This is my 485th and final post here at Seattle Transit Blog. As I move on to an exciting new opportunity, I wanted to take a minute to thank the reader community here. For the past 7 years I have been able to take for granted having substantive policy conversations every day, a rare treat in today’s media landscape. What passes as contentious or petty in our comment threads is downright graceful just about anywhere else. And your generous support has allowed me to get paid to do this for the final two years, a blessing given the bleak outlook for the economics of journalism.

This has been a consistently rewarding experience, a supplement to my professional life at Pierce Transit, Commute Seattle, as a business owner, and soon at Sound Transit. Numerous agency officials have become confidants and friends, and I hope I’ve earned their respect as much as they’ve earned mine.

This blog analyzes the tiniest needles on each policy tree, but as I reflect back on the last 7 years, I am astounded at how healthy the forest has become. Growing up in Coeur d’Alene, my experience of Seattle was limited to semi-annual trips to the Kingdome and Pacific Science Center. We’d drive over and park in “South Lake Union”, then a bleak stretch of concrete the workaday crowd drove through on the way out of town, with the remnant neighborhood of Cascade hanging on by a thread. We’d walk over to 1st Avenue to catch a free bus to Pioneer Square, and 1st Avenue’s then much seedier nature shocked my young evangelical eyes.

After 8 years of college and graduate school on the East Coast and abroad, I finally moved to Seattle in 2009. Freshly minted with a master’s degree and desperate for income, I took seasonal retail jobs at Bellevue Square and Pacific Place. My first experience of Puget Sound’s transit was the monthly trek up to Kemper Freeman’s offices to pick up my paper Puget Pass. Link opened the month I moved here.

In 2017 there is still much to criticize, of course. Our agencies still struggle to coordinate on matters of service and fare integration. The customer ‘friction’ of our overlapping, complex systems still presents a psychological barrier to the average citizen. We struggle to provide sufficient transit priority, and we waste taxpayer resources spending excessive amounts of transit funds on the resulting schedule padding. There are still too many injury and fatality collisions in our city, and bike facilities remain fragmented. Our one-way grid in Center City still prioritizes the fast movement of vehicles over people, and continues to revolve around access to/from I-5. And our transit activist community remains too white, too male, too nerdy, and on its worst days, too condescending to new entrants. A ton of work remains to build an inclusive, mobile city.

But consider the growth we’ve experienced . Thankfully I missed the days when the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel closed on nights and weekends, or the pre-Sound Transit days when just getting to Everett or Tacoma without a car was an epic adventure. When I moved here real-time information was in its infancy, a graduate student project that I used by text message on my flip phone. Now I use one app in most major cities in the world, and it works nearly flawlessly. Not so long ago the flagship 71/72/73 were all hourly in the evening, combining for 20-minute service in the University District. When RapidRide C and D launched, they planned for half-hourly evening service. For crying out loud, until 2012 you couldn’t even take a bus between Ballard and Fremont without crossing the Ship Canal twice, via Route 17. Today, Route 40 is something we’d never again try to do without.

These days, Seattle is down to just one hourly weekday service (Route 22), and frequent service has become both an expectation and (mostly) a reality citywide. The Night Owl network is about to be radically improved after a half-century of waiting. Link has shrunk the city and brought us closer to our friends, family, and partners. Trips that were difficult and frustrating just two years ago (Capitol Hill to Safeco Field, say) are now effortless and reliable. Outside my Beacon Hill bedroom window, I watch my Route 36 go by every 5 minutes, taking me to a train that comes every 6.

Voters have consistently opened their wallets to boost service, with affirmative votes on ST2, multiple Metro measures, an unprecedented city top-up of Metro service, and of course ST3. Metro’s Long Range Plan proclaims a solid vision for our future network. The next few years will be ones of painful growth and transformation, and I can’t wait to see what things look like when we emerge on the other side in 2023, take a quick breath, and then start digging to Ballard. I now have the chance to work on these things from the inside, and I can’t wait. But thank you all for your indulgence and grace. It’s been fun!

29 Replies to “Thanks for 7 Great Years”

  2. All of those things sound fantastic and have no doubt improved transit in confined bubbles wth narrowly measurable metrics that make it look good.

    Shunned Sounder does the real heavy lifting in the south sound, but will be hamstrung as a second class citizen on BNSF track when for the cost of building Link from the Airport to Tacoma, ST could have owned that track and actually have something worth gloating about by now, you know – 130mph electric trains and 25 minute trip from Seattle to Tacoma via 4 downtown areas.

    Link is PR gold for ST, yet is doing almost nothing to address the white elephant in the room – the housing affordability problem in Seattle and the lack efficient interconnected commuting to more affordable places in a timely fashion and the transit agencies like to pretend nothing exists outside of their own routes, their own service is the only thing they measure their performance against and its quite good when you cant see the forrest for the trees :-)

    Thanks for your contributions, STB is the lone voice of common sense for transit in the Puget Sound :-)

    1. Link is PR gold for ST, yet is doing almost nothing to address the white elephant in the room – the housing affordability problem in Seattle

      Other things link has done nothing to address: my struggles with seasonal affective disorder, my relationship with my estranged son, and my poor dietary habits, Washington’s regressive tax structure, and the quality of public schools in the region.

