Tacoma’s abandoned railroad tunnel. (Pretty Gritty Tours)
1980 Seattle bus and walking tour. A short KCTS documentary. (Tom Speer)
A realtor looks at Seattle in ten years. (Living in Seattle with Sean McConnell) Best taken with a grain of salt, and he’s trying to drum up buyers, but here’s what people are saying. Just don’t look too closely at a Ballard to Bellevue trip on light rail.
This is an open thread.
That abandoned Tacoma RR tunnel story is fascinating. It’s not clear to me what UP was hoping to accomplish, however. They did end up building a rather steep line up that gulch–the route Sounder trains use today to Lakewood. Was the tunnel, which seems to parallel the eventual line, meant to be simply a lower gradient route to the same place? Did the development of more powerful locomotives allow a steeper line?
The route Soundef takes today didn’t exist then. Sounder takes a new connection between the NP line to DuPont and the UP/MILW line to Centralia. UP was trying to do what the new line does, but avoid its extremely steep grade of that or the steep MILW line.
When ST built the new connection, the old NP route between the line to DuPont and Tacoma Union Station got torn out. It makes it difficult to see how this would have helped them now.
I think ST only built a short piece of track between the Tacoma Dome station area and about C Street, where it joined the existing gulch line. Then the old connection from C Street to Tacoma Union Station was torn out. The line up the gulch from Tacoma Union Station has been there a long time–it shows up on the oldest topo map I can find, from 1897. I still wonder why a tunnel was the plan, until it wasn’t.
Exactly, and 1) that new connection is exceedingly steep, so even now the UP couldn’t use it for heavy freight very well and 2) the UP/MiLW line is also really steep, and the route it takes from Tacoma to Chehalis is circuitous. 3) The NP line to DuPont went the wrong way. They’d have to back their trains through Tacoma.
The UP would up using the MILW line for a while, but for heavy freight to use that line the yard limit extended pretty far south. Such steep hills weren’t suppose to even exist on what was considered a main
Line.
The tunnel would have done essentially what the NP line through Lakewood and DuPont does, but with much more gradual grades.
From what I read the UP wanted their own route into tacoma from the south. After abandoning the tunnel the UP worked out trackage rights to tacoma via the Prarie Line, part of which still exists. The sounder still uses part of that original Ling passing the old Northern Pacific shops and yard near 56th and South Tacoma way. (Which was also an airport after the NP shops were closed.) The Prarie Line continued through what is now JBLM, through Roy, Yelm and connecting at Centralia. Then they opened the Nelson Bennet tunnel which was more level. The BNSG and the UP continue to use that rout with the UP having track age rights into Tacoma. I am no expert but that is how I understand it to be. Yes there was a terrible street car wreck on the Yakima St Bridge. It was on some big celebration 4th of July 1900. Buy my memory may be failing me.
That tunnel story is super interesting. I go by there every day, riding my bike across the Yakima Street bridge. I’ll look at that area differently now!
It also very near the sight of longest bike bridge ever built (maybe just at the time) in the late 1800s.
That area is also just north of the site of one of the biggest streetcar disasters, where a car went off the tracks and tumbled into the gulch, killing dozens, iirc.
What would it take to extend the Rapid Ride G line to Alaskan Way? Seems the 1st Ave terminal/layover was based initially on a shared streetcar platform transfer. Why not take it two blocks west to the waterfront and closer to the ferry terminal?
because there’s no bus lane and that place is a traffic nightmare. Walk. it is healthy.
A bus along Alaskan Way is needed and would be useful to people with young children, people with packages, whatever, or people like me, who live in Winslow. Time marches on and now at 81 a bus would be very useful.
It was initially considered. I forget why they decided just to stop at First Avenue instead. I think it would work, it would just require the same type of work as before. There are no buses there so you would need to harden the street. You need to add bus lanes and the special bus stops. You have to do the traffic analysis to make sure the bus doesn’t get stuck in traffic. You would add BAT lanes (not bus lanes) which can be problematic. For example there are BAT lanes on Madison heading towards the water. But drivers can turn left onto Fourth which means the bus can be stuck behind turning traffic. That would happen at First & Madison, First & Spring and Second & Spring. That assumes the bus turns around on Western. If it turned on Alaskan Way it would encounter similar traffic issues on Western. Then there is Alaskan Way itself — there are no bus lanes on that part of Alaskan Way. The same is true of First Avenue but I think it would be easier to add them there (especially since that was the plan with the streetcar). I think Western would be much easier. You could just remove the parking and add a curbside BAT lane.
I think it would be worthwhile but not trivial. I think the biggest flaw with the RapidRide G is not running contraflow. This is why they are forced to use BAT lanes (not Bus lanes). It is kind of crazy when you think about it. They spent all that money and effort to have special buses and special bus stops so that the buses could run in the middle of the street on First and Capitol Hill. Yet they didn’t bother to provide the same level of service (for far less money) and run the buses contraflow downtown. Ooops. If they did eventually fix the line then I would extend it as well (to Western if not Alaskan Way). This means a bus would turn left onto Western from Spring and then turn left onto Madison (to head back up the hill). Like the rest of the route the one block section of Western would be a bus lane (in the middle of the street) not a BAT lane. The bus would run in its own lane everywhere west of 15th.
RapidRide G extensions in a number of ways seem possible. It could continue up the waterfront for tourists. It could run to the end of the pier for direct ferry loading. It could replace the proposed streetcar connector and run up First Ave through Belltown to Seattle Center, or replace the SLU streetcar. It could run southward along the waterfront and end near Union Station and Link.
There is a fundamentally bigger factor that goes unmentioned. There just isn’t the interest and governance structure to consider planning ideas like this. Our transit planning Downtown is done by ST or Metro or SDOT (and sometimes even WS Ferries) as a “lead agency” rather than by a multi-agency team. While coordination meetings do happen, the lead agency usually recommends what they want and the other entities are forced into more of an accommodation role. Not until our transit corridor planning fundamentally structurally changes, our three-headed planning approach for transit in and around Downtown will continue to be suboptimal as well as very costly. Plus, our elected officials and agency heads would lose influence so they’d be less able to appease groups and corporate interests that lobby them.
I live in the Seattle region and have never been to the top of the Space Needle. I definitely would if the price was an inflation adjusted $8, instead of $50 today!
because you only go there once before you realize it isn’t even worth 5 bucks.
Wow! Holy cow that is expensive. It is fun, but not that much fun. I think it just as nice to walk around the top of Queen Anne Hill. You get a lot of the same views and can vary it as you see fit. Something like this: https://maps.app.goo.gl/jvspCk959zkxd6VU6. That picks up a lot of really nice little parks with great views. It follows old streetcar routes much of the way (you can see brown signs for “Queen Anne Boulevard” — https://maps.app.goo.gl/A31qq3p5VV8iPE2c9). It is quite charming and has some spectacular views as well.
Or go up the Volunteer Park water tower. Great views, and a very interesting building!
Yes, absolutely.
The pies and pints pass is only $35 per person for two people, and for tourists there is (or at least was in 2012) a coupon book that includes the Space Needle plus admission to a bunch of other stuff as part of a package. Only times I’ve been to the Space Needle was at the generosity of people who couldn’t use the Space Needle coupon and so gave me theirs.
Anyway, there are cheaper ways than the $50 general admission ticket if you are able to take advantage of them.
I’ve been to the Space Needle a handful of times in the past fifty years. The top is disappointing now because the highrise buildings built since the 1990s are taller than it, so the only view you get is north over Queen Anne. The restaurant is overpriced and mediocre. So you’re not missing much.
I’ve never been in the Smith Tower, but that would be my first choice now, followed by the Columbia Center. Otherwise, go enjoy the free waterfront park, take a ferry ride across the Sound, visit bustling Pike Place Market, and go to the Lake Union shore.
