Seattle Transit Blog

Seattle Subway’s political director, Jonathan Hopkins, is moving on to be the Executive Director of Commute Seattle. We’re sad to see him go, he has done a plainly incredible job for Seattle Subway and our region and will be very much missed — all of the congrats to Jonathan on his new role! He leaves […]

Aside from the SE Seattle Metro restructure, the two major service additions in September 2016 were the opening of Angle Lake Station and the addition of the first mid-day Sounder roundtrip. Nearly 4 months after their launch, we wanted to check in on ridership stats for the Angle Lake and Sounder portions. Sound Transit tells STB […]

At a press conference this morning, King County Metro is announcing plans to purchase 120 battery buses by 2020, providing unprecedented opportunities for zero-emission electric bus service throughout Metro’s service network. After 3 years of federally-funded demonstration projects – with 3 battery buses on an interlined loop serving Routes 226 and 241 – Metro is making a bold bet that […]

Clark County and Vancouver, WA aren’t exactly known for transit. Often seen as the Republican yin to Portland’s yang, where the dream of the suburbs is alive, Vancouver gets a bad rap. Local Republicans (often led by the gleefully antagonistic Don Benton) have been exceptionally hostile to both Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and to extending MAX […]

Jon Talton is one of my favorite Seattle Times columnists. His latest big-picture piece in the Sunday Magazine ($) has a lot in it that I agree with, although overall it has a get-off-my-lawn tone. But one sentence bothered me a lot: Dull glass-skinned towers have replaced architectural variety. For one thing, many of the new towers […]

In a turn for the better, State Senator Bob Hasegawa (D – Renton) has chosen a new transportation cause: allowing commercial vehicles carrying wheelchairs to have access to high-occupancy vehicle lanes. The bill digest for Senate Bill 5018 states that the bill: Authorizes the use of high occupancy vehicle lanes by private, for hire vehicles […]

November was an incredible month for Link ridership, with 66,237 average weekday boardings, up 95% from November 2015. Though down from October’s 68,387, this represents the first November in which ridership was higher than July, continuing the shift away from seasonal tourist fluctuation. Recent weekend trends continued, with Saturday ridership surprisingly strong (+103%) and Sunday ridership surprisingly sleepy (+37%) […]

Metro announced yesterday that it will offer carpool parking permits at 6 park and rides (P&R). Beginning February 1st, carpool groups can obtain permits for reserved spaces at Eastgate, Issaquah Highlands, Northgate, Redmond, South Kirkland, and South Renton. Metro’s entry into the program will boost carpool access by 66%, with the 6 new P&Rs joining the 9 that […]

Photo by “Beast Mode” AVGeekJoe / flickr Link Light Rail had its busiest year by far in 2016, and saw its largest ridership growth ever, with ridership growth surpassing the original year’s ridership for similar periods of time, counting from the opening of University of Washington Station and Capitol Hill Station. It is still settling […]

This afternoon, the Sound Transit Board’s Operations & Administration Committee will take up a contract proposal with Impact Recovery Systems, Inc. to install between-car barriers on the platforms of Link Light Rail stations. Impact Recovery Systems has a long resume of transit agency customers that have paid them to install various between-car barriers, including chains […]

Limping into the playoffs but happy to be playing at home, the Seahawks play the Detroit Lions on Saturday at 5:15pm at CenturyLink field. Sound Transit announced last night that Sounder will serve the games with a typical service of 2 trains from Lakewood, 2 from Everett, and 1 from Sumner. The first South Line train […]

Back in August we wrote about Sound Transit and Metro adding cell service to the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel (DSTT) by the end of 2016. Well it’s January 3rd, and there is still no service from Westlake to International District. When asked about the delay, Sound Transit gave a relatively cryptic response, indicating an unspecified delay […]

2017 will be a much quieter year than 2016 for transit in greater Puget Sound. After opening 3 new Link stations in 2016 and nearly doubling ridership, 2017 begins the first of 4-5 years without major service additions. September will bring two more Sounder roundtrips, but that’s about it. Sound Transit Though less public facing than […]

With over 600 articles, tens of thousands of comments, and millions of page views, you kept us busy in 2016. Here are the Top 10 Most Commented and Most Read Posts of 2016. You may notice a theme here. Was there a big ballot measure or something? Top 10 Most Commented Posts of 2016 1. […]

Oran’s visualization of the pro-ST3 vote (go here to interrogate the results further) doesn’t teach us much that we didn’t already know from 2008’s ST2 results. In other words, the region’s most urban areas tend to vote for quality transit, with the actual locations of ST service outperforming by a few points. To some extent, […]

I got an early Christmas present last Thursday, when I saw new route 107 pull up to the bus stop across from Beacon Hill Station, in front of the Red Apple on Beacon Ave S. Most of the waiting passengers boarded it, happy to have two routes (the other being route 60) to take them […]

Zach made a compelling argument for the new Link fleet to feature open gangways throughout the length of the train. Open gangways increase capacity without costly platform extensions by turning dead space into passenger space. Extra length low floor light rail vehicles are common in European tram systems and are slowly making their way across […]

Link’s vehicle shortage provides both challenges and opportunities. By deciding to batch the order for the remaining 122 cars needed to operate ST2 (Lynnwood-Overlake and Lynnwood-Angle Lake), Sound Transit chose economies of scale at the cost of limited operational flexibility in the interim years between ULink and new vehicle delivery (2016-2018). In practical terms for […]

Upon signing the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) on New Years Day 1970, President Nixon signaled the beginning of a hopeful new era: “[These] must be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters, and our living environment.” And make no mistake, the debt […]

About a year from now, transit riders and carpoolers traveling between Seattle and the Eastside will notice a big improvement: for the first time in history, State Route 520’s HOV lanes will extend all the way from Bellevue to Montlake. If your bus or carpool happens to traverse this segment of road, you’ll have a speedier, more reliable commute. It […]

In an early Christmas gift for beleaguered Queen Anne-SLU-Capitol Hill commuters. Metro and SDOT have announced a slew of improvements for the notoriously unreliable Route 8. The plan would do a number of exciting things: First and foremost, the city will add an eastbound bus lane on Denny between Fairview and Stewart by reducing westbound Denny (rarely congested) to […]

On December 2, British Columbia’s Lower Mainland welcomed the latest SkyTrain extension, the long-awaited Evergreen Extension to the Tri-Cities area (Port Moody, Coquitlam, and Port Coquitlam) east of Simon Fraser University. The extension covers 6.8 miles in 15 minutes, roughly the same average speed as Link (27 mph). Most of the line is at-grade or […]

With a couple of inches of dry, powdery snow in greater Seattle, our area has mostly avoided the icing disasters that are common to Seattle snow events. As of last night, only Routes 2 and 13 were rerouted in Seattle, avoiding Queen Anne Ave between Mercer and Galer. Late last night all South King County routes […]

Seattle fancies itself a city of neighborhoods, but in many ways is a city of suburbs. As has been well documented, the city’s first population boom coincided with the electric streetcar, leading to an urban form primarily composed of “streetcar suburbs” – planned communities such as Queen Anne and Capitol Hill where mass development of […]

It hasn’t really snowed around here since Seattle won its only Super Bowl nearly 3 years ago. When it snows and sticks, our region has a deserved reputation for basically falling apart, like the multi-day Snowmageddon of November 2010. Paltry amounts of snow bring us to a standstill, and there are many plausible reasons: the rarity of storms, icing […]