Seattle Transit Blog

The election for Pierce County Executive may not seem relevant to our efforts for mass transit in our city and region. However, this year’s Pierce County Executive election will be pivotal for us. Rick Talbert, a strong mass transit advocate, is facing Bruce Dammeier, a vocal opponent to Sound Transit 3. The next Pierce County […]

Seattle ready to waive some environmental process for infill development. Stabbing at TIBS. Fourth Avenue quietly gets a bus lane. ST survey shows that Link riders mostly walk to the train, and most of the rest take the bus. Riders are also disproportionately poor. Not really news, and I’m not one to hit a news […]

The worst case scenario has occurred. Regional voters have turned away from the generational opportunity to expand traffic-separated transit, listening instead to a series of micro-objections about marketing budgets and email address management. Or perhaps they blanched at a $54 billion price tag that didn’t really mean anything. And at least a few voters thought that if they voted […]

The STB Editorial Board is starting work on its General Election Endorsements. If there are any non-obvious races where a particular candidate stands out on transit or land use, please let us know in the comments. Links to your claims about the candidate are very much appreciated.

It’s transit maps in motion! Here’s a really well done presentation of the rapid transit projects in Measure M, which is Los Angeles County’s version of ST3 Regional Prop 1.

Martin was a guest on a recent episode of the Seattle Growth Podcast, which covered transportation. Martin starts at the 30 minute mark, but the interview with SDOT director Scott Kubly is interesting as well. You can listen right here: http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/284892469-seattlegrowthpodcast-ep-10-seattle-transportation.mp3 I’ve been enjoying the series from the first episode. If you’re interested in diving […]

@SeaTransitBlog @SoundTransit #MitchHedberg pic.twitter.com/1bpImyY7t2 — Kevin Pittman (@KevnTweets) September 29, 2016 The only exception I can think of is SeaTac Airport Station, where most passengers are pulling wheeled luggage. Addendum 1: All escalators at UW Station were working Friday, when they were desperately needed. Thank you, Sound Transit, for making sure they were all in […]

Nat Levy, GeekWire: Amazon plans to debut its own pilot commuter service Monday, joining the ranks of major tech companies that offer private shuttles as a perk to employees and a way to counteract the headaches caused by traffic congestion, GeekWire has learned. “Amazon Ride” will run six times in the morning and six times in the evening at 20 […]

Seattle and Vancouver leaders bat around ideas for genuine High-Speed Rail. They could start here. KCDOT looking for a new communications manager. Big transit measures on the ballot all over the country. Siemens LRV order, first reported here, now final. South Sounder delays for the rest of the year due to track construction in Auburn. […]

On Monday, County Executive Dow Constantine released his $11.3B biennial budget proposal for King County, and the Metro portion of the budget represents a positive and ambitious forecast for the next two years, and one that telegraphs the expected adoption of the Long Range Plan in the next few months. The proposal adds 300,000 total […]

The National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) is hosting their conference in Seattle as I write this. If you’re one of the urbanists pouring into our fair city this week, you may be interested in the article we wrote for Rail~volution in 2013, which focuses on attractions in Seattle of interest to urbanists and transit […]

Bruce Englehardt contributed to this post. The shuttle service for Friday’s 6 pm game against the #7 Stanford Cardinal will be significantly different from the Metro-operated shuttles that serve Saturday Husky games. First, they won’t be operated by Metro, which is busy using its whole fleet and workforce covering its regular routes. Second, there will […]

Welcome to all the new and returning students at UW! As students, you are the lucky recipients of the best transit deal in town — the U-Pass, embedded in your Husky Card — which covers unlimited rides on: King County Metro buses Sound Transit (Link Light Rail, ST Express buses, and Sounder commuter rail) Snohomish […]

[updated with additional budget details: 3:05pm] Mayor Murray is delivering his budget address from 2-3pm today. The speech will be archived on the Seattle Channel, or you can read the remarks as prepared here. Though rightfully focused on housing, policing, and other major issues, several transportation line items were also called out. The budget funds […]

