Transit Still a Low-Income Lifeline

Gene Balk has a typically informative column ($) about who is taking to transit to work these days. University professors, housekeepers, and computer programmers have the highest transit share of any professions in Seattle. He astutely points out how much this has to do with where jobs are located. Seattle is incredibly fortunate that Amazon continues to place the vast majority of its office jobs in the center city.

Someone might use that as a story of how transit is now just a "hipster" phenomenon, but professional definitions are arbitrary - I don't know the difference between "computer programmer" and "software developer" in this context.

Credit: Mark Nowlin/The Seattle Times

Meanwhile, less arbitrary divisions, like the income chart above, show that low income people remain, in both absolute and relative terms, the biggest users of transit in the region. Moreover, transit's mode share is relatively stable across income boundaries. Broadly speaking, we've made transit an attractive option, and this creates a positive feedback loop. Creating higher-income riders creates stakeholders with more political power - which leads to better and more attractive transit.