This post is the first in a series, adapted from an article I wrote for my blog, Transportation Matters, a Pacific Northwest-flavored blog that discusses railway planning, urban planning, and related politics.

Introduction

In this environment of service cuts and stalled transportation projects, it can be difficult to envision a future when Pierce County has a comprehensive transit system that just works. Such feelings are coarsened when it is accepted that the future we work toward is incongruent with the needs of the area, as Transportation Matters has observed for nearly 10 years. However, citizens of the subarea—to use Sound Transit parlance describing the urbanized portions of our County—should take solace in the fact that Pierce County is not some vexing transportation problem. Rather, it is a place of long-standing corridors and urban centers that need straightforward transit investments and services. Those investments and services should be rooted in the same best practices that help develop quality transit everywhere in the world. There is no reason why Pierce County cannot have excellent mobility alternatives to the car.

A map of Sound Transit’s five subareas, to include the Pierce County subarea. The term “subarea” will be used as shorthand to cover Tacoma and urbanized Pierce County.

In many ways, the path forward has already been laid before us by the key transit agencies, Pierce Transit and Sound Transit. Pierce Transit’s system restructure in 2017 was both impressive and logical. Its focus on frequency, a grid layout of bus transit lines, and easy connections between them must inspire future plans. Sound Transit’s original railway plans for the subarea—dating from before the agency’s inception to sometime after 2007—continue to be those that best pair capacity with demand. While Pierce County’s focus on light rail has worked to intellectually deaden the planning of its transit, if it is to have good railways and even expand them, then the old Sound Transit projects are those to build. The rationale behind their development is as current as ever: Downtown Tacoma remains the vital heart of Pierce County and the center of its transit system. 6th Avenue remains the dominant corridor to TCC. Contemporary planning efforts have betrayed this truth. Sound Transit’s earliest planners recognized it decades ago.

If Pierce County is to grow coherently on a spine of transit, its jurisdictions first need to revise land use policies so that transit is prioritized and supported. Transit planners then need to reaffirm the framework that formerly guided their plans and apply it. For these reasons, the subarea should return to the negotiating table and reconsider long-range transit plans. It should refresh its shared vision and investment goals, and adopt plans that are mode-neutral, cost effective, and which realistically offer liberatory mobility options to as many residents as possible.

30 and 60 minute bus headways do not make the cut; we should be reaching for 15-minute or better headways everywhere there is suspected demand, particularly along the arterials that link so many of us together. These local services shall then be overlaid by a thoughtfully integrated regional transit system. Easy connections between the two should occur at destinations that are popular in their own right and which amplify urban life. These are places like Commerce Street and Pacific Avenue in Tacoma’s city center, Lakewood Transit Center, Tacoma Community College, and the Parkland Transit Center. When made necessary by either demand or the ballot box, strategically build railways. Circuitous lines whose point-to-point runtimes are far worse than the existing bus do not make the cut; we should advance methodical railway plans along pivotal corridors. These plans should reinforce the bus grid and allow for the total redistribution of a bus line’s service hours.

There remains much to be hopeful about. With careful attention, the subarea can develop a transit system that does more for less (per rider), brings more people to where they want to go than ever before, and which does so in an intuitive manner. This will require an aspirational plan and supportive policies.

So, do not be despondent. Request from your officials and transit agencies that they get to planning. Perhaps they may start their work by reading this piece.

Pierce County Integrated Transit Plan

(To see the plan in ArcGIS Online, click here)

To address the need for an aspirational transit framework, Transportation Matters has created a draft Pierce County Integrated Transit Plan. The goal is to generate enthusiasm for transit and to rekindle a dialogue about future investments and opportunities. The remainder of this series will detail 15 wishlist investments that would do much to deliver it. To realize the plan not only promises a transformation of the subarea transit system, but the ways in which we develop communities and live our lives.

An overview of the Pierce County Integrated Transit Plan, showing frequent bus lines in purple, feeder bus lines in orange, heavy rail in light blue, and light rail in dark blue.

In this series, we will review the following “Wish List” of 15 investments that would vastly improve public transportation in Tacoma and across Pierce County. The next four posts will review the proposed investments as follows:

  • The T Line
    • Commit to Downtown Tacoma and Integrate the Light Railways
    • Upgrade the Track Capacity of the T Line
    • Use 6th Avenue for the T Line Extension to TCC
    • Cancel East Tacoma Station; Extend the T Line to Puyallup Tribe District
    • Plan for a T Line Extension to the Mall via Lincoln District
  • Tacoma Transit
    • Dramatically Improve the Transfer at Pacific/24th
    • Send Regional Buses to Pacific Avenue and/or Downtown Tacoma
    • Replace the MCI Vehicles of the ST Express
  • Pierce Transit
    • Secure a Sales Tax Increase for Pierce Transit
    • Increase More Busline Frequencies to 15 minutes or Better
    • Invest in a Pierce County Bus Transit Grid
    • Expand the Pierce Transit Service Area into Greater Pierce County
  • Targeted Investments
    • Make Targeted Bus Corridor Improvements
    • Implement New Buslines that Connect More Local Centers
    • Electrify the Core Local Buslines

Up next: The T Line.

