Month: December 2025

The past year was another tumultuous and exciting one for transit and land use in the central Puget Sound. Dow Constantine became CEO of Sound Transit and the agency began seriously reckoning with its massive long-range financial gap. The eagerly-awaited extension of the 2 Line to Redmond opened on-time, but opening of the 2 Line’s crossing over Lake Washington was delayed (again). Meanwhile, the 1 Line extension to Federal Way opened sooner than expected, Rainier Ave South got more red paint, and “Fix the L8” advocates hop-scotched from Dexter Ave to Stewart St faster than Metro’s Route 8. November elections put several transit-oriented Urbanists in positions of power across the region including TRU’s leader Katie Wilson as Mayor of Seattle.

Here were Seattle Transit Blog’s Top 10 Most Read (by number of views) and Top 10 Most Discussed (by number of comments) articles:

Continue reading “Annual Roundup: 2025”

Transit agencies around the region will be free to ride all day (and most of the night) on New Year’s Eve. Some agencies are extending late-night service to accommodate riders celebrating the end of 2025 and the start of 2026.

These agencies will operate fare-free tomorrow until end of service:

Continue reading “Free and Extended Transit for New Year’s Eve 2025”

Alternatives for a Geary Street subway in San Francisco with BART, MUNI Metro, or automated Skytrain technology. (Tomo Tawa Linja)

Wordless 1900-era dream drama. MrWhippler combines Klovn’s ambient song “McKlaren” with a silent movie “In the Land of Nod”. The dream starts at 1:15, a main street inhabited with stop-motion toy dolls and animals on foot and in vehicles. The street is shared by pedestrians, wheelbarrows, horse carriages, tricycles, motorcars, and a double-decker buses. The characters get into street fights and mayhem and vehicle crashes.

This is an open thread.

Each transit lane has been grouped into one of the seven categories below. Limited hours usually refers to peak hours or daytime hours.

Continue reading “Seattle’s Transit Lanes in 2025”

Nate O’Brien moves to a tiny house off the grid on his own rural timber land.

A subway entrance in the woods. (Ambient soundscape by Miracle Forest)

There’s also the mysterious subway station and abandoned subway station. (Miracle Forest) The mysterious subway station is in the Budapest Metro. Can you spot two things unusual about the trains?

This is an open thread.

Service Announcements:

• Holiday Service: Transit services will be on special schedules or closed for Christmas tomorrow. Check agency websites for more information. Several agencies in the region will be fare-free on New Year’s Eve.
• Sat., Dec. 27: Link service between Stadium and Capitol Hill stations will end at 11pm and restart at 10am on Sunday as ST works on upgrading the DSTT’s signals system. Shuttle buses will run in the meantime.
• Fri., Jan. 2 to Mon., Jan. 5: Link service between Stadium and Capitol Hill stations will end early on Friday and restart Monday morning as ST continues DSTT signal upgrades. Shuttle buses will run instead.
• Evenings Jan. 13-15: Link service between Tukwila Intl. Blvd and Mount Baker stations will end early (around 10pm) each night as part of ST’s monthly extended overnight work program. Shuttle buses will run instead.

News:

• Ferguson proposes $3 billion WA transportation budget, $1B of which would go toward buying 3 new ferries (The Seattle Times, $). Additional coverage by The Urbanist.
• After rivers flood, King County Water Taxis use infrared goggles to dodge logs (KUOW)
• Seattle OKs New Growth Plan, but Biggest Zoning Battles Lie Ahead (The Urbanist). Additional coverage from PubliCola.
• Transit-oriented development moves forward at new South King County Link stations (The Platform)
• SDOT finished repainting the Dr. Jose Rizal Bridge ahead of schedule (SDOT Blog). This maintenance project included stripping layers of decades-old lead-based paint from the structure and repainting with an eco-friendly coat of green.
• Crosslake Update: Work on the 2 Line connection enters a new phase (The Platform)
• “if it feels like Sea-Tac is always under construction, it’s because it is” (The Seattle Times, $). For those worried SEA might run out of room for more flights, the Port of Seattle’s long-term master plan includes a new terminal north of the current set.