For Lake Union there’s Gasworks Park, SLU Park, Fairview Avenue stroll, Westlake Avenue stroll, and Burke-Gilman Trail. Some of these form the “Cheshiahud Loop trail” around the whole lake. Lake Union is the geographical center of Settle, and it’s an interesting view to all sides, and a quiet low-stress place, and you can watch the boats and seaplanes.
You’ve got a good view of the Olympics, Mount Baker, Glacier Peak and Mount Rainier. The downtown buildings block some foothills to the east of Rainier but not many. From an urban perspective it is good. Partly that’s because the area around there has grown up so much. There are probably better urban views but overall I would say it is quite good. There aren’t that many places where you can see the volcanoes and the Olympics from the same spot. West Point (at Discovery Park) has a spectacular view as you can see Mount Baker, Mount Rainier and the Olympics at sea level. But you can’t see Glacier Peak (or many of the North Cascades). If the Space Needle was a lot cheaper (and not so damn crowded) I would likely visit more often (than once in a blue moon). By the way, it has a panocam (https://www.spaceneedle.com/webcam) and you can pick a time and date to see what it looks like on a clear day (although you have to know what that day is). I mainly use it to see if the mountains are out before I head to a particular place in the city (like Discovery Park).
I’m not sure it’s even worth $8.
I lived here for years before some visiting friends took me up there. The funny thing about the Space Needle is that the view from several other places (most of them free) is better than the view from the Space Needle. It’s nice to look at, but not so nice to look from.
The view may have been better during the World’s Fair. I moved here in 1972 so I don’t know what the view was like before then.
Man, some scorching hot takes! I love the view from the Space Needle. I think that angle of the Lake Union is particularly beautiful, and looking at the expanding skyline of downtown is great because the Needle is far enough west to be able to look down along Elliot Bay.
Underrated viewpoint: Eastgate freeway station. Unobstructed view of Bellevue & Seattle skylines framed by the Olympics.
Yeah, the Space Needle is great for tourists. Maybe not worth $50 for locals, but I still recommend it for visitors. There’s still a great view of Downtown, and the floatplanes often fly over to make a northward “landing” onto Lake Union is always fun.
Is it time to replace the Seattle Monorail?
I don’t read the discussions about a second downtown tunnel, so I may be woefully ill-informed about the different proposals; but the Monorail alignment seems like the perfect pathway between downtown Seattle and the Seattle Center for Ballard Link. On the day that Ballard Link opens, the Monorail will likely be at least 75 years old and in dire need of refurbishment. I love the Monorail, but the guideway is very rough and the rolling stock isn’t going to last forever. Instead of building an expensive tunnel on a sub-optimal alignment, can we find a dignified retirement spot for the red and blue trains and convert the 5th Avenue guideway to an aerial pathway for Ballard Link?
I agree that this idea deserves some consideration, GuyonBeaconHill.
I’ve mentioned several times that the monorail tracks will end their useful life soon — and that the corridor above Fifth Ave could be used for another rail transit vehicle type.
I’ve previously suggested that the monorail vehicles be relocated to a place where it would be memorialized and run as part of a museum or park (like maybe the waterfront or maybe connecting the Museum of Flight to Link) with new piers that last another 75 years.
Fifth Ave could then be reimagined with part of an Ballard automated stub line above it.
It’s not without challenges though. The biggest are whether it could ever be extended beyond Olive or Pine and how a Downtown terminus would be built and operate, and whether going from a monorail structure to a two-track per direction profile would be overly offensive to Fifth Ave property owners and tenants. But certainly it could save billions in rail expansion cost as well as open years earlier than the current deep bored tunnel / stations concept through SLU running through Downtown.
Sadly, unlike other parts of the country, our rail planning ignores flexible and varied alternatives to study anything more than current Link technology operating now and it will not propose doing anything but “additive” rather than “repurpose” strategies. The argument was always that it saves time and study cost — yet of course the funding shortfalls create such long delays that it ends up taking much longer to build something, and the cost escalations created by not being flexible results in billions of extra cost (much more expensive than studying them at the planning stage) are so great that the time and cost savings arguments end up being red herrings.
Not sure if the monorail can be relocated and still moved. I would just preserve the vehicles. MOHAI would be a great resting place for one vehicle The northern terminus feels like it could have a clever new life, incorporating the section that curves through the MPOP, as the new Link line likely won’t repurpose that final section.
MPOP, if that’s what the Experience Music Project is called now, didn’t want to lost the monorail and have an obsolete hole in their building. So I’d suggest mounting a monorail car through the hole as a permanent exhibit.
“It’s not without challenges though. The biggest are whether it could ever be extended beyond Olive or Pine and how a Downtown terminus would be built and operate, and whether going from a monorail structure to a two-track per direction profile would be overly offensive to Fifth Ave property owners and tenants.”
On the south end of 5th Avenue at CID Station, it’s easy to envision an aerial alignment above or adjacent to CID. The alignment would continue north on 5th Ave. and drop into a tunnel where Yesler passes over 5th Ave. The tricky part is engineering the transition to an aerial alignment from a tunnel at Westlake. Fifth Avenue does have some elevation gain and loss from Jackson and Union. Maybe the line could daylight at about Union Street and climb onto the aerial alignment between Union and Pike.
Just run it elevated the entire length of 5th. Once STX routes are truncated to Link in the suburbs, there is no longer a need to run buses on 5th, so ST can take a lane.
To get under Yesler, it could drop to at-grade between James & Washington – those cross streets (Jefferson, Terrace, Washington) all terminate a block east, so doesn’t matter if cross traffic is cut off. Or just elevate over Yesler, a more expensive but more likely outcome.
Fully agree. The Ballard stub should be 100% elevated or at-grade, which will shave another billion or so off of the cost estimate. Repurpose the monorail ROW, which likely means a complete closure during construction so the support columns can be fully replaced, and have stations at Seattle Center, Belltown, and then terminate at Westlake at the current Monorail terminus. The utility of the Monorail, both as transportation infrastructure and as a tourist attraction, is preserved for another 100 years.
The fixation on Ballard Link needing to be a tunnel into downtown is almost as foolish as the fixation on a 2nd tunnel overall.
SLU can get an alternative investment, same as how First Hill got a streetcar in lieu of a station. Major investments in reliability on the 8 is a good start (e.g. create a busway on Thomas), but with hundreds of millions to spare, ST & SDOT can really invest in infrastructure in the urban core. Shoot, maybe the CCC can finally be built, including much higher frequency on the SLUT segment.
The existing monorail route doesn’t serve South Lake Union, but…
You could build a replacement monorail with two routes: the existing one and one over a different set of streets to swing it over to South Lake Union.
I know people have dismissed monorail switches as slow and cumbersome, but the monorail lines in Japan have track switches that deal with frequent trains just fine.
The key destination for the current routing is Denny Triangle, not SLU, and a station at 5th & Bell serves the Amazon HQ just fine.
To serve SLU, invest in the 8 running between Seattle Center and Cap Hil stations. With 4 Link station transfers (Seattle Center, Cap Hill, Judkins, and Beacon Hill), it should at minimum get the RR treatment.
I don’t think I’ll have 2 downtown routes, at that is essentially reverse branching, which is not best practice unless you anticipate 2 branches north of the Ship Canal as well.
One issue with monorails is each vendor has incompatible technologies so you get vendor lock-in and high prices. Light rail has standardized generic options so you can mix-and-match vendors and change over time, or have multiple vendors simultaneously (as Link does now with two fleet generations from different companies).
It will never happen, but I think the Monorail pathway would make for amazing elevated park through Belltown, essentially a Seattle version of the NYC Highline.