      Good transit is a very good thing indeed, and has a host of indirect positive effects, but it’s not a panacea.

      for the cost of building Link from the Airport to Tacoma, ST could have owned that track and actually have something worth gloating about by now, you know – 130mph electric trains and 25 minute trip from Seattle to Tacoma via 4 downtown areas.

      Extraordinary claims like this require some sort of evidence. Anyone who knows anything about the costs associated with high speed rail will find this claim wildly implausible. It’s not even clear BNSF would sell, or *could* sell if they wanted to.

    2. Link is PR gold for ST, yet is doing almost nothing to address the white elephant in the room – the housing affordability problem in Seattle

      Other things link has done nothing to address: my struggles with seasonal affective disorder, my relationship with my estranged son, and my poor dietary habits, Washington’s regressive tax structure, and the quality of public schools in the region.

      Good transit is a very good thing indeed, and has a host of indirect positive effects, but it’s not a panacea.

      for the cost of building Link from the Airport to Tacoma, ST could have owned that track and actually have something worth gloating about by now, you know – 130mph electric trains and 25 minute trip from Seattle to Tacoma via 4 downtown areas.

      Extraordinary claims like this require some sort of evidence. Anyone who knows anything about the costs associated with high speed rail will find this claim wildly implausible. It’s not even clear BNSF would sell, or *could* sell if they wanted to.

    3. If anyone buys the BNSF track it would be the state. ST doesn’t have that kind of money, nor is it in a position to negotiate the best deal or to buy the entire corridor through the state.

      Sounder and Link serve different transit markets. Sounder doesn’t go to the airport, and it will never run every ten minutes or at midnight. and it will never serve Rainier Valley. Sounder is good for long-distance express trips. It’s not good for spontaneous trips to areas between its stations. Sounder is the “heavy lifter” only in the sense that hundreds of commuters use it during rush hour. That’s a small percentage of the total trips people take in south King County and Pierce County at those times and throughout the day. It works well for what it does: transporting the highest-capacity crowds between Seattle, the Kent valley, and Pierce County. That’s not the only kind of transit south King County and Pierce County need.

      Housing affordability is only peripherally related. The more affordable housing is not just in Sounder’s corridor, it’s also in Des Moines and Federal Way, and Burien and Renton. And rents are rising faster in low-cost areas like Kent than in Seattle. As the population increases and housing fills up, affluent people start looking in a wider area, and with strict zoning limiting the number of units that can be built, the rents between areas will tend to equalize, even if they don’t go all the way. In other words, south King County may be affordable for only a few more years. Like how Oakland was shunned, then it became hip, then it became unaffordable.

    4. Weasel, I think your cost figures ‘way off. Remember that the TGV in France, and every other high speed passenger rail system in the world, requires that track and trains be designed together as a single machine.

      With understanding that no other make or model of trains will ever get on there. Let alone any freight at all. Over a distance of thirty miles, your train will have to spend most of the trip braking be able to stop at Tacoma at all.

      A very fast regional rail system will undoubtedly at least be started by the time LINK us built out. The fast regional service you want will probably be similar to the Pågatågen (Poge-a-togen) trains in Skåne (Sko-na) Province, Southern Sweden.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A5gat%C3%A5gen

      And LINK will become an extremely necessary adjunct. Serving the stops you mentioned, including carrying passengers to the express stops. With buses of various speeds serving the LINK stops. Look at it like a living creature’s circulatory system. Arteries and capillaries.

      I think transit is now at the same stage of development as the automobile universe at the end of World War II. Wonderful PBS presentation, and I think a book, called “Horatio’s Drive”, wherein a 1903 millionaire bets some other businessmen he can drive a car all the way across the United States- after one of them claims they’ll never work outside cities.

      he end of World War II, which itself ended the Depression for this country, marked first time in history the average person could buy a car. Cities were old and crowded. Surrounded by a whole continent of land, much for sale to developers, that no one ever thought could get so full of cars that nothing could move.

      Like in the last big shift, the young people coming into the region, and out of the delivery rooms, are already seeing their parents’ suburban lives as bo-ring to the max.
      Historically, more kids have always run away to cities than to farms and suburbs.

      Now, the higher people’s incomes, the farther Down Town they like to live. As has been common forever in Europe. Real societal difficulty right now is restoring the working middle-class a healthy modern society needs. Which is not a land use planning problem. Though the better the transit, the easier every good result should get.

      The real work these next thirty years or so- length of ST-3, right?- will be re-organizing our living patterns so they can be served by line-haul transit at all. If present real estate explosion takes same trajectory as 2008 one, a lot of this week’s development should be foreclosedly empty.

      And available to be cleared and replaced with communities that include street and interurban rail like present suburbs do cars. To me, everybody reading this and the rest of STB for a decade or so will experience the most interesting period in modern transit history. The one where people of our age and in our trade will count the most.