Continue reading “Midweek Roundup: humble bus”

More fare payment options are coming to ORCA in 2026, both motivated by the FIFA World Cup coming to Seattle next summer. Public pilot programs testing Open Payments and a 3-day PugetPass are planned for 2026, allowing more flexibility in how transit riders pay their fares. The last major updates to ORCA came in 2024 when Sound Transit and ORCA announced the ability to add ORCA cards to Google Wallet app on Android phones. Open Payments will allow users of iPhones and other non-Android phones to pay with their phone, too, but not with a digital ORCA card. Unfortunately, there is no update on when iPhone users might be able to put their ORCA cards in their Apple Wallet.

Continue reading “New ORCA features next year: Open Payments and 3-Day PugetPass”

A few weeks ago, Jeremy Cole shared an idea about the Fremont Bridge in a Bluesky post.

Hot take: Fremont Bridge should be closed to cars and open only for bikes and pedestrians. For cars it's mostly redundant with Aurora Bridge and we're never going to build a new bridge (with the required ability to open, especially) for non-cars. As a historic bridge it'll last a lot longer, too.

— Jeremy Cole (@jeremycole.bsky.social) 2025-11-25T01:41:40.723Z

Is Jeremy’s idea for a car-free Fremont Bridge feasible? Let’s take a look at the data to see why it makes sense to redesign the Fremont Bridge for people walking, biking, and taking transit.

Continue reading “The Fremont Bridge Should be Car-free”

How many trains per hour can fit into one downtown tunnel, both currently and with tunnel upgrades?

Sound Transit’s current ceiling is 20 trains per hour, or one every 3 minutes. With capital upgrades this could be increased to 30-45 trains per hour, or one every 2 to 1.5 minutes, as many other metro tunnels around the world operate. 30 trains/hour is common in many subways like New York, London, Moscow, and St Petersburg. The Paris Metro gets up to 40 trains/hour. Automated Skytrain can reach 45 trains/hour.

The 1 Line currently runs every 8 minutes peak, or 8 trains/hour. The 2 Line will have the same, or combined 4-minute frequency and 16 trains/hour. Sound Transit is currently upgrading the signals in the tunnel to ensure it can deliver that reliably; that will require two weekend closures in January. That leaves a theoretical 4 slots unused to fit within the 20/hour limit, equivalent to a line every 15 minutes.

With three lines in the tunnel all at 8-minute frequency, that’s 24 trains per hour, or a train every 2.5 minutes. That’s 4 trains over the 20/hour limit.

If those three lines are each increased to 6-minute frequency, that’s 10 trains per hour each, or a total of 30 trains/hour. That would combine for one train every 2 minutes. That’s at the low end of the upgrade range, so the easiest to do. It’s also what the tunnel alternatives study seems to be targeting to meet ridership demand in the 2030s and 2040s with more Link lines to more areas.

It’s not that Link can’t go over the 3-minute limit now. It currently runs trains every 1.5 minutes after ballgames, with extra trains in the Stadium-Roosevelt segment, some reversing on both tracks, and southbound trains from Lynnwood coming in between whenever they can. But this level of service throws reliability out the window, so trains come whenever they can. And it wouldn’t be allowed for every day service due to the limited number of egress paths in the downtown tunnel stations currently (elevators/ escalators/stairs).

There are two sets of future tunnel upgrades. One is needed anyway regardless of whether the second tunnel is built, to bring reliability up peer cities’ norm. The other is to increase tunnel capacity if we put three lines in the tunnel or make Ballard a Ballard-Westlake stub line instead of building the second tunnel. Both of these lists of projects are still being identified, but we know both of them involve signal work, and the second involves adding egress paths to Westlake station and maybe others. Other kinds of upgrades are probably needed too, but ST is still identifying them so we don’t know what they are yet.

This is an open thread for miscellaneous transit and land-use topics. There will be no Sunday Movie this week. Instead Sunday will have another Link article, and next week will have five non-Link articles.