16 Replies to “Better Transit in Pierce County: Introduction”

    1. Good catch. The original reads, “we should be reaching for 15s or better everywhere there is suspected demand”, so I think this was an unintentional carry-over edit between sites.

    2. Corrected. Also corrected “this article” to “this series”. We split Troy’s article into five parts to fit STB’s length and comfortable reading/commenting. They will be published over the next several days, going around open thread days.

  2. Great to see you putting your vision up here, Troy.

    Can you provide a list of the series topics, (if you already know) so I don’t ask questions you plan an answering later?

  3. I’d love to understand the underlying rational for the disjointed aspect of Lakewood transit, with the Transit Center, the Park and Ride and the Sounder Station (not to mention Pierce Transit Base) all in different locations, yet less than a mile away from each other.

    I tried getting around without a car down their last week, and after walking to the incredibly pedestrian-hostile Park and Ride, and just missing both the 574 and 594, and just threw up my hands and walked to Tacoma in the rain, eventually catching the 3 after twenty minutes of walking on the joy that is Pac Hwy/ S. Tacoma Way.

    If they were all sited together, one of the options would have likely worked, but you have to commit, and if you don’t time it perfectly you are in for a long wait.

    1. I’ve never spent time in Lakewood, but I see the Transit Center is at the mall, which’s a good place for it because people want to go there by bus. The P&R is right by the freeway, which’s also a good place because it makes it easy for people to drive there and for buses to get there quickly.

      That leaves the Sounder Station… which should ideally be where the tracks cross the straight road between the Transit Center and P&R, rather than down on Pacific Highway with zero local bus service. Move that, and then the 594 can follow the 574 from the P&R to Transit Center and connect with local buses rather than ending at the Sounder Station.

      1. Yes, the Lakewood Sounder station location is very problematic for connecting transit services.

        It is another piece of evidence in the larger theme here that Pierce County must do a better job of comprehensive transit planning.

    2. The transit center at Lakewood Towne Center is the transit nerve of the City of Lakewood. It serves the most riders of the local transit facilities by far. It sprang up around the old mall that has since been redeveloped into the Towne Center.

      The SR-512 park-and-ride was built in 1988 to allow suburbanites to quickly access buses via the two area highways. It pre-dates by roughly 20 years the Lakewood extension of Sounder, which built a third station along the existing railway that runs along the industrial margins of the city.

      Lakewood’s situation mirrors Tacoma in some ways. Transit to Lakewood should ideally serve the “towne” center, where riders can access the main activity hub and make transit connections. Unfortunately, some transit cannot go there, mainly because it is impractical to deviate a heavy rail corridor to it. I am also referring to Tacoma when I write this, but I argue that the service approach should not be to terminate core transit lines at the distant Sounder station—which hosts peak-hour commuters who largely drive to the station—but rather serve the Towne Center and allow people to connect to Sounder for their outbound rail journeys.

      Tacoma secured a better arrangement because Pierce Transit smartly understood that the proposed new light rail line, heavy rail line, and existing buses all needed to pass by the Dome to get from Downtown Tacoma to Downtown Seattle. Consequently, they sited their giant park-and-ride in the constrained area next to the highway access ramps that would eventually serve all three modes.

      Ultimately, the Sounder stations should be served by transit, yes, but they are not the center of our cities.

      1. Agreed. Walking around, I couldn’t actually locate a “center” of Lakewood. I didn’t walk over to the Towne Center, but it would be shame if that were the center. Looks like a series of massive underutilized parking lots serving mid retail.

      2. Lakewood Towne Center used to be Villa Plaza as a traditional 50s/60s shopping center and then became an enclosed shopping mall in the late 80s called Lakewood Mal in response to the Mall building boom of the 70s and 80s with it anchored by Target, Lamonts, Emporium, Mervyn’s and Frederick & Nelson when it opened with Loews Cineplex Theater opening later.

        Said mall suffered a poor reputation from the onset due to management and mall layout problems alongside the tenant occupancy rate being lower than expected due to lower sales per square foot than expected for the size of the mall (this is an important metric malls use to sell to potential tenants who want to lease space and to investors/shareholders who want to invest or continue investing in the property). And anchor tenants closing up shop like Frederick & Nelson in the early 90s.

        The mall ended up closing in 2001 , a decade plus after it became a mall and then ended up being redeveloped iby MBK Northwest, property developer who redeveloped Jantzen Beach Center in Portland and Parkway Supercenter in Tukwila into new power centers. And did the same to Lakewood with it converted nto a retail power center and civic center for the City of Lakewood and State of Washington, with a new city hall and state government offices.

        The only anchors to survive the transition from what I remember was Loews, Target and Lamonts which became Gottschalks after its merger with them in 2000. Though Gottschalks closed in like 2009 due to Chapter 11 bankruptcy and later liquidation. With the building being demolished afterwards and is still an empty plot of gravel and concrete across from the AMC Theater all these years later since its demolition.

