For most transit agencies in the United States the largest constraint to providing more service is funding. In Seattle, that luckily has not been a constraint in recent years. Instead, our transit agencies have struggled to operate the amount of service voters have funded.

Before the pandemic, King County Metro could not deliver the amount of service Seattle wanted to purchase via the STBD. Labor shortages and limited bus base capacity meant money dedicated for service had to be diverted to capital projects and other programs.

In 2020, hundreds of millions of dollars of lost sales tax and fare revenue forced Metro to significantly downsize to stay above water by cutting service and reducing its workforce. Additionally, the City of Seattle reduced funding for night, evening, and weekend bus service and the fall 2020 service change was done under the assumption that Seattle’s Transportation Benefit District funding would lapse (which it did for four months). Coupled with very high turnover, mechanics, parts, and operators were all in short supply for years.

Continue reading “Metro Operator Shortage to End Next Year” | 29 comments

It has been over a year since Metro restructured the buses because of the Lynnwood Link Extension. We now know not only the monthly ridership of the routes but also more advanced data like the ridership per service hour from 2024 and 2025 . This is an analysis of those changes as well as a proposal based on that analysis. We will report on Community Transit routes as that data becomes available.

Continue reading “Lynnwood Link Metro Bus Restructure Analysis” | 74 comments

Two videos partly related to Friday’s “Pedestrianize the Ave” article.

The biggest opposition to congestion pricing and pedestrianizing streets comes before they’re implemented, then they open and often become big successes. The Hill of Hysteria. (CityNerd)

Deliveries by cargo bike. With illustrations in color. (Urban Mobility Explained)

This is an open thread.

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Sound Transit’s monthly maintenance program is continuing in March with several service reductions over the next few weeks.

Reduced Frequency

Starting at 11pm tonight, 1 Line trains will run every 20 minutes. The reduced frequency is to allow single-tracking trains between Rainier Beach station and Tukwila International Blvd Station. The 1 Line will resume its normal headways at 5am Sunday morning.

Pinehurst Station Construction

To accommodate Pinehurst station’s ongoing construction, 1 Line and 2 Line service will be altered after 11pm Monday-Friday next week. On Monday (3/2) and Friday (3/6), 1 Line trains will single track between Northgate and Shoreline South. 2 Line trains will terminate at Northgate station. After 11pm on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday next week, replacement buses will be used between Northgate and Lynnwood. The 1 Line will continue to operate between Federal Way and Northgate. The 2 Line will run between Downtown Redmond and South Bellevue, and between International District/ Chinatown and Northgate.

Continue reading “Upcoming Link Maintenance: March 2026” | 65 comments

University Way NE (“The Ave”) is the historic main street near the University of Washington campus in Seattle. The street is lined with dozens of shops, restaurants, and bars that cater to thousands of UW students and the nearby community. In 2021, the U District Link station opened one block west of The Ave between 43rd St and 45th St. Despite the street constantly buzzing with people shopping and dining, most of the right-of-way is allocated for cars and on-street parking.

University Way runs between NE Pacific St and NE Ravenna Blvd. For the purposes of this article, we will focus on pedestrianizing The Ave between NE 41st St and NE 50th St. There are a few variables that need to be considered when pedestrianizing a street: transit, emergency vehicle access, deliveries, accessibility, and cross streets. Let’s take a look at possible solutions for each of these categories.

Continue reading “Friday Roundtable: Pedestrianize The Ave” | 99 comments

This is part two of a three-part series investigating city-funded bus service in Seattle. Part 1 covered the Seattle Transportation Benefit District (STBD) from 2014 to early 2020. This article covers its successor, named the Seattle Transit Measure (STM) from 2020 to present day.

By early 2020, the STBD had transformed Seattle into a truly transit-accessible city. With Sound Transit’s self-proclaimed ‘exciting period’ of annual light rail expansions approaching quickly, county leaders saw an opportunity to undo the failures of 2014 and provide better bus service to all of King County, not just Seattle.

King County Floats Measure, Pandemic Hits

In February 2020, King County Council unveiled a proposal to utilize King County’s own Transportation Benefit District to levy a countywide 0.2% sales tax increase to fund additional transit.

Unlike the failed 2014 measure, revenues would go exclusively to Metro and focus primarily on service expansion. Seattle’s existing investments would also be funded under the assumption that a county measure would eclipse Seattle’s. Seattle would lose its freedom to dictate service investments, but planning and funding would be re-regionalized, ending years of a ‘pay to play’ system where Seattle experienced higher service levels than Metro could provide on its own.

