Seattle Transit Blog

Fun fact: the first escalator on the London Underground was installed in 1911 at Earl’s Court station. They hired a man with a peg leg to ride up and down the escalator all day to reassure people of its safety.

One Center City, once more with feeling Last week’s traffic apocalypse and silly editorials (9:19) Governance reform and car tabs (17:17) The unexpected joy of one-seat rides (27:13) Title courtesy Carl Ballard http://traffic.libsyn.com/seattletransitblog/STB_podcast_035.mp3

Community Transit, heading into this weekend with a minor service change to add late night and midday service, is proposing the addition of 21,000 bus hours of service (a 6 percent increase) in September 2017 and March 2018. The service proposal includes new service from Lynnwood to the Boeing Everett plant, as well as extensions and modifications […]

First Hill Streetcar currently under a indefinite maintenance shutdown. Rob Johnson is checking the warranty. ST elected board bill may die in the house ($); but the legislature may go after car tabs instead. Four new openings at Sound Transit: 1, 2, 3, 4. The Everett Herald writes a grown-up editorial ($) about ST’s car tabs. […]

After approving the restoration of 59,000 annual service hours in April of last year, Pierce Transit took a long and hard look at its existing route network, with some help from the public. The result is a service change scheduled for Sunday, March 12, which will affect 31 routes and add 35,000 service hours that were […]

On March 5, 1912, some 40,000 Seattleites filed into voting booths across the city to decide whether its future would be directed by a 273-page comprehensive plan designed by civil engineer Virgil G. Bogue, a practitioner of nationwide “City Beautiful” movement. The plan was bold and ambitious, fitting for a newly-christened city that was in the middle […]

This Transportation Planning and Engineering Division Intern will assist City of Redmond staff to plan and deliver multimodal transportation projects and programs in this growing community and regional jobs center. Major projects underway include the Overlake Village transit-oriented development, the arrival of East Link light rail, and the development of Downtown Redmond into a mixed […]

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TCC has their own list of bills in Olympia. East Link tunneling now underway. Rainier Ave. redesign worked. People losing their minds because ST is applying the law by levying a tax voters just approved. Redmond Link Station planning. Convention Place sale deal reached ($). Stuff changing around Mt. Baker. Olympia a swirling mass of bills […]

Crises inspire clarity and focus, and One Center City is no different. Our whirlwind of overlapping projects usually overwhelms us with extended process and mind-numbing rounds of design revisions and open houses. But Seattle in 2017 faces an historic convergence of projects that prevents us from such discursive luxuries. If we do nothing, we face […]

Ok, so we’re definitely not ready for the Big One. The ‘quake’ that was felt in Seattle on Monday was due to a single tanker truck, overturned and leaking butane at the I-90/I-5 interchange. At 10:30 Monday morning, the overturned truck caused a closure of I-5 in both directions that lasted until after 7pm. Crews […]

[Editor’s Note: the author is not employed by Community Transit, and the restructure ideas presented here are entirely his own.] Community Transit currently has 19 routes that serve Downtown Seattle and the University District during peak commuter hours. In 2023, Westlake-Lynnwood travel times on Link will be 28 minutes with trains coming up to every […]

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Friday was the last day for bills in the state legislature to get out of fiscal or transportation committees. Budget bills are exempt from that cut-off. The next cut-off is 5 pm on Wednesday, March 8, when bills have be out of their original house. 33 transit-related bills survived Friday’s cut-off in the House. Passed […]

Beginning Sunday, March 12, Community Transit will add 40 new weekly trips on 11 routes, increasing late-night service on two major corridors, adding mid-day frequency in Lynnwood and expanding DART paratransit service hours. As we reported last year, the trips will combine for a total of 6,300 hours, and will be followed by a large service […]

Sen. Dino Rossi sponsoring anti-Sound Transit, anti-tolling bills straight out of 2000. Pierce Transit starting a bus from downtown to Pt. Defiance this June. Burke-Gilman missing link ($) lurching toward a conclusion. Seattle Council unanimously approves U-District upzone ($) after O’Brien, Sawant, and Herbold fail to water it down. Urban planning workshops over the next week for […]

Last night the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) kicked off planning for the five additional RapidRide corridors promised in 2015’s Move Seattle levy. The Draft Seattle RapidRide Expansion Program Report rolls two projects already underway – Madison Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) and Roosevelt High Capacity Transit (HCT) – into a single process that includes the next […]

A Pierce Transit employee was killed Tuesday evening after being run over by a bus at the headquarters, located in Lakewood. Names of the victim and the driver of the bus were not released Tuesday night. KOMO is updating its coverage frequently, for the latest details. Our condolences go to family of the deceased, and […]

[Update 2: A reader sent in the scanner traffic reporting the incident. Listen below.] [Update: Sound Transit worked through the night to fix track and signal damage, and service returned to normal Wednesday morning.] Around 8:30pm Tuesday a person driving a white Chevy Tahoe SUV collided at high speed with Link at Holgate Street in Sodo. […]

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 […]