Walking the London Underground District Line from end to end. (Let’s Walk!)

Seattle’s annual Jane’s Walk is still going on. The last one is Tuesday at 10am, “Downtown South”. I don’t know if the registrations are full yet.

This is an open thread.

62 Replies to “Sunday Movie: District Line Walk”

  1. Surrey Langley Skytrain Construction – April 2026.

    It’s a 10 mile, 8 station, fully elevated extension, costing $4.4B USD. Construction started in late 2024, and is expected to be completed in late 2029.

    https://youtu.be/E9MZDqxwy5k

    1. So why can BC build high quality rail to every suburb, for way cheaper than ST? Langley and Surrey has a lot of people but it’s certainly not “dense” – plenty of single family homes.

      Meanwhile a bunch of people on here think it costs $10-20B to build rail along I-405 and that it’s not worth building. Who cares about Issaquah, Tacoma, and Everett? They’re dreaded suburbs! Even though hundreds of thousands of people live there. Instead we need a gondola to Bellevue College.

      1. “ So why can BC build high quality rail to every suburb, for way cheaper than ST?”

        First answer. No subway segments!

        Second answer. Frequent automated trains mean smaller station footprints.

        Third answer. No adjacent property owner obsession with perceived negatives like aesthetics and noise.

        I’m sure there are other factors too. Canada seems better at cost containment.

      2. “So why can BC build high quality rail to every suburb, for way cheaper than ST?”

        Because they have Canadian regulations and labor relations, their governments prioritize transit quality and don’t saddle it with non-transit burdens.

        1. I wish we had SkyTrain instead of ST. We should scrap Link entirely and replace it with a faster version of SkyTrain. Reuse existing tracks and stations for existing lines.

          The smaller stations, fully elevated, and automated high frequency are just amazing features.

          Link is just terrible. Trains sometimes run late. Some stations are poorly laid out and wastes a lot of time.

          On top of being incompetent, it’s just poorly engineered. The floating bridge is a marvel but everything else is not. Some of the screw ups are extremely confusing.

          With the same money, we’d probably have built 10 lines by now if we followed Sky Train’s model.

        2. If you hadn’t noticed, most of us support building Ballard as an automated “Light Metro” very like Skytrain. So enough with the “come to Jesus” prattling.

          Before you post ONE MORE COMMENT whining about people’s objections to suburban Link, drive to Blaine, take the last exit into town, and drive to the end of the Blaine Marina.

          Then gaze north across Blaine Bay at “suburban” Whiterock and you will see clearly why BC can build successful, well-used rail transit, and the Sound Transit service area cannot.

          Hint: it’s those two dozen high rises decorating the hill, instead of the sanitized, cul-de-sac riddled sprawl that you ‘Burbistas spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to inhabit.

          Langley and Surrey have similar clusters throughout their urbanized areas.

        3. It’s not just regulations.

          An awful lot of the expense has to do with the American concept of privatization: supposedly, private enterprise can do stuff cheaper, so a lot of stuff goes through private companies that could be done cheaper in house.

          A simple example: a certain transit agency back east routinely puts things like hardware (screws, washers, etc out to bid, with McMaster-Carr part numbers, with the stipulation that substitutes would have to go through an approvals process. They could just buy the stuff from McMaster-Carr directly, since that’s the part number they’re requiring. Instead, they put it out to bid with all the cumbersome paperwork that involves, meaning a $5.50 box of screws probably costs them at least 100 times this, because they’re required to go through private enterprise to “save money.”

          This is just a simple example of the nonsense that can go on. More complicated problems on larger projects develop similar price increases when certain expertise is required, but that expertise must be hired from the outside rather than have technical staff that can help figure things out.

        4. Why do the urbanists on here have to be so disingenuous?

          White Rock got that skyline AFTER getting transit. If a society is car dependent, why would they build mass housing and skyscrapers?

          Even other cities in BC are built that way because they actually get a bus to their neighborhood, unlike over here where major cities only get a single all day bus route to/from the city.

          By giving Link to a highly populated corridor, it will naturally become dense over time if that’s within the interests of the people and government here (which it is of the people, though not sure of the elect). That’s what TDD is.