        The Towne Center currently is a mish mash of strip malls on the edge, big box retailers, a Safeway, some stand alone restaurants, banks, DMV, Target, AMC, Barnes & Noble, Lakewood Playhouse Theater, and the Lakewood Transit Center.

        Here’s an old article albiet sponsored content (as it’s on an old real estate news site and written by the developer about the project
        https://www.djc.com/news/re/11142404.html

        I grew up in Tacoma when the Lakewood Mall existed and I think we only went there a few times as a little kid when it was an enclosed mall. Don’t remember it ever being that busy, not dead mall quiet but not Southcenter on a weekend busy either.

        In my honest opinion, it is prime within the next decade for redevelopment into an urban village with apartment complexes, office spaces, retail, dining, entertainment, etc. like the one in University Place and soon to be Tacoma Mall.

      3. Oh yeah, and the Towne Center has always had problems with keeping the entire Towne Center full tenant or anchor wise. DICK’S was in there for a good while before closing and eventually moving into the old Nordstrom/Forever 21 building in the Tacoma Mall and the building now holds a n adventure oark. DressBarn closed from bankruptcy during 2023. Old County Buffet closed during the pandemic. Catherine’s closed when it shifted to retail only. Bed Bath and Beyond closed last year during bankruptcy and liquidation. Pier 1 closed when it filed for bankruptcy and then it became an Ulta Beauty.
        Etc etc etc.

        It’s got potential but badly needs a rezone to deal with how much parking it has and honestly realistically needs.

    3. My dad grew up on SW 112th Street in the farmhouse across from Clover Park High School. He and his siblings went to that school. I visited my grandmother’s cottage in the 70s where the high school parking lot is now. We had 50 acres, which we subdivided and sold off in the 1960s and 70s when the area was transitioning to suburban. In the 2000s we had a lingering property dispute with a certain neighbor, and I went down to see the neighborhood I hadn’t been to since I was I was ten and barely remembered.

      I thought about what it would be like to live there. I despaired at the wide gap between Lakewood TC and the Sounder station (on different sides of I-5), and the dropoff in transit to 112th, and the unwalkable, residential-only nature of what they’d built. Since then transit has gotten better: 112th now has the 4, but that’s quite a bit east of this area. Its walk score has gone from “car dependent” to “some transit” to… “very walkable”, is that even possible? It must be counting the stuff at Lakewood TC further north.

      In the early 1970s, my father wanted to develop the last 10 acres west of the farmhouse. He designed what he called “cluster housing”: groups of apartments and close-together houses, alternating with natural spaces. The blueprints were on our dining-room table when I was in second grade. But it required a zoning variance, and he couldn’t get it. What they actually said was, the city of Tacoma demanded a bribe to grant a zoning variance, and my grandmother refused to pay it. (Lakewood wasn’t incorporated then.) So my dad sold the land to a conventional developer, and now it has ten large-lot single-family houses on it.

      Looking back, the cluster housing he wanted to build would now be called “new urbanist”. It had the mixture of close-together housing and open space, but not the retail. It would have been better than the sprawl that was built.

      1. That’s interesting, Mike. Why would Tacoma need to be bribed in unincorporated PC?

      2. I don’t know, and I don’t know if it’s true. I first heard about it thirty-five years after it happened and many of the participants were dead. I knew we sold the land but I was too young to understand the details. They may have meant the county government, or maybe the city had zoning jurisdiction there. They always said they lived in “Tacoma” even though that area was unincorporated, so I’m not sure how much of a “Lakewood” or county consciousness existed then. In the same era Shoreline, Des Moines, Federal Way, and Auburn, had “Seattle” addresses, so people weren’t always consistent about whether they were in Seattle or not or what their identity was. The same thing happened around Tacoma.

        I also don’t remember the neighborhood, just the inside of my grandmother’s cottage. Her address was 111th. Sometime after that the main street was apparently moved from 111th to 112th, so there must have been a lot of other changes too.

  4. Urban Pierce County is mostly low density. There are some areas that are higher density that deserve better transit service.

    I kind of like the idea of designating “transit level of service” zones based on activity density and linearity first. From that it would then make sense to figure out routing. Maybe there are three or four area type levels out there. Service areas could earn upgrades to a higher level if their activity density increases through denser development and ridership performance.

    I think there could also be a role for a limited stop, higher overall speed, frequent (10-15 minute) line crossing Pierce County. I would initially draw it from JBLM to Downtown Tacoma to South Hill. Whether that’s a dual mode train, a Stride-like freeway bus system, an exclusive busway or something else or a combination I’m not sure. Maybe it would even function as a circle/ loop using SR 512 and/or 112th? The impetus is that much of suburban Pierce is spread out so much that regular bus service gets slow and expensive. Some frequent, higher speed transit connectivity seems warranted layered on top of regular bus service.

    I don’t think the typical public realizes that if Link ended at Fife as a large intermodal station with parking and convenient level transfers, there would be billions left over to seed this intra-Pierce higher speed transit line that could make it possible to get almost anywhere within a hour (hopefully under 45 minutes) in urban Pierce as well as hop Link to Seattle and SeaTac.

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