The problem with the current monorail route is that we’ve had a lot of development between Downtown and Lake Union that is poorly served by transit. Half the reason we’re trying to build the Ballard Line is to solve that problem along the way.
The other obvious alternative would be to give the South Lake Union Streetcar dedicated lanes and signal priority. But doing anything that might reduce car capacity is a tough thing to do around here.
Most of the new development is Denny Triangle, not SLU, so include a station at 5th & Bell and most of that is within the station walkshed.
Also, the current SLU station is west of Dexter, right? If there is a station at 5th & Thomas, is it really that much further? Also, an elevated station will be faster to access than a deep station tucked under the 99 tunnel.
My thought was an elevated alignment could ideally run up Mercer, or Elliot Ave to Thomas if Mercer is politically impossible, and have stations at QA/1st and at 5th+Thomas, before taking over the Monorial ROW north of Denny. To serve SLU itself, focus on improving the 8, including moving the 8 to Thomas west of I5.
But sure give some love to the streetcar. ST could pay for the CCC as mitigation, which can then double frequency on the SLU segment, which can be as impactful as more dedicated lanes & signal priority
Well, “No, we can’t”.
The supports are designed to carry the loads of the guidebeam and two two-car, rubber-tired monorail vehicles, not heavy Link trains designed to survive a crash with a semi-truck. The entire set of supports would have to be replaced.
The fustercluck of a station at Westlake cannot host more than one train at a time, and the bridges to the east train are ridiculous and impossible to deploy and retract in a high-frequency operation.
Any sufficiently rapid frequency would demand a loop terminal at both ends so that the trains ran in a “dogbone” pattern, never changing direction except at entering and departing service times. The slow-moving and very cumbersome “guidebeam switches” such as Las Vegas uses are far too slow to do platform-selection, and they probably could not use a “scissors” configuration, but rather would require two-successive simple cross-overs; “crossings” require a turntable sort of device that rotates a section of guidebeam.
I don’t see where — or how — you get the south end of a dogbone in downtown Seattle now that the Westlake right-of-way between Stewart and Pike is gone. The curves at the corners of the dogbone square would be way too sharp.
It’s the ROW that is the be repurposed (for billions in cost savings relative to a greenfield tunnel), but the supports need to be replaced to create a new asset with >100 year useful life. The monorail vehicles can limp onwards (they are already a Ship of Theseus) in perpetuity with regular replaces, but the supports will reach a point where they need to be replaced. The proposal is to do that replacement now (aka in the 2030s) and built an entirely new line with a new technology but along the same corridor, rather than build a Link line now and then need to replace the monorail later.
Assuming that the vehicle is driverless, I see no reason for a loop. The vehicle (light rail, heavy rail, rubber tired, monorail, whatever) can simply reverse. The station will be completely rebuilt and likely will have a bigger footprint, but a simple layout like the current northern terminus will work fine.
A full scissors on a monorail approaching an end of line station is shown here. It’s really not especially slower than a normal track switch.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iTTxIHcrgPo
Extend the Monorail
I know I’m going to take some flak for posting this but here goes.
1. The cost of tunneling under SLU is very high, using the existing Monorail between Westlake and Seattle Center would instead use an existing dedicated transit line. Other than the costs needed to modify the existing stations and infill at least one station this is a cheaper alternative. (I admittedly have no numbers to back that statement up)
2. The Westlake Station could be reconfigured by maintaining the existing inside platform for southbound trains and the Nordstrom building could host the northbound trains. And a mezzanine level should fit under the guideway beams providing a common station area. The mezzanine level might also be a good location for a two car stub terminal for a reinvigorated SLUT with longer trains made up of lengthened streetcars running much further north past Fred Hutch.
3. A trade off between a scissors cross over track or the dog-bone loop could be made. For the dog bone configuration the tracks would follow 5th Avenue and be formed around one of the blocks south of Westlake. Or even follow 5th Ave to the Library and then climb up Madison to Seattle U and Pill Hill. Those rubber tires with electric motors will come in handy there!
4. North of Westlake add an infill station at 5th and Blanchard
5. Close the existing Seattle Center station, reroute the Monorail following Thomas with a new station on Thomas between Queen Anne Ave and 1st Ave.
6. continue the new beam-way to Elliot Way and 15th with a station at Galer positioned to serve Expedia and the Cruise Port.
7. A station at Interbay/Dravis
8. A high level bridge or tunnel to cross Salmon Bay into Ballard. If you build light rail on this route you are going build some fantastic means of getting across the Ship Canal anyway.
Advantages
A) Rubber tires provide a quieter environment for adjacent building in lieu of a noisier steel wheels on rails rounding corners for a scenario where the Monorail route would be repurposed for an elevated rail line.
B) The Seattle Monorail is an icon of Seattle, don’t get rid of something like that. And possibly less offensive to adjacent landowners.
Other notes:
Would some of the existing columns and beams need to be replaced after 75 years as claimed by some? Sure but if you look at something like the Green Line in Boston which has been in use for what 130 plus years they didn’t throw out the line when it got old, they performed periodic maintenance and have even periodically updated systems.
While Monorail technology is not seem the USA except at Disney Parks and Las Vegas it’s in use in India and Japan with great success. Hitachi which took over from Alweg (the supplier of the Seattle Monorail trains) is still building and supporting these other systems. And the new trains would be accurate copies of what I would argue is best looking Monorail Train look in the would from the outside to the unique seating arrangement.
In conclusion, it seems a shame to not fix/expand existing mass transit systems we have such as the Monorail and Streetcars.
Sure, if the existing supports are in good long term condition, and you are right that the political acceptance might be higher – an elevated rail is something unknown while the monorail is beloved.
The key will be how straightforward will it be to operate an OMF with dozens of vehicles.
But yes, that’s the same route I had in mind, and the existing monorail vehicle is sufficient, assuming it can operate at high frequency.
5A. I would have a station on each side of the Seattle Center; a station on 5th between Harrison & John would serve SLU, particularly if it can be integrated well with the 8
5B. The station placements would be better if the monorail followed Mercer, but it would be pretty cool and probably cheaper (financially and politically) to follow Harrison through the Seattle Center rather than curve around the north side.
AJ
“5A. I would have a station on each side of the Seattle Center; a station on 5th between Harrison & John would serve SLU, particularly if it can be integrated well with the 8”
Totally agree with your Harrison and John Station.
I suggested that there might be pier issues initially. With some subsequent digging, I see that they’ve been apparently rehabilitated to last for at least several more decades. So it no longer seems to be a concern.
Stepping back from the topic, I see that the bigger truth is that we don’t have to always use Link technology for urban rail. I would even note that most large urban rail systems around the world have multiple rail technologies and vehicle types. Consider that the recent Sepulveda EIR/ EIS looked at three different rail modes — standard urban rail, automated rail and automated monorail.
The arguments against that by ST seem to boil down to three:
1. It saves time and gets to opening day sooner. That’s just not true in reality. The Link delays are almost certainly due to not the having the funds to build as it would be to take the time to do additional studies — and cost savings can mean that construction could start sooner and end sooner.
2. Operations and Maintenance facilities have to be built. While there may the need to build connections or site relocations , these facilities can be retooled and I don’t see a significant capacity difference created by switching rail vehicles. Keep in mind that ST Link already has two more OMFs planned and different vehicle types can operate out of service elsewhere if they fit on standard tracks. ST recently suggested that they want to purchase a different kind of vehicle in the future anyway!
3. Having different technologies means a larger vehicle fleet, so using one technology provides economies in spare needs, maintenance and operations training and other things. There may be some validity with this one — but a lower-cost technology could easily negate this kind of cost. And as with the above point, ST is already floating a vehicle type change anyway.
The issue I think is before us is whether or not ST should keep ignoring other rail technologies for Link corridor alternatives . Other technologies would still need study (including enough engineering to get an idea of actual design with costs) before choosing a technology.
