With Puget Sound transit ridership down to a trickle, no doubt many of you are missing your favorite bus or train route. Cheer yourself up with a Transit Supply sticker pack! All the local agencies are represented here in adorable sticker form.

Transit Supply is the brain child of Chris Arvin, a San Francisco-based designer. He creates stickers, t-shirts and more to celebrate transit agencies in other cities including Boston, San Francisco and LA. Arvin started selling unofficial transit merchandise about a year ago, he told me. “There can be a lot of negativity around public transit, but so many people love it, and for them, transit is part of what makes up their community,” he said.

For Arvin, it’s all about bringing people joy. “When someone tags me in a selfie excited that their items arrived, or when I hear a story about strangers connecting over transit because of my merch, it makes me excited to expand and bring that to more cities.”

He says Seattle has been a popular request and there will be more coming in the future. “You’ve certainly got a lot of transit fans out there!” he noted.

Yep. And until we can all get back on our buses and trains, stickers will have to do.

A sheet costs $5.95 and can be ordered online.

30 Replies to “Miss your favorite bus or train? Get a sticker!”

  1. Wonderful sight to wake up to, especially THIS morning. Radio news? Wish I could hit the “off” button so hard it never goes back “on” again, at least ’til we start getting our masks and other Personal Protective Equipment. When merchant demanded I get a mask yesterday, passer-by kindly gave me two brand new ones.

    And also, at any level, an actual Government. Weather looks “Grey-All-Day.” Without these little faces looking out at me from STB, couldn’t’ve got up to make my coffee. Olympia Roasters, “Big Truck Blend. Working on logo showing one of those Euclids the size of a five story building with pantographs on top for strip-mining.

    Will be really great if Class of 2020 adopts these challenging depictions to put on jackets and sweatshirts. Also when these young passengers celebrate their eighteenth birthdays by kicking off their campaigns for State Legislature.

    And when elected, take a leaf from Scotland and put the voting age at 16, in some places matching the age for the death penalty. Anybody want to tell me Scotland’s not going to try for Independence again when the Plague goes all-clear?

    Mark Dublin

  2. Oh, come on, everybody! The stickers are a ray of sunshine exactly like Olympia’s weather turned into soon as I complained.

    This morning’s posting also called back an episode from the Downtown Seattle Rail-Tunnel’s rubber-tired beginnings. When the wonderful Arts Project was also new. Art world tells me that by the rules of art, we’re getting a lot of bang for our buck.

    Idea to use the then-emerging “Wrap” technology to give the Breda fleet a North Coast First Nations totem animal treatment. Starting with a bus tricked out to resemble a totem bear, windshield panels for eyes, with nose, teeth, and whiskers on the panel underneath. Paws on side panels.

    Recall one manager asking why the bear looked so sad. Maybe because it discovered it was a Breda, but my folk-lore’s too lacking to venture an opinion. Present-day graphics technology could let us give it another try.

    While we give our trade schools transit-oriented mechanical projects- some speed-ups on wheelchair securement? – I’m guessing that 2020 vinyl can let students a lot younger make art-pieces out of our fleet, bus, train, and streetcar alike.

    Anybody know if the “One Percent for the Arts” requirement still applies to ST’s present endeavors? Would really love to see our young get into this part of transit early enough to make it all something of theirs. For life.

    Mark Dublin

    1. In Soviet Union one-channel radio never turns off. Consumer gets volume knob and can turn knob all the way down.

      (Yes, these radios actually exist.)

      1. Hope we’re not comparing our One Percent for the Arts allocation to Russian non-stop radio. Transit world’s got a working memorial to something much worse.

        When the Soviet Union came down, the Hungarians created a park dedicated to Communism’s most idiotic works of self-praise.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_Park

        Budapest’s excellent-looking streetcar line doubtless has more than one route that goes there. Only one experience on Link I’d put anywhere near close: late-night run from Pioneer Square to UW (Husky Stadium, not the Concert Hall, with the PA repeatedly insisting next stop was Sea-Tac Airport followed by Angle Lake.

        Also bugs me having both Routes 3 and 4 call out my eye doctor’s stop as “Second Avenue”, with Queen Anne Avenue fifty feet ahead of the coach. Chauvinist, maybe, but Terran pronunciation suggests a lot more familiarity.

        Mark Dublin

      2. The one-percent law is still in effect, yes. Every Link station project has artists who design the large works.

  3. Cute!

    I’d be more interested if there were stickers using the new ST branding as another sheet!

  4. I like how these show the relative widths of the different modes of transportation. See how much wider Bart trains are as compared with busses ;-)

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Area_Rapid_Transit

      Casey Mac, if memory serves, the BART cars were a one-off shot on more than one “spec”, and a lot wider than anything on rail before or since. Also seem to remember that Helsinki is what we’d call narrow-gauge. Entirely up to the people who elect the people who give orders to the people who write the specifications.

      And as active and interested voters, make sure their ST Board, County Council, and City Council Members stay on top of the process. And, with those buses that’ve now come back On Topic for prime motivation, make sure non-responsivity get stopped in its tracks, not the trains and their co-partnered buses.