      Mark Dublin

      1. “If present real estate explosion takes same trajectory as 2008 one,”

        There’s no more liar loans. The high prices are because the inventory is extremely low: a 30-day supply of houses rather than six months like it was before 2008. People aren’t selling like they did before 2008, and the rising population and pent-up demand has bought everything available. So if the banks go bust with their oh-too-clever securities, or the government cancels the mortgage-interest deduction, house prices here might go down but not that much. A lot of buyers are paying cash.

        I have heard that the next wave of bad debt is most likely to be car loans.

      2. A very fast regional rail system will undoubtedly at least be started by the time LINK us built out.

        Yeah, good luck with that. I never pegged you as the irrational optimist, Mark.

      3. Beware of thinking the future will be like the present. 2023 is short enough that nothing will likely change except possibly at the federal level given how volatile it is, and a recession which could happen anytime. But 2041 is a generation away: a new generation will be in power and public attitudes may change. Mark is right that a rational response to ever-worsening traffic (which is worse where he is compared to what most of us experience) would be maximum transit. And it has gone in that direction if you look at what the public would accept in 1990 and 2000 compared to today. But it hasn’t fully turned over yet, which is why we there are still people more concerned about car-tab taxes than about having a comprehensive transit network sooner. But that could change: look at attitudes on gay marriage and marijuana lagalization, which did turn around in the same timeframe. But people have particular feelings about their cars and commutes and houses and yards, because they experience them every day, so it’s taking longer for those. Still, it’s hard to believe they’ll last forever.

  3. Thank you so much for all of your work, Zach. I have certainly felt more informed and more confident as a transit advocate thanks to your writing and analysis. I’ll miss reading your work here but wish you all the best in your next role.

  4. Thank you for your wonderful work – this blog has been a beacon of hope towards mass transit in the Seattle area. Best of luck in your new ventures.

  6. Thanks for upleveling the conversation here. Hope you can do the same at ST (they need it).

  7. Now the fun begins.

    Choosing your words carefully, always being aware of what you can and can’t say.
    (particularly what you can’t say)

    You will sound like a politician.

    I’ve known and worked with a few of the people at Sound Transit.
    All good people.

    Good luck Zach.

    1. You will not have to sound like a politician, Zach! Which is bad enough if you really are one. Whose your constituents like you better if you don’t.

      Would be great to counter-punch ST’s worst legislative enemies by getting elected to the Board they create and becoming Chairman. As a stepping-stone to one of their seats in the Legislature.

      Choosing words carefully can also include putting most content into the fewest words. Sharpening a razor always involves removing metal. With practice, you can verbally cut an opponent’s throat so slick he won’t notice ’til his head falls off. Though in some agencies, this condition is not a career obstacle.

      But please refresh my memory. What are your duties going to be?

      Mark

      1. Whoa!… I think he needs to get his feet wet first, Mr. [Dexter] Dublin… ;-)

        Zach’s advantage is that he’s been doing the verbal parrying with opponents for a long time already, so he should be good thinking on his feet.

        The plain and simple truth – spoken with confidence, and understanding (though not necessarily agreeing with) the opposing opinion – will prevail.

  8. Remind us about your destination and future occupation, Zach. But just hope you’re leaving us a trained replacement.

    Who can take over the job of proving that every ailment listed above is within our capacity to fix.

    Mark Dublin

  10. Thanks for all of your contributions as both a volunteer and paid journalist on the site. You leave some very big shoes to fill!

  11. Zach,

    I wish you the best with ST and in the future.

    You and I have not always agreed on issues and one time you told me to move out of the city when we disagreed on the affect increased taxes have on senior citizens with fixed incomes but I took that comment as part of an exchange of different viewpoints on issues which is an important part of a democracy. Even though we disagreed we kept our conversations civil which unfortunately doesn’t always happen these days.

    Again the best to you with ST.

  12. You have a unique ability to see all the real factors, connect the dots, and keep them in perspective. Your writing has seriously helped the STB community recognize what’s happening and what needs doing, come to an agreement on it, and promote it. Every dollar raised for your salary has been well worth it. Good luck in your future endeavors. While ST doubtless offers good money, I think your talents are more than PR and marketing require, so I hope that later you’ll find further opportunities to exercise all your talents to a wider audience, at a suitably lucrative compensation.

  14. I’ll miss you Zach. Talked to you a couple of times over the years. You’ve struck me as the one person who remember that not everybody commenting in STB was white coder bro.

    Best of luck to you in Sound Transit, and if you are at some open houses for Northlink and Lynnwood Link, well, we probably cross paths again.

  16. Thanks for your contribution to this vital Puget Sound resource. Your work has been much appreciated and will be sorely missed. Best of luck in your future endeavors. May your future success be Seattle transit riders’ good fortune.

  18. Thanks for you service! You have educated me significantly and you inspired me to service. Thanks to learning about the opportunity on this blog, I am on the Citizen Oversight Panel for Sound Transit. What will you be doing for ST?

Comments are closed.