It’s this pragmatic study of additional alternatives that’s needed rather than a forced decision to recommend a specific technology at the outset — and ignore other ones.
1. Saves time only if ST interlines Ballard Link, which then means the DSTT would need to be closed for over a year. So sure, faster, but massive disruption. If it’s a standalone tunnel (DSTT2), that will certainly take longer than an elevated line, even if the EIS process needs to be rebooted (it’s absurd that the EIS takes years, but that’s a separate issue)
2. I think this is a moot point. Assume Link extends to Tacoma (pretty much set) and at least a few stations north of Lynwood, OMF-S is needed, so that can be built as proposed. WS/BLE requires OMF-N, so if we pivot to Ballard Link in a separate mode, then OMF-N is smaller and/or descoped.
3. That’s the key point – an elevated line, in particular one that repurposes the monorail ROW, is billions cheaper, easily offset higher operating costs. Further, if the line is automated, the operating costs will certainly be lower than running 4-car Link trains with drivers.
BNSF is closing its maintenance facility in Interbay (Balmer Yard). There’s plenty of room for an OMF on that footprint.
Yesterday I posted about the homeless encampment near the Rizal (12th Ave S) Bridge being cleared. I walked through the park this morning and there still are plenty of tents and makeshift structures in the park, but I would estimate that 30-40% of the tents and structures that were present last week are gone today. The encampments near Yesler Terrace have also been cleared and there were crews cleaning up debris and garbage at that location this morning.
I’m hoping the safety situation at 12th and Jackson bus stops will improve soon. Even this morning I witnessed several groups of people smoking fetty along 12th.
I also saw stolen-goods salesmen at 12th & Jackson the last two times I’ve been there, one a couple weeks ago when I took the 7 to Goodwill, and one a couple months before that when I went to Thanh Vi. The problem that used to be at 3rd & Pike has moved to 12th & Jackson and has been there for months, and businesses have signs saying “Save Little Saigon” and begging for relief. I hope Wilson addresses this soon.
To be clear, the primary safety problem is a dearth of permanent structure space to get those experiencing homelessness indoors. Moving people along to another site and disposing of their remaining belongings does not make them safer, and is basically an exercise in squeezing a balloon.
We need more housing of all types, including shelters.
I see a difference between people living in a cluster of tents with all their belongings or sleeping on sidewalks with a shopping basket of belongings, vs a group of people on the sidewalk just standing there all day and some of them selling drugs or hawking stolen goods. First off, they shouldn’t be selling drugs or stolen goods at all. Second, if they need someplace to spend the day, why not go to a park in smaller groups? I can understand hanging out on the sidewalk because that’s what we kids did on the Ave when I was in junior high and high school, but not in the way these people are doing it.
I can’t easily tell when goods are stolen or bought dirt-cheap at the Goodwill a couple blocks away.
The place to intercede on the stealing of goods is at the stores, most of which downtown have security personnel. I have watched shoplifters tell such personnel they have no right to stop them, and then push their way out and leave.
I have also not seen the plainclothes officer who used to panhandle near Westlake in awhile. I guess everyone figured him out.
Downtown stores, and perhaps stores throughout the City, are also hurting themselves by shutting their restrooms to all but employees. That is a quick way to lose transit-dependent customers.
Ultimately, the circus at 12th and Jackson exists because someone is making a good profit selling a dangerous product to a vulnerable population. The petty theft and sexual exploitation are all part of the economic system that supports the fentanyl supply chain. The people who get hooked into addiction may be able to get clean if the appropriate social services are available, but the supply problem is a law enforcement issue.
As I posted yesterday, I haven’t seen any police presence at the clear outs. I’m guessing that’s intentional. Moving people into safe shelters (or out of unsafe situations) shouldn’t be a police job–it’s a social services mission.
I don’t understand the business model of selling something that kills the customer.
That said, I have used those bus stops a lot, and never been offered anything for sale, stolen or not. I’ve seen lots of people there who seemed out of it, but not polished salesfolk.
They don’t try to sell them to me; they do to other people. I suppose I look intimidating and if I wanted it, I’d ask. The last time somebody whispered “Buds?” to me was years ago. I did take drugs in high school for a few months, but I decided I like reality better, and now I hate drugs. And it really angers me that they shoplift things to resell them. If somebody has to sleep on the sidewalk or in a tent, fine, we’ll get our social services straightened out someday. But don’t go stealing things to resell them and crowding out a sidewalk for it. Things like toilet paper, candy, electric pots (something shaped like a rice cooker and still in its box), hair dryers, etc.
Well, I guess I rarely see a drug sale directly, but a few people are smoking fentanyl or tending to their pipe kit or passed out, so they must have gotten it there. Police cars are sitting a block away and do nothing until… whatever it is that motivates them to act.
I hadn’t thought that they might have bought the goods at Goodwill. But it’s the same goods as the ones downtown and elsewhere used to sell. And why wouldn’t the customers just go to Goodwill themselves and buy the same thing cheaper?
The STP 2026 delivery plan was released:
https://www.seattle.gov/documents/departments/sdot/about/funding/levy/reports/2026%20seattle%20transportation%20levy%20delivery%20plan.pdf
Pretty vague overall, a few corridors that stood out to me:
– 3, 4: Bus stop improvements; 9th/James operational improvements
– 8: Queen Anne bus lanes through 2nd Ave; John/10th safety improvements; MLK/23rd bus stop improvements; planning for Denny/Olive bus lanes
– 67, 348: Bus stop consolidation, crossing improvements as part of the Pinehurst/Roosevelt repaving project
I hope none of these projects create sunk-cost fallacy blockages to the more sensible path of having route 67 turn *north* on 5th Ave up to Pinehurst Station, in part to replace 75 service on 5th.
The Seattle 2035 video is mainly to show that things may feel very different then. I have a hard time visualizing the situation in the future and how I’d feel being in it. But when I look back to 2015, 2005, and 1995, the living environment and my available choices was dramatically different each decade, even if many of the basics remained the same throughout.
I was amazed when he said the One Seattle Plan adds some 300,000 zoned housing-unit capacity, and that Lynnwood’s capacity would double. That’s twice the 150,000 unit backlog shortage Seattle/King County has now. Although if it all fills up with population growth, that doesn’t address housing for the people who are currently cost-burdened or got displaced from Seattle and want to return. So it may not get us further ahead, but at least it will help keep us from falling further behind. I still favor expanding urban village footprints further as Wilson wants to do, but 300,000 is a surprisingly good number. That and Lynnwood make me think that maybe we’re not doing as badly as I thought. Although a lot of that won’t be built because some owners will decline to redevelop.
Mike Orr,
Many urbanists want zoning to the reason that housing is so expensive, but it’s really not the case in the Pacific Northwest. There have been plenty of places to add development in Seattle the last 30 years and Mayor Bruce added even more. Mayor Katie could change Citywide zoning or enlarge the urban villages currently planned, but the City doesn’t have a dime to finance any new housing right now. The Mayor can’t actually make developers build anything. Amazon is has a bigger effect on the Seattle housing market than the City government. The history of Seattle is economic boom and bust periods and the City has been riding one heck of a tech boom for a decades! At some point this too shall fade away.
I’m still friends with many of the folks I started working construction with back in the 1980s and I can tell you that those of us lucky enough to have bought real estate are just light years ahead financially of those who didn’t. It’s always been that way in America I guess? And here’s the kicker that that, Greater Seattle just wasn’t all that cool back in ’85, so of course real estate prices were low.
Many urbanists want zoning to the reason that housing is so expensive, but it’s really not the case in the Pacific Northwest.
Right, the laws of economics don’t apply here. We are a special little snowflake, unique in the world.