Unfortunately on February 29, 2020, the first death from COVID-19 in the United States was announced in Washington. Soon after, then-Governor Jay Inslee announced a statewide state of emergency. By March 13, all schools statewide were ordered closed and Metro reported a 45% reduction in ridership.

All signs indicated that a county-wide transit measure was poorly timed and by March 16, County Councilmember Claudia Balducci announced that King County would no longer proceed with a ballot measure to increase bus service.

Continue reading “Seattle Transit Measure: Performance Since Passed (2020 to Now)” | 34 comments

In 2015, Mayor Ed Murray’s administration unveiled what would become the 2015 Levy to Move Seattle. It included a goal to “Provide 72% of Seattle residents with 10-minute all-day transit service within a 10-minute walk of their homes” by 2025 dubbed the “Very Frequent Transit Network”. Using Seattle Transportation Benefit District (STBD) funding, access to that network increased significantly. In 2015, only 25% of Seattle was within walking distance of the Very Frequent Transit Network. By 2020, 70% of the city was.

Continue reading “What Happened to the Very Frequent Transit Network?” | 21 comments

New post on Page 2: Renton’s Transit Center Moves Toward I-405. If you’re a reader and interested in lending your perspective on transit and land use in the region, contact us.

• WSDOT has taken another step toward revamping access to I-90 from Rainier Ave South, with the project team recommending “Alternative 2” for preliminary design (WSDOT Blog).
• Issaquah city leaders have some ideas how to build the 4 Line faster and cheaper (The Urbanist)
• The freeway bill comes due: WA State Senate wants to issue $2 billion in bonds to fund highway and bridge maintenance after years of raising regressive taxes to fund major freeway expansions (The Urbanist). The House’s proposed budget is more conservative. Transit and ferries get the short straw. Additional coverage from The Seattle Times ($).
• King County is set to finally adopt a revamped bus network around the Federal Way Link Extension including a 72% boost to weekend bus service (The Urbanist). Additional updates direct from Metro (Metro Matters).
• Sound Transit wants transit riders to consider it the backbone of a synchronized, regional system (The Platform). The spine, if you will.
• Washington State Ferries will start charging a 3% credit card fee on March 1 (The Seattle Times, $)
• Seattle’s Social Housing Developer is boosting staffing and looking to start buying property after first-year tax revenues were confirmed at $115M (The Urbanist).
• A discussion of the problems that arise when buses are free but subway trains are not (Pedestrian Observations)
• Washington is about to become the first state in the nation to have a comprehensive inventory of all of the sidewalks and pedestrian paths within its borders (Streetsblog USA)
• One-way streets help funnel commuters in and out of congested downtowns, but at the cost of killing pedestrians, street-level businesses, and the environment (Jalopnik).

This is an Open Thread.

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As part of its 2026 Service Plan, Sound Transit is proposing a new overnight bus service in the corridor of the Link 1 and 2 Lines. These routes would also continue to Everett, Tacoma, and Lakewood. These services will specifically operate during the night after Link stops running, and end shortly before Link begins again the next morning. Service is scheduled to launch in the fall of this year, contingent on the ability of partner agencies to deliver the service. Sound Transit is also launching a pilot of this service on the segment from downtown Seattle to SeaTac starting March 28th, with service roughly every 30 minutes throughout the night.

Despite shadowing the Link 1 Line, the overnight service proposal skips 10 out of 26 current 1 Line stations. Intuitively, the reason for skipping so many stops is probably is to keep the bus moving quickly as it heads to Everett or Lakewood, as well as to keep operating costs and staffing levels manageable. Also, considering that Sound Transit is a regional agency rather than a local one, they may be leaning on King County Metro to provide night-owl service within the city of Seattle. However, though some of the gaps are covered by King County Metro’s own night-owl network, there is not as much overnight service along parts of the 1 Line as you might think.

1 Line overnight service, visualized

Here is an overview of current overnight bus services along the Link 1 Line (including a comparison to the proposed overnight service), in the style of Sound Transit’s diagram of alternative routes to Link (click the image to zoom in):

Here are summaries broken down by route:

Continue reading “Current and proposed overnight service along the Link 1 Line” | 61 comments

Open payments or “Tap to Pay” started today. Several transit agencies’ bus and rail readers including Sound Transit and Metro now accept not only ORCA cards but also credit cards and digital wallets (pay by phone).

Open payments raise the risk that if you have both an ORCA card and credit cards or debit cards in your wallet, it may charge the wrong card or multiple cards or refuse the transaction.

How are your experiences with it?

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