Seattle Transit Blog

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 […]

Full text of the address is available here. This is an open thread.

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 […]

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 […]