I don’t mean to be rude but while you talk a big game, you obviously know nothing about housing development in Seattle. Maybe you are an expert in Tacoma — I don’t know. But in Seattle, it is pretty obvious to anyone who walks around that they are building like crazy. It is just that they are building *only* what the regulations allow (house, ADU, DADU). These are essentially condos for at least two of the three units (it is all one lot). What do you think they would build if they allowed a multi-unit building? Do you think a developer looks at 10,000 square foot lot and thinks “Hmmm, I could build an apartment with 20 units. Given the high cost and rent that would be quite profitable. Or maybe condos — same think. Nah, I’ll build one big house, an ADU with a connection that no one ever uses and a second, smaller house. I’ll make the proportions just like very other new development in the neighborhood.”
Hell, if they just changed the lot limits you would see a lot more houses. Those same house/ADU/DADU developments would just be row houses. On most lots you could build a half dozen row houses, easy. Each owner would own their own land. That would be way more profitable for the developer. You would see way more new places to live. With more places to live the cost of living goes down. The *only* reason that isn’t happening is because of the draconian zoning.
Ross Bleakney,
I happen to know a lot of code and regulations that go along with it, but it’s all boring as watching paint dry. The City of Seattle does make it harder to build anything than neighboring cities. I have worked on projects all up and down the I-5 corridor and although the regulations and code are different depending on which County or City the project is in, the basic math problem doesn’t really change. Here’s the math…….
Currently, housing prices are falling in Portland. It’s still the same basic place it was when housing prices were skyrocketing , but now Rip City just isn’t seeing the mass inbound migration it has in the past 20 years. Housing prices are mostly flat and local governments are struggling to fund services (starting with transit) at higher levels.
Seattle is still flying high, gaining 1000-2000 new residents, or more, a month. My guess is that most of these migrants have more money than the locals so it’s going to damn hard to find nice affordable housing if you’re not making a 100K a year. The construction industry in Seattle is largely focused on those well-heeled newcomers, because that’s where the money is. The builders and the money guys are in Seattle for profit, not affordable housing.
At some point Big Tech will crash or leave Seattle and it might go back to the proverbial cow town it used to be. Nothing lasts forever. I lived in Seattle after the Big Boeing Bust…. I thought it was a better town back than what it’s turned into now. Money isn’t everything. Amazon can change Seattle. Mayor Wilson? Not so much.
The thing to remember is housing is free market and it’s going to do what it’s going to do regardless of what zoning does. Seattle built so much housing in the last 30 years…. and yet working class people can’t afford to live there. San Francisco didn’t build shit….. and yet working class people can’t afford to live there either.
I never had the sense of entitlement that Seattle gave a crap about me.
“Currently, housing prices are falling in Portland. It’s still the same basic place it was when housing prices were skyrocketing , but now Rip City just isn’t seeing the mass inbound migration it has in the past 20 years.”
You just contradicted your own argument. The reason to upzone is to allow housing supply to keep up with rising demand. If supply remains proportional to to a population increase, prices don’t rise that much, because buyers/renters have the same amount of clout they did before. But if housing doesn’t keep up — as in the 2010s when Seattle was building 9 units for every 12 added jobs — then more people are competing for each unit, and that gives owners/landlords leverage to raise prices beyond inflation and make them stick.
In Portland you say population growth has decreased, so that reduces the pressure on housing. Naturally prices remain flat or fall.
In Seattle if Amazon suddenly closed or moved away, a lot of tech workers who recently came would leave too, as happened in the 2008 crash. That would relieve the pressure on housing prices.
In the 1960s, white flight and the Boeing Bust reduced Seattle’s population. In the early 80s when I first went out on my own up through around 2004, there was enough remaining slack in the housing market that you could look at an apartment, take a week to decide, and it would probably still be available, and you could get the cheapest apartment on minimum wage. Houses took six months to sell on average, and prices rose gradually, accelerating in the 90s and 00s but not as fast as later.
In the 2008 recession, house buying slowed to a trickle, but selling slowed too, and construction halted. Pent-up demand gradually built up while supply remained low, so the time-on-market shrank from six months to 3-6 weeks, and it never went back to the previous normal even after the recovery. That’s what gave owners leverage to raise the prices so fast. It has gotten somewhat better now, but still not back to the 6-month level where prices were more stable.
In rentals, the last remaining slack was finally squeezed out of the market in the 2013 recovery, and the cheapest $650K 1BR’s suddenly jumped to over $1000 and displaced people, and rents started rising faster than they ever had before. (At least back to the 1950s.)
So housing prices respond to supply and demand. Upzoning is a tool to allow supply to rise to its natural ceiling if it’s being artificially constrained.
“Seattle built so much housing in the last 30 years…. and yet working class people can’t afford to live there.”
Because we didn’t build enough, and it wasn’t walkable or convenient enough. It’s the same thing as with welfare and food stamps and healthcare and untreated mental-health cases. The reason we didn’t eradicate poverty like the Great Society hoped is we slashed and eliminated the support in the middle of it for ideological reasons, so it wasn’t enough to reach critical mass and turn the tide. And then macroeconomic developments caused people to lose purchasing power, so the number of poor people increased, and the population increased rapidly, and the number of poor people increased with the population. The net result is shrinking or skeletal benefits and support, and the number of poor and homeless people increasing.
Contrast that with Finland and the Nordic countries, which made a decisive turn toward investing in their citizens, minimizing government corruption, and maximum democratic freedom. Finland has cradle-to-grave support, and practically free childcare and education through college, so that its residents can become the most educated and compete in international business and technology. And it has a robust level of minimum housing support, so that it’s safer to take entrepreneural risks, because if your business fails you won’t be devastated or thrown into poverty, you can brush yourself off and take care of essentials and start again.
This is all what’s missing in the American system, and in the American housing market.
The cost of housing as a national issue and a local issue have been around for decades. It’s quite complicated and it’s not going away.
It’s impacted by mostly things like household size, mobility/ commuting capabilities, housing ownership and a market response to marketplace salaries.
There are three overarching changing trends that should not be ignored. The first is that nationally our population growth is expected to subside unlike the past several decades. The second is that household sizes aren’t going to get much smaller unlike in past decades. The third is that the expected appropriate square footage for a family of four or even a single person is no longer increasing like it has in past decades.
Rather than point fingers at things like whether an isolated block here or there should allow taller buildings, let’s at least first acknowledge that our region collectively has been doing many things right. Many suburbs now have higher housing densities being created in addition to Seattle itself. Our region has opened dozens more miles of high frequency rail and encouraged densification around the new stations.
Outside of some wild shifts in immigration or foreign worker policies or massive abandonment of other cities due to climate change (like an overheated Las Vegas or Phoenix with its increased water and cooling requirements) I’m not expecting the housing stress to continue beyond the next few years. Ultimately it’s affected by the larger income inequality issue, and the more dense the housing type the more housing ownership actually shifts increasingly to the wealthiest people and corporations.
I’d much rather see local governments focus on pursuing denser, home ownership strategies rather than much denser and taller corporate apartments owned by absentee entities . Throwing up cheap or “affordable” apartments that will deteriorate into crime-ridden slums in 30 years could actually be the outcome of some of our housing approaches .
“The cost of housing as a national issue and a local issue have been around for decades.”
It’s metro-specific. Chicago, Dallas, and Houston have been more relaxed about letting housing supply keep up with demand, so they haven’t had large spikes like the coastal cities have. Rapidly-increasing prices started in San Francisco and San Jose in the 90s (high population increase and high nimbyism), then spread to Seattle in the early 2010s (high population increase and somewhat lesser nimbyism), then spread to most of the country in the late 2010s (San Bernardino, small-town and rural western Washington, Idaho, etc) (moderate population increase overwhelming local supply). In all these cases it’s when all the slack is finally squeezed from the market. That happened at different times in different cities depending on their population and regulation trends.