          If we didn’t miss out on Forward Thrust, many of our cities would look completely different.

        5. Langley to Vancouver is a 90 min transit ride (currently), versus a 75 minute car ride during rush hour.

          That’s a very acceptable gap in commute time considering you don’t have to park and deal with driving.

          But over here, what is a 45 min drive in extreme traffic can 90 minutes or longer even using an “express bus” – and if you have to use a local bus and transfer… Good luck.

          So naturally development comes up because of the ability to use transit.

      3. How much did Federal Way Link and Lynnwood Link cost, and how many miles were they? That’s the closest comparison.

        1. Not much. $2-3B for 7-8 miles. But 10-15 miles of I-405 rail will cost $30B for sure.

        2. Adding a single lane on I-405 across 15 miles is costing us $700M and extra litigation costs/delays due to contractor issues.

          And yeah we’re not going to see any traffic improvements at all because of that. Stride will be nice but it’s not the best regional connection we could’ve delivered.

      4. Non-transit burdens imposed on Link:

        – Dogged insistence on conventional light rail mode, rather than considering whether automated trains, faster trains, express buses, gondolas, etc, might be more effective and cost-effective in a particular segment.

        – Starting backward: Link was predicated on the Everett/Tacoma Spine (60 miles). Skytrain was predicated on Vancouver-Scott Road, and later they decided to extend it to central Surrey (King George) when that new town was built, and later to Langley. Those weren’t part of the original vision or mandate. The total Vancouver-Langley distance is 30 miles, or half the Spine, and only half of that can be considered the original vision. A comparison would be if ST1 and 2 had Link only CID-Northgate.

        – Cities saddle Link with “Christmas tree” demands as a condition of permitting, and NIMBYs saddle it with EIS “environmental mitigation” demands.

        – Cities force alignments and station locations that don’t maximize ridership: stations an excessive distance away from transfers or destinations.

        – The federal “Buy America” rule excludes state-of-the-art and lowest-cost vehicle models, because companies won’t set up US factories for most of their products when the total US transit market is so small and intermittent. Agencies can get a waiver for things not available in the US, but are reluctant to apply for it.

        – Healthcare costs show up as employer/salary costs rather than general taxes, and an unwillingness to fix runaway billing practices between providers, insurance companies, and drug companies. This is a major burden on US local governments and companies, and it shows up as higher prices.

        – Unwillingness to even look at what works well in non-English speaking countries and replicate it.

        – Technical issues. I’m sure there are some other issues that only an engineer or transit-industry person would understand.

      5. It helps that BC has been building skytrain pretty consistently for 40 years.
        Also worth mentioning that Fraser highway was widened a few year ago to prepare for the SLS guideway. That cost isn’t included in the price tag even though it was necessary.
        Finally it may look like sunshine and rainbows compared to ST but this project had a 50% price jump and 1 year delay already. BC is having financial troubles in general.

      6. Car ownership is way, way lower in Canada and as a result, there are far more potential suburban transit riders in Canadian suburbs than there are in American ones. Surrey has 0.66 cars per capita, while Langley has 0.78 (source: https://metrovancouver.org/services/regional-planning/metro-2050-performance-monitoring/goal-5/travel-mode-choices/car-ownership). Meanwhile, Seattle has about 1.27 while Bellevue has 1.61 and Lynnwood has 1.69. South King cities like Kent and Federal Way are north of 1.8, and I’m sure you could find suburbs well over 2. (Derived from: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDT1Y2024.B08201). The least car-dependent part of the Seattle region – Seattle proper – has 30% more cars per capita than the most car-dependent part of Metro Vancouver (White Rock at 0.97). At least part of the reason Canada builds things like a SkyTrain extension to Langley is that it will be very well ridden, because there already are transit riders there.

        Within the context of our current political structures, rail along I-405 is an awful idea if our goal is high ridership. That’s not the only worth goal, but I’m not really convinced we should do rail transit for coverage (or even for regional express) purposes outside of certain contexts, which I imagine is not a controversial opinion. There is almost no price low enough to justify rail on I-405, given that other corridors exist too and those theoretically lower prices could be applied there too. Yes, we could do a bunch of normal cost saving things everyone else does, but then why confine that to just I-405?