      Mark Dublin

    2. See how softer the seats are compared to MUNI buses. MUNI’s seats are like hard plastic McDonald’s seats if I recall. And BART has a carpet, which is a nice touch. Unless they’ve been changed in BART’s renovation.

      1. Interesting point of furniture design. Whatever the material, though cloth cushions and metal frames seem to work best together, what good seats have in common is that they are shaped to give the human body its closest “fit.”

        Mark Dublin

    3. I was noting that the Alexander Dennis Double Talls appear to be higher than a Sounder locomotive. C’mon Siemens, give us some Big Trains!

      These are great fun!

  5. Additional service cuts for Metro and Sound Transit may start as soon as this Wednesday.

    This info comes from a Sound Transit/Metro Planner

    Proposed Cuts Include:

    Eliminating Sunday Link Light Rail Service
    Starting Link Light Rail at 6AM and ending service at 9pm.
    Running trains every 35 minutes until 6pm, with hourly service until 9pm.

    King County Metro Considering further bus route eliminations and running all rapid bus routes every 24 minutes at all times.

    2. I’ve heard the same thing. I also heard transit service won’t be restored at pre convid leavels for years. I believe link will return to 20 minute headways this fall.

    3. Lord how I wish American English wasn’t so weak for swearing, because this one calls for at least three diseases and at least a couple of half-breed animals, one draft, one domestic pet.

      Twelve or fourteen minute headways instead of quarter hour….reason still classified. Now show me the demented sadistic multiply counter-therapeutic piece of language that won’t let headway be either 30 or at absolute perverted worst TWENTY-FIVE!!!!!!! This is about power, isn’t it.

      Mark Dublin

    4. Are these from staffing shortages, or budget shortfalls? If it’s staffing, I really hope frequency can be restored when staff and riders feel safer. I think it’s important to keep in mind how much has changed in the last month, and that we really have no idea what things will look like in a month or two, let alone by next year.

    5. These are by two people who only give their first names, so it remains to be seen whether they’re confirmed.

      If Link goes down to 35-60 minutes, what’s the point of running it at all? Who’s going to time their trips to match Link? The point of Link is that it’s frequent and doesn’t get stuck in traffic. If it’s so infrequent it’s like coverage service, and there’s no traffic, why not take a bus? This will be worst for Kirkland riders.

      I’m starting to get concerned about what if businesses open and buses remain limited to 12-15 people and a limited schedule. It’s patently impossible for people to get anywhere peak hours without filling buses, or for that many people to drive and park downtown. When my workplace (not downtown) opens, if I can’t take a bus for hours because of pass-ups then I’d have a 2 1/2 hour walk each way. In that case I’d have to get a bike again. And fenders and rain gear and a headlight for those rainy/dark days, and I wouldn’t want to ride when there’s a chance of freezing and ice.

    6. “Are these from staffing shortages, or budget shortfalls?”

      ST said its last cuts were due to staffing. For Metro it’s probably mostly staffing too. Hopefully the agencies will be clear about the reason for the next round.

    7. BTW, I had my second Costco run Friday. Since the previous one was a 1 1/2 hour walk southbound, I took the 131/132 both ways instead. I wrote down the Link schedule and bus cancellations beforehand so I wouldn’t be surprised. I didn’t bother with Link, both because of its 30-minute schedule and I’d still have a 20-minute walk from SODO. The 2:20pm southbound bus was canceled but I managed to make the previous one. There were ten passengers. Midway the bus reached its 12-passenger ceiling and began turning people away. Northbound the passenger count was the same and there were no pass-ups.

      The 131/132 combine for 15-minute service but this is still a low-volume corridor compared to RapidRide or routes like the 7 or 36. So if the RapidRide lines are reduced to 24 minutes, they will definitely not be adequate and there will be a lot of pass-ups.

    8. These cuts are making me nauseous. What the heck did we play our butts off for in 2016?

      That will be all.

  6. I think it’s cute how everyone else is represented by an Xcelsior model. Except for Pierce Transit. They only buy Gillig.

    1. Yup, I appreciated that nice touch as most but not all of Skagit Transit’s buses have been and will remain Gillig. The senior leadership of Skagit Transit are die-hard Gillig fans due to maintenance.

      Me personally I prefer Proterra. Gee, I wonder why…….

  8. Aha, apparently you don’t know about the sixty-foot Erie Railroad, Mark. Yes, it’s a thing, and it operates with six foot track and custom rolling stock from 1852 to 1880 when it was flipped to standard gauge. It took three years of preparation and led to bankruptcy, but they did it in one day over the entire railroad.

    So, No, BART is not the widest thing on rails, since it’s 5 feet six inches track width. The same logic of “stability” was used to make that decision as well. But now “standard gauge” supports 200 mph trains, so it’s not really germane today.

    2. Quite a few rail systems operate on 5′-6″ broad gauge world wide (or a very close metric equivalent), including the world’s most used passenger rail system in India. Chilean and Argentine trains use the same, and the Iberian gauge in Spain and Portugal are so close to that spacing as to be compatible (high-speed trains in Spain are standard-gauge).

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