Chicago, Dallas, and Houston were able to escape most of it by having liberal growth policies. Chicago does it with infill while Dallas and Chicago do it with sprawl (and some infill now), but the issue is the housing supply still goes up as much as it’s needed more or less. Although I think even Dallas and Houston are starting to be squeezed a bit now.
“It’s impacted by mostly things like household size, mobility/ commuting capabilities, housing ownership and a market response to marketplace salaries.”
That’s the same thing as saying housing demand changes based on all these factors and how they impact a particular city. So it doesn’t change the fact that housing supply should increase proportionally with demand, and that can relax when demand is flat or decreasing.
“nationally our population growth is expected to subside… household sizes aren’t going to get much smaller… [immigration decrease]”
All these are long-term possibilities but they aren’t certain yet. Even the national average is decreasing, Pugetopolis is still seeing strong population growth (interstate movement, immigrants coming here), and it may take a decade or two before it levels off if it does. People have been saying every year since 2008 that the major population growth is behind us, but it still keeps happening, and if we hadn’t built all those tons of units in the mid-to-late 2010s and 2020s, we’d be a lot worse off, like San Jose is now. So keep up the housing growth until we see a definitive shift down for more than just 2-3 years. And we still have a major backlog to fill even if population growth ends immediately.
“the expected appropriate square footage for a family of four or even a single person is no longer increasing like it has in past decades”
I’m not so sure of that. It’s being driven by insane egos and a sense of entitlement that I should live like a medieval or Edwardian count or duke. That’s arbitrary and I don’t know what will break the fever.
Mike Orr,
There wasn’t any way to build enough housing back in 2010 given the number of jobs Seattle was adding. Zoning wasn’t the problem, it was a lack of labor to design and build enough units. Maybe not enough money floating around, but I doubt it. Back then I could work as many hours as I wanted, and most construction workers were at 50-60 hours a week…. for years.
One modern problem we have now is a crappy education system. In the past, say 1920, when a building boom hit, construction bosses went down to high school and hired 16 year old kids to go into the trades. Now we let inner city kids learn absolutely nothing in high school, get in trouble and do a stint in the Big House before joining the trades. It’s pretty common to hear guys say “I wish I would have started building houses younger and I would have left meth alone”
It’s easy for tech companies to create jobs. It’s really hard to build housing. That’s why Seattle is in the shape it’s in.
“I’d much rather see local governments focus on pursuing denser, home ownership strategies rather than much denser and taller corporate apartments owned by absentee entities”
When I say upzone I mean the full range of missing-middle housing to midrises. We can still have zoning tapering down at the edges of villages, but the “roof” over it should be wider and flatter in the outer half. The proliferation of so many 7-story, wide, boxy buildings is part of the regulation constraints we’re trying to fix. There’s not enough land allowing multifamily, so it all gets squeezed into 30% of the land (or less in suburbs), and large Wall Street-funded developers compete with small developers for the limited lots and out bid them — so they build maximum wide buildings with an emphasis on luxuries and the highest rents. But if a larger area were allowed, there would be more potential lots to go around, and smaller and more local developers could come in on the ones the big developers leave behind, and build smaller, less expensive buildings.
Another issue is parking minimums, setback regulations, FAR limits, etc. These encourage a bifurcation into large boxy absentee-owned buildings on one hand and low-density houses on the other — because those are the only formats that fit the regulations and get the minimally-viable number of units in.
Al S.
Thanks for the positive post. Greater Seattle really has made some amazing progress in the last 30 years!
Here’s something to think about with housing in 1950 to 2026. Back in 1950, we were building ranch style houses for a family of four that were 1200 square ft. That’s like 400 sq ft per person. I figured out my average sq. ft. of living space for my entire life and it averages out to about 450 sq ft., given roommates, living with Mrs. tacomee, my in-laws and kiddos. And I’m not complaining here…. I’m a rich guy! Owning a house made me able to provide space for family gatherings and gave my wife’s parents a place to spend their final days.
Forty percent of Seattle lives alone in apartments that average 700 sq ft each. Tearing down a family home to build 4 units for single occupants is the way Seattle is going and I get it. Things change. But there’s absolutely nothing wrong with living in a single family home either. To each their own I say!
“There wasn’t any way to build enough housing back in 2010 given the number of jobs Seattle was adding. Zoning wasn’t the problem, it was a lack of labor to design and build enough units”
WordPress swallowed by long reply, but to recap: the job growth rebounded in 2012, not 2010. I moved into my current apartment in 2010 and got a 10% rent discount because demand hadn’t recovered from the 2008 crash. Job growth started ramping up in 2012, apartment growth ramped up in 2013, and by 2014 both were in full swing.
So the issue wasn’t labor, it was demand. The labor ceiling was scraped in 2013-2017.
Even with the same number of laborers, regulation changes can affect what kinds of buildings they build where, and what formats developers choose to build. So even at the labor ceiling there’s still room to build better formats and more units than the space-wasters and less-walkable designs than they build under the previous regulations.
“Back in 1950, we were building ranch style houses for a family of four that were 1200 square ft”
Yes, I’ve been saying that too. Average house sizes were 900-1200 square feet in the 1950s and 1960s. Then they started creeping up to 1500, 2000, 3000, 4000 over the following decades. That’s part of the problem affecting both housing costs and walkability.
“It’s metro-specific. Chicago, Dallas, and Houston have been more relaxed about letting housing supply keep up with demand, so they haven’t had large spikes like the coastal cities have. “
Here’s a link to the National Association of Realtors data on single family housing costs:
https://www.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/2025-11/metro-home-prices-q3-2025-single-family-2025-11-06.pdf
Our market barely moved at 0.2% year over year recently. Some of the fastest increases are in small middle-American cities. Even the percentage increases within Washington State are higher in smaller metros. Chicago went up 4.2%, much greater than ours.
Certainly our metro is much more costly for housing overall. But housing prices in many areas of the country have been more steeply growing since 2022. Sadly, the salaries of their residents haven’t kept up.
Texas and Florida metros haven’t had that happen. But the anticipated population growth in those states greatly slowed from prior years per new Census estimates released last week:
https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/tables/2020-2025/state/totals/NST-EST2025-POP.xlsx
Texas went from an annual growth of over 600K new residents in 2022-2033 to under 400K growth in 2024-25. Florida dropped from over 400K to under 200K in those same years. The markets there probably overbuilt.
Curious that Washington state added 74K residents in 2024-2025, up from 52K residents in 2022-2023.
My guess is that most of these migrants have more money than the locals so it’s going to damn hard to find nice affordable housing if you’re not making a 100K a year.
Seattle built so much housing in the last 30 years…. and yet working class people can’t afford to live there
You constantly assert that Seattle is sooo expensive and that working class people cannot afford to live here, but this is just wrong. The high median rental price means that 50% of the rentals are below that price, and says nothing about the distribution. If you take a cursory look at available rentals, it will become abundantly clear that you can live modestly (i.e., in a studio or with a roommate) in the middle of the city with great transit access on literally minimum wage, or farther out in a larger apartment. When you factor in that most other places in a 500 mile radius require a car and add the minimum 1000-1600/mo car ownership cost plus the higher earning potential due to the higher minimum wage, it becomes clear that the financials are better than most nearby suburbs and really most places in the region. I know multiple people working minimum wage who can afford Capitol Hill, Belltown, and U District studios or 2 brs for under 1100/mo per person and people in very small apartments or larger houses in nearby neighborhoods paying under 900/mo who still have good transit access. Rents over the last 2-3 years have been flat. These are the fruits of a building boom that certainly relied on a tech boom, but which would have never happened without the right zoning. And yes, it would be great if many of these were condos instead of rentals like Al suggests.