        1. …? You’re making a reverse correlation.

          People have to own more cars unless there is a reliable transit alternative.

          At the moment, Vancouver area has better transit and therefore people don’t need to buy a car.

          It’s the opposite here. If you don’t have transit you have to own a car.

        2. Why I-405? It’s the most congested corridor. Even if the density along that route is low, there is a high rate of flow between two points filling in from other regions that needs to be relaxed. It’s almost as important as I-5 service… Which is still very lacking except for the 1 Line and a few express buses to Tacoma.

          That’s why Stride is being built, but a train offers higher capacities, more station possibilities, and reliability than a bus would ever offer.

          If the NIMBYs don’t get to block it, new development possibilities along the freeway are very possible… Closer to the lake.

        4. Having lived in New York City, and also in other countries, I’m pretty sure New York City is way more car-brained than anywhere outside the US. Most residents don’t have a car… but most voters and most elected officials do have a car.

        6. Ian, I think you’ll find the census block level maps in the below link more insightful. The densest parts of Queens (Long Island City, etc.) are very urban, but the majority of the borough by land area has a drive-alone ration >0.5. In that sense most of Queens is not much different than West Seattle south of the Junction or most of Seattle north of 50th – dense but still low-rise landuse where car is almost always the easiest way to travel unless the trip is into the urban core.

          https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/03/06/land-use-around-the-interborough-express/

        7. “Is American car brain that much stronger?

          Ya think?
          It’s so ingrained in the American psyche that it not only affects all legislative thinking, it pervades the thinking of transit supporters, even those here on the STB.

          Build No Rail Before Its Time

          As if major cities with robust rail transit had the density first, then the trains.

          That’s not the way the established cities got built.

          Having rail systems in place first mitigated the need for massive expansion of highways in the urban areas.

          Even the suburban towns and villages grew with walkable centers.

        8. SKR,

          Car ownership is much more culturally ingrained in the US. There’s a comment below highlighting that Metro Vancouver suburbs have lower car ownership rates than parts of NYC served by the subway. It’s not as simple as “transit good, so no car”. Transit is great in Seattle, but people still choose to have a car for lifestyle reasons. That’s way less common in Canada, and if you don’t own a car you ride transit a whole lot more. But some of this isn’t strictly causal one way or the other – they influence each other.

          Rapid transit along a high-flow, low-density corridor is extremely difficult to do well in the US. And there’s a very high opportunity cost for any project in Greater Seattle, since we lack the scale of urban rail service that you’d find overseas (or even in Canada). I-405 is just a low priority for rail relative to other corridors.

          And building rapid transit because of potential future development potential is almost always misguided. We should serve existing nodes first along corridors with good bones before doing speculative projects that require some 25 year master plan to sniff respectable ridership numbers.

        9. Owning cars doesn’t have much to do with taking transit…?

          Some people have 4-6 people in their family. That’s why they own multiple cars. It’s not because they aren’t willing to take transit for going to work, school, bars, games and other events.

          The reason people don’t ride transit because it’s slower and inconvenient in every regard. Even in Seattle. They live in Seattle but work outside the city. The only people who can save time with our current transit is people who live inside Seattle and work inside Seattle.

          But if we actually had all day express connections, there’d actually be a reason to take transit. Whatever happened to the X routes from Metro? The priority doesn’t seem to be efficiency for the average rider anymore. It’s catering to foamers who don’t have a job and ride on a bus 3 hours a day to get Starbucks, and low income who need to take a 30 min bus ride down the street to grab groceries. A lucky few especially from the Eastside can actually use buses effectively into Seattle and the various colleges in the area… Unlike other parts of the region. Yes, the Eastside is closer but not always. Issaquah is clearly politically favored despite not proving to be less valuable than most cities around here.

        10. And what other corridors exist outside of Seattle that we should prioritize that is not being built under ST3? Genuinely curious. Ross said nothing though clearly that’s a wrong answer when we still require more high capacity connections in the Eastside.

          I-405 rail is the logical next step for Sound Transit.

          Again Seattle can always establish their own local subway/light rail fund if they want to accelerate their corridors, but ST is strictly regional. There are projects required in every subarea. The logical project for the East subarea in ST4, which there should be, is I-405 Rail.

