Seattle Transit Blog

NOTE: This post is copied in its entirety from an article I wrote, titled With Major Revisions, the SPIRE Plan Becomes Our Region’s Surest Best for Express Rail Service: A Mapped, Annotated Update. It is the latest entry of my blog, Transportation Matters, a Pacific Northwest-flavored blog that discusses railway planning, urban planning, and related politics. <>————-<>————-<>————-<>————-<> […]

At Friday’s regular board meeting, the Sound Transit Board heard a report about the state of elevators and escalators on the Link light rail system. Some stations, like University of Washington, are not meeting the escalator availability standard because of frequent and long-term outages that is being blamed on premature component failure, among other […]

Looking to foster greater ties with our Canadian neighbor, last fall Microsoft sponsored the Emerging Cascadia Innovation Corridor Conference in Vancouver. Many of the issues discussed were as you’d expect: the flow of skilled labor between the U.S. and Canada, easing of trade restrictions, and pre-emptive fear of the then-ridiculous prospect of a Trump presidency. Seemingly out […]

The failure that caused a five-hour Link stoppage ($). WSDOT has a new “Active Transportation Division.” Distracted driving bill rolling along ($). Pedestrian injuries and ORCA LIFT underutilization. This story about an affordable housing lottery ($) is heartbreaking. Bonney Lake P&R now has bike lockers. This is a nice summary of the state of bike investment. […]

More on One Center City Should ST have an elected board? (17:30) Tolling freeways (29:11) High-speed rail to Vancouver (34:55) http://traffic.libsyn.com/seattletransitblog/STB_podcast_034.mp3

Last October we reported on a partnership between Metro and SDOT to overhaul the last remnants of the vestigial night owl network (defined as service between 2:15-4:30am). The plan announced then would eliminate Routes 82/83/84 while beefing up service on a number of key corridors: If approved by the County Council, the proposal would boost total […]

The Point Defiance Bypass Project will change the face of heavy rail service in Pierce County by the end of this year. You have only a few months left to take in the view around Ruston. Reminder: South Sounder will only be running between Puyallup and Seattle (serving all stations in between) from the afternoon […]

More people are driving into Downtown Seattle than ever, and car commuting is at its lowest rate in the modern era. Both of these statements are true. This morning Commute Seattle released its 4th biennial “Modesplit Survey” capturing commute trends in Seattle’s Center City – see our coverage of the 2012 and 2014 surveys – and the results show […]

5 million ORCA LIFT trips last year. ST’s train etiquette campaign. Seattle seeking data on Uber and Lyft’s impact on traffic. Bike stakeholders not happy with One Center City planning. SDOT’s trucks designed to be safe for bikes. Boise’s transit not adequate. Update on ST projects in Renton. KIRO talks driverless trains. The concern about […]

As the One Center City project proposes removing SR 520 buses from Downtown Seattle, minor design flaws at UW Station will become all the more prominent, and the success of truncating buses at UW depends on fixing them. There is enormous promise for the concept. Route 545, for example, spends half its running time between International District […]

Snow days are hard on agencies. Imagine chaining hundreds of buses and fundamentally altering your network on short notice. Doing so protects rider safety and is very necessary in a hilly town, but it causes a lot of pain too: it breaks transfers, hoses real-time information, leaves large network gaps (cough, First Hill or Wedgwood), and […]

ST Express 550 in Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel / photo by SounderBruce on flickr The One Center City bus restructure plan rolled out on January 26 contains some painful proposals, terminating ST Express 550 at International District / Chinatown Station, turning most of the West Seattle and Burien peak express routes (37, 55, 56, 57, […]

King County Metro started offering free carpool parking permits at six park & ride lots on February 1.

Crowded southbound train at University Street Station during evening rush hour Photo by SounderBruce, flickr Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff gave us a tight range on the practical maximum number of light rail vehicles (LRVs) that can be in service at one time regularly given the current fleet, in one of his Board reports last […]

This past Thursday evening the City of Redmond held a public meeting about bus and rail planning for the future Downtown Redmond light rail station, part of the City’s ongoing Downtown planning. The City asked the public to give feedback about four station area concepts, with the eventual goal of providing the City’s recommended station area […]

ST escalators keep failing ($). Car2Go rolls out 200 4-door Mercedes vehicles, increasing options for multiple passengers. Erica on where HALA went wrong. Rob Johnson spearheading a badly needed upzone. KCDOT hiring a position in public engagement. As promised, ST tightens rules about ordering stops in Link service. 450 more spaces for Kent Sounder by 2024, […]

Panic at the port Funding for sanctuary cities (7:40) Link to Federal Way (12:35) Eastside bike share (23:45) One Center City (25:35) http://traffic.libsyn.com/seattletransitblog/STB_podcast_033.mp3

Last year Zach reported on a Republican bill in the legislature that would replace the current, appointed Sound Transit Board with an elected one. Politicians don’t mess with an agency’s governance when it’s on the right track, so we can only assume HB 1029 is an attempt to fundamentally change ST’s trajectory from the one […]

SeaTac Airport was busy Saturday with protest of President Trump’s executive orders restricting travel rights by country of origin. Early in the day dignitaries – including Governor Inslee, Mayor Murray, County Executive Constantine, Rep. Jayapal, and Rep. DelBene – held a joint press conference at SeaTac condemning the orders. As part of a wave of […]

As reported in 2015, Seattle’s Pronto Bike Share was on the move to the Eastside, thanks to a $5.5 million budget allocation from the Legislature to King County Metro. It was originally slated to move forward by this June, but now it seems to be stuck in the mud. Pronto’s collapse seems to have slowed State […]

Readers sometime ask us how to join our writing staff. While we’re thrilled to have Zach working part time, it is our volunteer writers (including yours truly) who guide the overall direction of the site and allow us to cover far more than one person can manage. Staff writers get more freedom to publish what they want on the front page, access […]

[UPDATE 9:42am: normal service has been restored at all stations with residual delays.] Tragedy struck early this morning at Othello Station in the Rainier Valley, as a person was struck and killed by a Link train. At this hour Seattle Police and Seattle Fire Department are working to extricate the person’s body from underneath the train. […]

Sound Transit broke ground last Friday on Northgate Station, bringing the opening for Northgate Link one day closer (though still four years away). As we’ve reported before on the blog, the station will be elevated above NE 103rd Street on the east side of 1st Avenue NE, just west of the current transit center and […]

USDOT designates UW as a “Beyond Traffic Innovation Center.” Tacoma to Dupont rail testing coming soon. Why Northgate Link isn’t all that close to being done. KING5 asks about Link’s constantly broken escalators. We’re used to mudslides canceling North Sounder — but now high tides are stopping it too ($). Sounds ominous! Eyman to go […]

We are regularly reminded that traffic congestion is growing across the region. The median Seattle metro area worker commutes nine miles to work. What if we could live closer to our workplaces? Drivers would drive fewer miles, and spend less time in traffic. Everybody who lives closer to work would contribute less to the congestion […]

In 2015, as SDOT began selecting Metro bus routes to improve with Prop 1 funds, much of the first round of funds went not toward frequency or speed, but to ‘schedule reliability’. Basically, congestion was so bad and variability so high that one of the first priorities was simply to pad the schedule to adapt to worsening […]

Bikeshare goes down (1:05) Angle Lake ridership impresses us (20:30) Fixing Link operations (27:30) Metro’s new battery buses (39:30) http://traffic.libsyn.com/seattletransitblog/STB_podcast_032.mp3

The first phase of New York’s long-awaited Second Avenue Subway opened to the public on January 1.