Four months ago I told you about large, but deliberately vague, plans for South Sounder if ST3 passes. At the time, the DuPont extension and facilities for 10-car trains were quite specific. However, plans for station access were, as usual, left open pending extensive post-election consultation with communities. Most importantly, the number and timing of […]

Video by David Sharpe

Trains are now running in revenue service to and from Angle Lake Station. The party goes until 2:00 pm. Enjoy the ride, come back check out the booths, and hear the world’s only (as far as I know) football club marching band, Sounders FC Sound Wave! Check out Sound Transit’s webpage dedicated to the new […]

Wandering around Downtown Tacoma is a strange and almost eerie experience. Stately and graceful buildings adorn an intact, human scaled street grid built to serve the golden age of railways. On the east side of Pacific Avenue, the most beautiful train station in the northwest now lies in sterile use as a courthouse. Downtown is […]

About a year and a half ago, I wrote about SDOT’s efforts to improve reliability for buses leaving the International District via southbound Rainier Avenue. The idea is to move buses to an exclusive center lane queue jump, thereby avoiding a couple of particularly congested blocks of traffic. Well, it’s been over a year, and recently reader YZ […]

Speed limits in Seattle may come down ($). Shoreline station zoning. The down side of caps on move-in fees. Lid I-5 campaign moving along. Spokane Spokesman-Review endorses STA’s coming ballot measure. Seattle Subway lands an excellent troll on The Seattle Times. Intercity Transit seeks grant to bring better bus service to NE Lacey. Seattle drive-alone commute […]

Its safety certification now complete, Sound Transit will open Angle Lake Station this Saturday at 11:00am. The 1.6 mile extension is the last station to open for the next 4+ years, when UDistrict, Roosevelt, and Northgate make their big entrance. Media were treated to a brief preview ride this afternoon, with our Bruce E. in […]

Comparing hypothetical alternatives for ST3, peanut butter and otherwise (1:20) Seattle Subway lands a good troll (18:50) Danny Westneat on Police Stations (23:35) Danny Westneat on Pronto (31:20) The merits of a cash ban (39:00) Our ST3 page (45:55) http://traffic.libsyn.com/seattletransitblog/STB_podcast_025.mp3

"Inverted Peak Schedule" tomorrow. All-day trains will have three cars, peak trippers will have two cars. pic.twitter.com/EoS0sjWGjs — Light Rail Operator (@EBoperator) September 20, 2016 In preparation for ‘mega-event’ service expected to be needed on Friday, September 30th – when both UW football and Mariner baseball converge on a weekday afternoon peak – tomorrow (Wednesday) Sound Transit […]

To date, I’ve been pretty disappointed in the public discussion of Sound Transit 3. Instead of discussing the transportation merits, we’ve been lost in hang-wringing over Sound Transit’s advertising expenditures (so much for “run government like a business!”), overambitious responses to public records requests, or other political minutiae. There has been the “multitasking fallacy”, in which SeattlePI’s […]

UDistrict Rezone Presentation – PLUZ Committee 9/20/2016 The City Council’s Planning, Land Use, and Zoning (PLUZ) committee meets Tuesday morning at 9:30 am. Towards the end of the agenda will be the first committee briefing on the big UDistrict Rezone announced last week after more than 5 years of planning. With the Comprehensive Plan entering […]

Although it hasn’t gained any support at all among regional decisionmakers, a longtime favorite in the STB commentariat has been the “peanut butter” plan. It would build rail and bus tunnels where surface buses are hopeless, namely the Ballard/UW corridor and in downtown Seattle, and try to address the worst bus bottlenecks on Elliott Avenue and […]

“So what’s the problem with BART?” (Martin H. Duke, April 6, 2016). With reference to Metrorail, BART does better than Duke implies. It achieves significantly lower unit operating costs than Metrorail, and does much better in terms of energy efficiency and labor productivity. Granted, BART has “issues,” but does do some things right. The exercise […]

