known as the "Ride Free" Area. Intended to encourage transit usage, improve accessibility and encourage downtown shopping, the zone was created in September 1973 and was originally called the "Magic Carpet" zone. It was later renamed the Ride Free Area (RFA). The RFA extended from the north at Battery St. to S. Jackson St. on the south and east at 6th Avenue to the waterfront on the west. Until 1987, the zone was in effect 24 hours a day, but in October of that year Metro began requiring fare payment within the zone during night-time hours, between 9 p.m. and 4 a.m., to reduce fare-related conflicts that sometimes led to assaults on drivers; in February 1994, the RFA's hours were reduced further, with fare payment required between 7 p.m. and 6 a.m. A King County Auditor's Office report released in September 2009 found that Metro "can neither fully explain nor provide backup documentation for the operating cost savings that offset the fare revenues in the calculation of the annual charges to the City of Seattle for the city’s Ride Free Area" and that some assumptions in the methodology Metro used to calculate the amount of lost fares were "questionable" and have not been updated to reflect changes to the fare structure and fare collection methods. A 1975 study found that while the Ride Free Area generally reduced bus travel times within the RFA itself, buses that traveled through the Ride Free Area to other destinations generally did not benefit. It also found that unloading outbound coaches once outside the RFA took additional time, though not entirely quantified vis-à-vis time saved within the RFA. On September 29, 2012, the Ride Free Area was eliminated. All riders boarding in downtown must now pay as they board. Operations Routes Metro has 237 bus routes that combine service patterns typical of both city and suburban bus networks, carrying over 400,000 daily passengers . The city network was descended in large part from the Seattle Transit system of converted streetcar routes. Most service is operated in a hub-and-spoke pattern centered either on downtown Seattle or the University of Washington, with lesser amounts of crosstown service. The suburban network typically operates on major streets between the regions employment and population centers. Routes in the city network are numbered from 1 to 99. Because of the scattershot evolution of the system, there is no easily discernible pattern