I’m happy that moving to the ‘burbs and buying a house when the market wasn’t inflated by lack of supply has been good to you financially, but this advice is basically irrelevant in the current market for most people, it’s not the logic we should be building a livable city around, and it is not a position from which you are well equipped to post sage advice about the Seattle rental market.
June Foamer,
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about living cheap. I spent a few years living in student boarding houses in the U-District, was an apartment manager on East Pike and had a big garden and raised quail at my small house in Tacoma. I ride bikes I bought at garage sales and public transit for largely monetary reasons, at least in the beginning.
The biggest challenge Seattle has with housing is the folks that build houses, the construction industry, can’t afford housing in greater Seattle. Young carpenters can move to say, Round Rock, Texas and afford to buy a home, start a family, live the American Dream the way they want to. I would guess I might be the only person on this blog who has hung sheetrock or used a tile saw for living.
It’s possible to get by in Seattle or other coastal Liberal city on $40K to $50K, I don’t know if it’s possible to thrive on that long term. People buy homes in the Midwest for the same amount people pay in rent in Seattle. That means something at 60, believe me.
“the folks that build houses, the construction industry, can’t afford housing in greater Seattle.”
That’s the Henry Ford issue: the people who build the buildings in a city should be able to live in the city. The same with teachers, hospital workers, and supermarket clerks. If housing prices are out of whack with the incomes of the people needed to keep the city functioning, that’s a problem that should be fixed.
@tacomee
Where is $40-50k coming from? According to job postings, $40-50k ($20-25 an hour) is starting pay for construction jobs, meaning day laborer rates. Journeymen make closer to $80-100k ($40-50 an hour).
My general sense is that there is a lot of opportunity in construction. There was and still is, as you said, a shortage of skilled contractors. Look at the going rates for any kind of construction, the price of experienced labor is crazy anywhere near Seattle.
A small anecdote, I chatted a bit with the contractor that replaced the windows at my previous residence (some guy my landlord hired). He moved here in the early 2010s with no prior experience and now owns a home in Lynnwood, and it sounded like he has no trouble finding well-paying work.
How does one raise quail? Are they like chickens? Seems like they’d need more space to run around.
Round Rock, like the rest of Austin, is now West Coast expensive. Your carpenter probably needs to move to OKC or Provo.
AJ,
Quail are easier than chickens…. they’re really quiet and everybody loves the little speckled eggs…. especially sushi places if you care to sell them. The need an indoor space and an outdoor run… with a roof over it. Otherwise the hawks will get them!
Human Transit today has an article today describing draconian cuts coming to TriMet, over in Portland. Any thoughts about this? Is this coming for Seattle area transit next?
San Francisco and Vancouver had 70% bus cuts during the pandemic that we didn’t, because of differences in their funding structure and government and city economics. Recently Glenn mentioned the MAX Green line cut and I asked why, and he said something about TriMet’s specific funding situation.
I think a worst-case scenario for Metro would be a 20-25% cut. That would be like the 2014 cuts, particularly if all four phases had been implemented (rather than just the first two). I don’t see it worse than that. That would look like RapidRide C, D, E, and H reverting to 15 minutes daytime; routes like the 5 and 12 reverting to 30 minutes; and a couple routes like the 79 being deleted. But most of the routes would remain in place, although some would lose frequency. The 7 and 36 would probably keep their frequency because of high ridership and equity.
In 2014 if I remember, the NE 55th Street route (30) was reduced to peak-only and later deleted. The 79 is its equivalent now. I think the 22 was deleted, and something in southwest West Seattle truncated, so Arbor Heights lost all bus service, and lower California may have lost it too. (South of where the C turns to Fauntleroy.) There was a big restructure to minimize the losses, but that reform is still in place so it wouldn’t have to be done again now. The 27 at one point became peak-only and didn’t go west of 9th Avenue, but I don’t remember if that was in the 2014 cuts or in the pandemic.
Sound Transit could simply suspend some capital construction, and then it would have more than plenty of money to operate Link and ST Express at full service. The problem is, what’s the chance ST would suspend West Seattle Link that it’s so keen on?
TriMet is largely funded by payroll tax. With costs of goods and services rising much faster than private industry payroll, the usual developing Republican policy recession, and state government being at an impasse over transportation funding, TriMet needs to cut some $300 million from its budget. These will start in August.
Anyone hiring bus and light rail operators?
Metro.
https://kingcountymetro.blog/2026/01/14/now-hiring-king-county-metro-recruiting-part-time-transit-operators-as-bus-service-increases/
Is Sound Transit/Metro still suffering from a driver shortage? In the 2023 East Link restructure plan, they proposed running the 554 (truncated to Bellevue) every 10 minutes at peak. Now, ST proposes to run the 556 (truncated to Bellevue) every 15 minutes.
https://oohsteastlinkconnect.blob.core.windows.net/media/Default/maps_p3/en/central/554.pdf
I heard 15 minutes in the earlier proposals, but what I wrote in my February 2024 article was the same as in that chart.
It could be because the 545 is hogging so many hours. The earlier proposal replaced the 545 with a peak-only 544.
Let’s see how the 542 compares. The 2024 proposal had 10-15 minute peak and 15 minute midday. The current proposal is unchanged from the status quo, which is… 20 minutes peak, 30 minutes midday, approximately. So quite a difference.
Well, nobody wants to ride the 542 anyway when there’s the 545, I guess.
When I’ve taken the 542 or 545 westbound from Redmond Tech before the 226 extension, I sometimes took the 545 because it came first and more often. But after getting caught in 520 and I-5 congestion, which I hate, the next times I took the 542.
Why would somebody take Link to UW and take the chance that they might miss a 30-minute 542? They’d go to Westlake and take the 545, or take Link all the way around to Redmond, all because the 542 is so infrequent. So it makes it look like nobody wants the 542, when in fact they’re just deterred by its infrequency.
I agree, it is backwards. Just to put it in perspective:
Redmond Tech to UW Station:
542: 15 Minutes
Link: 43 Minutes
Redmond Tech to CID:
545: 29 Minutes
Link: 31 Minutes
Redmond Tech to Westlake:
545: 22 Minutes
Link: 36 Minutes
It you are going from Redmond to the UW, the bus saves an enormous amount of time. From Redmond to downtown the bus is faster, but not by nearly as much. Now imagine both buses are running every fifteen minutes. Depending on your destination, it makes sense to take the train to downtown just because it is more frequent and consistent. But it never makes sense to take the train to the UW. Thus if they run the 545 at all it should be designed for people who can time their trip. It should run every half hour. Otherwise those riders take Link; depending on their destination it would not cost them much time. In contrast, the 542 should run frequently as that is only reasonable way to get from Redmond to the UW (and places north). Running every half hour means some riders will be forced to wait almost a half hour for their bus.
[Feel free to correct my numbers. I assume a 19 minute travel time from Downtown Bellevue to CID. The rest if gathered from the schedules.]
Another wrench is that the 545 will likely be slower than scheduled until the I-5 construction completes. It really doesn’t make sense to run it at its existing frequency.
Won’t we be soon able to answer this with actual ridership data in a few weeks when Link opens across Lake Washington and the restructured bus routes begin to operate?
I’m thankful that there is redundant regional transit available. What path a rider chooses can be affected by many things from weather to walk times at the ends to the time of day to perceived ride quality to “congestion” in traffic or in trains/ buses to even what views a rider may be seeking.
“Won’t we be soon able to answer this with actual ridership data in a few weeks when Link opens across Lake Washington and the restructured bus routes begin to operate?”
