It was standing room-only at the Feb. 5 Transportation Committee meeting after Squak Mountain residents flocked to the gathering to make a plea for bus service.

Squak Mountain resident Paul Winterstein presented the results of a community survey he and a handful of neighbors conducted regarding bus service.

The survey was in response to a September meeting on the same subject, where the city presented a list of possible options for extending service, including: adding to the Route 200 circulator bus or the Metro Route 927 bus, starting a dial-a-ride service, starting a vanshare service, or initiating a “good-neighbor” carpooling plan.

But some of those options come at high costs: extending the Route 200 or 927 would cost Metro about $135,000 or $200,000 respectively. Costs to the city and Metro’s willingness to extend service are unknown.

The report recommended pursuing dial-a-ride, vanpooling, and good-neighbor carpooling – endorsements that spurred Winterstein’s report.

“Honestly, it was (those recommendations) that lit a fire under me more than anything,” he said. “I thought … you know, I’m hearing things in talking to people, and those voices haven’t been heard yet. So let’s go and find out what they want.”

The group spoke to about 130 households on the mountain, issued e-mail surveys, handed out flyers, and even gathered signatures on a petition.

Winterstein said the response was largely in favor of bus service.

“It’s not just a few people, there’s a lot of comments from people saying, ‘this is very interesting, and I would use that,'” he said.

Transportation Committee members supported the idea and applauded their efforts, but had mixed opinions on how exactly to bring public transportation to the mountain.

Committee Chair Joshua Schaer said it would be tough to secure King County Metro due to financial constraints, and suggested looking at private vendors to operate shuttles.

Committee member Fred Butler leaned more toward the vanpooling idea, stating that there might not be enough people using the service to merit the costs of a bus.

“If someone called me up and said, ‘Would you like something?’ well, I would probably say sure. But, ‘Are you willing to pay for it?’ well, maybe,” he said. “So this is a tough one. It’s hard to get a sense of how many people would actually use it.”

But residents of the mountain remained firm that a bus was the best option.

“The vanpool goes at one time of day, and comes back at another,” said Elizabeth Maupin, who lives on Big Bear Place. “That doesn’t take care of the people who need to get down for shopping and so on. If we are using the van, why can’t we have a van that keeps running? The need is continuous.”

Bob Frelund, who built his house on Wildwood Boulevard Southeast in 1969, pointed out that the lack of public transportation disenfranchises a whole population of seniors.

“We need regular transportation,” he said. “There are a lot of people … that would like to stay in their homes, but if we don’t have bus transportation, there’ll be a time when automobile transportation is out of the question and we’ll have to move.”

Committee member John Rittenhouse supported looking in to extending Route 200, stating that it made the most sense.

“If there’s a financial way to extend the 200 up to Squak, that’s something we ought to at least look at,” he said. “It makes such logical sense. The 200 now terminates at the north end of the mountain, it terminates at the east end of the mountain … about the only thing it doesn’t do is continue that loop up the mountain.”

The committee will take the community comments into account, and Schaer said they would look into the possibilities of a reroute with Metro, but that the first thing to nail down is what the service will be.

“The final routing and nitty-gritty details are sort of phase 2 in my mind,” Schaer said. “I don’t think you want to plan where the service is going to go until you know what service you’re talking about.”