Imagine standing at a King County Metro stop in Seattle—coffee in hand, messenger bag hanging from your shoulder—when you notice a man with a missing chunk of his face. Then you start noticing the putrid scent of weed. Finally, the bus that was previously two minutes away according to your app suddenly disappears, becoming one of the many so-called “ghost buses” plaguing the area. Seattle is thriving.

I got to the bus stop around 7:30 a.m. on Thursday morning. It was more packed than usual, with three homeless people (a couple, and a single man) camped out at the bus stop. One looked high, the other two giggling and talking. At the time, the Transit app said the bus was about ten minutes away.

More and more people started to crowd the bus stop. And out of the corner of my eye, I see one man approaching. He was tall and skinny, and coughing up a storm. Others turned toward him, but I didn’t because there have been many instances of riders hacking up a lung, hopping on a bus with the rest of us. I moved away from my spot waiting for the bus so he could get on before me and I could sit as far away from him as possible.

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A King County ghost bus revealed a homeless man without half of his face

Seven minutes left before the bus was supposed to arrive, I started to hear a weird noise. An airy sucking; the sound you make when you’re slurping soup. Two women to my left kept looking, somewhat discreetly, towards the coughing man, then back at each other. Again, I assumed they were just annoyed that he’d be getting on the bus and spreading all his germs around. Again, I thought nothing of it.

Looking at the Transit app, the bus was scheduled to arrive in two minutes. Those two minutes came and went, the weird airy-sucking sound kept going as the coughing man started to pace to my right, and when I checked the Transit app again, the bus had disappeared. It became a “ghost bus”—a bus that is scheduled to arrive, shows up on metro apps, then just completely disappears. King County Metro is plagued by this issue and never seems to have an answer. It’s gotten so bad that the King County Council is now involved.

Needless to say, I was annoyed. The annoyance grew more intense when I started to smell the weed that one of the homeless people started to smoke at the bus stop. The idea of waiting there for another 10-plus minutes for the next bus, if it arrives at all, prompted me to walk to the next stop. It was nice out this morning and I enjoyed the walk.

But when I turned to walk away, headed in the direction of the coughing man, I realized why people kept looking his way. The airy-sucking sound was coming from the fact that he was missing almost the entirety of his left cheek.

This is Seattle compassion

The man was homeless. He had a bandana wrapped around his face, apparently to support the skin around his jaw. I saw his gums and teeth. I saw red flesh that looked to be rotting. He didn’t appear to be in any pain, and he didn’t even look uncomfortable. He was just going through his morning, coughing up a storm, and sucking the saliva back into his mouth, though there was a thread of some dropping from his chin.

Welcome to Seattle, where “compassion” means exporting our problems onto the streets and expecting riders to just grin and bear it.

No consequences, no dignity

Metro used to be the domain of working commuters squeezing into morning buses and college kids zoning out with headphones as they made their way to the University of Washington. Now it’s a front‑row seat to the city’s failures: untreated mental‑health crises, rampant drug use, and a bureaucracy so protective of “compassion” that common‑sense enforcement has gone missing—just like that homeless guy’s cheek.

When you smoke weed in public or pass out on a bench, you’re supposed to get help—or at least a polite nudge. When you’re walking around with a missing cheek, you need help. Desperately. But they don’t get it.

Instead, Seattle’s “tolerance” turned into policy: do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want. The result? A rolling social experiment on wheels, with paying customers effectively trapped inside. And you better not complain for fear you’ll be labeled uncompassionate.

Safety on hold

King County Metro drivers simply call dispatch when situations deteriorate, leaving riders to swap horror stories instead of schedules. Meanwhile, the county touts “fare enforcement” as the solution—but where this so-called fare enforcement is happening is a mystery to me.

Seattle city and King County leaders brag about unprecedented spending: billions poured into housing, mental‑health programs, and outreach teams. Yet every sweeping plan seems to raise the same unanswered question: if we’re spending so much, why are so many people still on the streets?

Commuters pay high fares and risk their safety for the sake of a city that treats its most vulnerable like afterthoughts. And the homeless? They stay in the same vicious cycle—neglected, unmanaged, and often dying on our doorsteps.

If Seattle truly cared, we’d enforce basic standards: no open‑air drug dens; mandatory mental‑health assessments; real penalties for public intoxication. We’d pair enforcement with real rehab, secure housing with rules, and accountability with services.

Seattle’s problem isn’t a lack of heart—it’s a lack of backbone. And until we grow one, our buses will stay the last refuge for those we’ve let down.

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