We are just one week from the opening of Angle Lake Station, completing a heady year of progress for Sound Transit. I hope to see y’all there! With the disappearance of waiting trains laying over at SeaTac Airport Station, since they are continuing on to Angle Lake Station out of service for pre-revenue testing, the […]

Author’s Note: The underlined clarifications below are from Scott Gutierrez, Metro spokesperson. Policies that nudge bus passengers away from paying cash while boarding the bus remain low-hanging fruit for system-wide service improvements via travel time reductions. King County measurements in 2012 measured it as 4.6 to 6.9 seconds per boarding, with another 1.5 seconds saved […]

When commuters get frustrated with transit in greater Seattle – be it cars hogging bus lanes with impunity, lack of transit priority altogether, or bafflement at specific planning decisions – a common refrain is “None of this would happen if only our agencies rode their own services!” Our politicians and executives like to tout their transit-riding cred, […]

Alert readers may have noticed the new “ST3” item on the menu bar at the top of this page. It’s intended to be a single, simple URL (http://seattletransitblog.com/ST3) for a useful reference to November’s ballot measure. You’ll find our endorsement there, of course, but also answer basic question like “What is in the package?” and […]

Hefty Snohomish County Ballot will cost 68 cents to mail; don’t screw up your chance to vote for ST3. An update on Seattle 2035. PSRC recommends $700m of federal grants in a $4.5 billion regional transportation plan. Checking in on ST2’s Tacoma Link expansion. Affordable housing on the agenda in Bellevue. Seattle CM Lorena Gonzalez […]

I recently had the opportunity to check out Portland’s new-launched bike share system, Biketown. While the bikes are similar, the rest of the system is quite different and there are many things Seattle could learn while mulling Pronto’s expansion. I joined Pronto earlier this year and use it several times a week. The two systems […]

The League of Women Voters is hosting a series of free public forums on Sound Transit 3 at five locations around the region. Each forum will feature pro and con speakers, including Sound Transit CEO Peter Rogoff, Transportation Choices Coalition’s Shefali Ranganathan, and Smarter Transit’s Maggie Fimia. Tacoma – Monday, Sept. 12 at 7 pm (tonight): Phillips […]

Mass Transit Now, the campaign to pass Regional Proposition 1, also known as Sound Transit 3, which this blog has wholeheartedly endorsed, is holding a series of campaign kickoff events around the region this week. Everett: Monday, September 12 (tonight!) 5-7 pm, The Anchor Pub, 1001 Hewitt Ave. The Anchor Pub is at the west end of Hewitt Ave, […]

Hi there, for the past few hours I have been mapping out our future ST3 Light Rail system in it’s entirety over a geographic map, so now you can see exactly where every station and routing will be and how it fits into our urban environment. Check it out here. If I have made any errors, […]

Beginning tomorrow, September 11, Pierce Transit will improve midday frequency and expand weeknight service on 13 of its routes. This is the second major expansion of the system since the Great Recession, during which the agency cut much of its service, withdrew from several cities, and failed to pass two ballot measures. Pierce Transit joins Metro, Sound Transit and Community […]

The idea that carsharing membership would reduce vehicle ownership is intuitive. However, the overall impact on Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) is less obvious. While an explicit per-mile charge discourages marginal driving, carsharing can also avoid an inconvenient transit trip for travelers who would not have purchased a car, or would have been deterred by the […]

Yesterday County Executive Dow Constantine launched the official Long Range Plan process, moving it from a (very good) draft to an actionable item of legislation. Now called “Metro Connects“, the County Council will tinker with and debate it through the autumn, with expected adoption in early 2017. As a reminder, the plan would a number […]

Discussing our ST3 Endorsement (1:30) Vancouver’s real-estate bust and what it might mean for Seattle (13:00) Reader mailbag (21:40) http://traffic.libsyn.com/seattletransitblog/STB_podcast_024.mp3

Most people who have a vehicle choose to use that vehicle to get to and fro rather than opting for travel via public transportation. However, using public transportation is often the smarter choice; using public transportation is better for the environment, can be more cost effective, and is often safer. The following highlights the top […]