We’ll know how people vote with their feet, and whether ridership on the 545 falls substantially. But that doesn’t directly affect what ST decides to do with the bus schedule. It makes its own decisions for its own reasons. Crosslake Link is set to start March 28. ST has already written the final ST Express proposal. It will reach a board vote sometime between March and June. That will give only a month or two of post-Link ridership data at most. The board will be reluctant to reject or modify the proposal, just like the County Council is reluctant to modify Metro’s final proposals. When it used to require modifications in the past, it was more to preserve one route to appease one activist group, which required cascading cuts to surrounding routes and improvements, rather than sensible across-the-board improvements the staff missed. So we don’t want that. The alternative is that public-feedback changes are more likely to be successful in the earlier rounds, or “primaries” to compare it to an election. But ST shut down that avenue by making it difficult to submit changes different from its, or on routes it didn’t propose changing. So that process didn’t work well either. So all that is leading to keeping the 545 at its current unusually-high frequency, and likely will no matter if ridership plummets when Link opens. But next year there will be another chance to see what ridership does overtime, and to try to get ST to make further changes if we want to then.
One thing we’re looking at is Federal Way. We have early Link ridership data and Metro bus data. We don’t have ST Express data yet.
The data shows surprisingly high Link ridership on weekdays, and some decrease on Metro routes. So we can indirectly guess that some A line riders may have defected to Link, but we’re not sure if that’s the reason for the decrease or if it’s just ordinary volatility. We don’t have ST Express’s numbers so we don’t know whether the 577 and 578 dropped or not. The 574 could be more mixed, since some people may have switched to Link, but others may be taking Link to Federal Way and transferring to the 574 to go further south. We don’t know.
So we may have underestimated Federal Way Link’s popularity, or there’s still a temporary first-month boost, or a significant number of people switched from STEX to Link, or more people are driving to the P&Rs and taking transit than they used to, but we don’t know yet.
December STX ridership data has been published. Weekday ridership on routes 577 and 578 is down 23% and 20% respectively (since Nov). Last year, ridership on these routes dropped 10% and 7% between Nov and Dec. Seems like Link is taking a small chunk of riders from both routes.
“One thing we’re looking at is Federal Way. We have early Link ridership data and Metro bus data. We don’t have ST Express data yet.”
December is such a weird month for ridership and FW Link opening is so recent that I wouldn’t conclude that there are anything more than general trends that can be observed. I think it will take at least through March to gather more extensive data on FW data — and by then crosslake opens meaning that that it could be good to wait until May data for more specific conclusions.
I also think there should be a massive transit rider origin-destination and trip purpose and mode of access survey across all agencies later in 2026 or in 2027. The transit landscape at a macro level will be different and riders will have adjusted by then. It can be overlaid against standard agency automated boarding counter data to see what is going on and what tweaks are needed. But it should include all the operators rather than just one to paint a complete picture. Let’s find out when, why and how riders across the entire region use a somewhat new transit system structure.
Finally, I’ll suggest that the region’s transit operators should implement a new round of targeted transit education and promotion later this year. Opening day celebrations are awesome — but residents should also get constant reminders about new service or service changes. Transit advocates get that a Link feeder bus may start running more often enough to be useful than the prior service, but many nearby residents should get often reminded of the new opportunities that now exist or they’ll be unaware of it.
I think this is fine. The 218 & 215 should overlay to provide frequency service on the Eastgate-Link trunk, which is primary source of demand on the 554. Bellevue Way is black hole for platform hours during rush hour, so I wouldn’t throw more frequency at the new 556.
Remember the Issaquah TC is a much smaller garage than the Eastgate or Highland P&Rs.
I agree that the 215/218 (with service to Mercer Island) will be the main connection to Link (for those along the I-90 corridor). But the new 556 is not about connecting to Link (even though it does). It is about connecting to Downtown Bellevue. Any loss of frequency is unfortunate. That being said, I would increase frequency on plenty of other buses before I ran the 556 every ten minutes.
Connecting whom to Downtown Bellevue?
The 226 also added pretty fast service from Eastlake TC to South Bellevue Station, alternating with another route that I guess was already there. That’s a slightly different clientele (people going to the P&R bus bays closer to the college, while the 554 serves the freeway station a bit away from it). But it’s part of the total Eastgate-Bellevue/Link ridership.
“Connecting whom to Downtown Bellevue?”
Issaquah. Currently the 556 is peak-only. The 554 is half-hourly and requires backtracking from Mercer Island. The 271 is as slow as molasses. The new 203 probably is too. This is extremely substandard for a regional satellite city connecting to the primary and job-rich Eastside city.
The proposed network will give 15-minute all-day express service from Issaquah to Bellevue TC and the significant destinations of Bellevue Square and the Old Bellevue area. And it will give 15-minute all-day expresses from the Issaquah Highlands to Mercer Island Link station. That’s a SIX TIMES increase of Issaquah off-peak express service, and NEW midday express service from Issaquah to downtown Bellevue.
“Bellevue Way is black hole for platform hours during rush hour, so I wouldn’t throw more frequency at the new 556. ”
The issue isn’t peak hours, it’s off-peak and weekend mobility. Currently it’s difficult to get from Issaquah to the rest of the region off-peak, and the only place you can efficiently go to is Seattle. Issaquah needs to be more tightly connected to the biggest city in the Eastside and to the Eastside in general. This restructure finally gives it that, twenty-five years after it should have started doing it.
Honestly, in all my time living in Issaquah I never tried to take transit to Bellevue off-peak, only to Seattle, so I didn’t realize the 556 was peak only, and when I lived on Bellevue Way I didn’t know anyone in Issaquah yet so I just used the 550.
in all my time living in Issaquah I never tried to take transit to Bellevue off-peak”
For one person that’s likely. But for an entire Eastside city of 40,000 people to not have good transit access to the Eastside is a glaring problem. It discourages people from taking transit because it doesn’t go to a logical place it should go, or they can’t make trips they want to because it would take unreasonably long to get there. We know some Issaquahites want to work and shop and recreate in Bellevue or Kirkland or Redmond because they say so, and they say they don’t want to go to Seattle as much for various reasons. They should have that option on transit.
Maybe by 2035 we can have a lightrail stop in Fremont/Wallingford/Stone Way, or at least a gondola that goes from Fremont to Cap Hill.
If I could magically add a feature to a light rail station…
I would install jumbo-sized reader boards at the cement track level (right below where the train parks) that is facing the bus bays. It would just show numbers for the next two departures (i.e. 3 13).
I know I can peer at my phone and get the real-time data that way, and I can wait until I’m near the base of the escalator and look at the listed departure info on the displays. But simply glancing up at jumbo numbers that are readable from the bus bay area would be much simpler.
As is it I’ve seen people rushing from the bays to catch the train that’s been sitting there for awhile even though they’ll never make it. And I’ve seen people not rush, assuming that train sitting there is about to depart (when in reality it sat there for several minutes). Give people info early on so they can make better decisions if they want to rush or not.
Whoops, I guess I failed to mention that I’m referring to the Lynnwood station!
The same thing is true about too many other stations!
At least Bellevue City Hall, for all its other problems, gets this point right: it’s got a big reader board at the corner of the pedestrian plaza by the top of the escalators.
By all promises and hopes for Lynnwood Transit Center, the next train is going to be there in 4 minutes anyway, so running wouldn’t be worth much. I do think a board listing all of the arrival times of lines that serve the bus bay at the bottom of the stairs/escalator would be extremely nice (especially for the folks who see only one show up every 30-60 minutes).
Probably best to position so it wouldn’t be visible until we’re all the way down the stairs – lets the William Tell Overture sound off with feet on level ground.
I see more of a need to tell riders about bus connections when they leave the train more so than when the next train arrives. Missing a train means (worst case) waiting another 8-10 minutes most hours of the day and evening — and just 4-5 minutes from DSTT to Lynnwood. But missing a bus can really inconvenience a rider! Also, there are trips that can be completed by using 2 or even 3 routes so a transferring rider wants to choose the earliest bus leaving.