          Lynnwood, Bothell (3 stops including UW/Cascadia and freeway stop), Totem Lake, Kirkland, S Kirkland, –follow 2/4 Line–, S Bellevue, Newcastle, Southport, Landing, Renton TC, Tukwila Station, Southcenter, TIBS, SeaTac

          You can now travel between any major location on rail / express bus, with easy transfers, in maximum 2 trips followed by any local travel using the local bus/light rail system.

          Examples of trips that are currently very challenging that would be significantly easier and traffic free:
          ——
          SeaTac to Issaquah
          Kent to Eastgate
          Woodinville to Renton
          Federal Way to Kirkland
          Southcenter to Redmond
          Tacoma to Bellevue
          Rainier Beach to Bothell
          Whidbey Island to Spring District
          Everett to Totem Lake
          …and list goes on

          It pretty much unlocks the freedom to travel around the region efficiently. Also the airport is significantly more accessible to the Eastside with this line.

          No other line would achieve this. Bellevue and the Eastside is increasingly becoming a more valuable jobs center and entertainment than Seattle, so it is imperative to provide adequate transit to it from the north and south.

        11. @SKR

          I don’t think there’s any line outside of Seattle that would be worth putting in rail. Stride South should get prioritized for an upgrade, with a connection to Southcenter and better connections to Renton. Replacing that with Link would take multiple decades at the very best, even if prioritized, while adding a few extra stops could be done in 5-10 years.

          Vancouver doesn’t have freeways that feed into downtown, so transit is relatively much faster than in Seattle. In the middle of the night, it takes about 30-40 minutes to drive from Surrey to downtown Vancouver. It takes about 18-22 minutes to drive from KDM to downtown Seattle. Those trips are both around 15 miles. That is why express buses are so much better in Seattle than in Vancouver.

        12. Tacoma to Bellevue? I go to Bellevue every decade or so, sure, but I don’t think I would take the train. I know nobody in Tacoma who works in Bellevue. I know nothing in Bellevue I would like to visit. We have our own mall, such as it is. And I don’t go to that much either.

          I go to Seattle multiple times per month.

          I think you are vastly over-stating Bellevue’s importance to people who don’t live there or are a techbro who is quirky enough to want to live in Seattle and work on the East side. And not telecommute.

          It will be interesting to see the 2 line numbers to see if a bunch of people see the Eastside as a destination. Maybe I’m missing out.

        13. To be clear, rail is slower than express buses on the freeway. Once Tacoma Dome station is complete, it will take noticeably longer to take Link to Westlake (70-75 minutes) versus the 59X buses in peak traffic (55-60 minutes). Off-peak the gap rises even further, since the buses take 50-55 minutes.

          This is going to be worse than driving in pretty much all cases, since the vast majority of riders will have to first drive to Tacoma Dome and park.

          And this is with no freeway upgrades. If I-5 was upgraded with a Stride-like treatment, the bus travel times would drop even further.

        14. SKR,

          Owning a car makes someone significantly less likely to use public transit – here’s a table from the census showing that: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2024.S0802?q=S0802:+Means+of+Transportation+to+Work+by+Selected+Characteristics&g=310XX00US42660. In the Seattle MSA, transit commuters are 5x more likely to be no car households than the baseline. A family of 4+ that owns two cars does so because both parents use cars to commute, and while poor transit is often part of that, it’s really not the only reason people drive to work. I know plenty of coworkers who drive to work from Seattle (or Bellevue) despite having transit options that are essentially time competitive, and my office is downtown.

          And express routes are almost always less efficient for riders not seeking a specific (likely downtown-oriented) commute. There are exceedingly few corridors where there is more demand for longer trips than shorter ones, and I think Metro does a good job of providing certain types of all-day expresses (like to West Seattle), but most of that is provided by ST Express anyways.

          I agree with Ross. We shouldn’t build projects just because, and I don’t see evidence that I-405 would support a rail line on ridership. We will see how that changes once Stride opens, but the 560 gets a little over 1,000 daily riders on 66 buses per day. That’s the ridership and service equivalent to the 33. The 535 does better – 1,500 riders on 64 buses per day, but that’s still 168 levels of ridership and service. Obviously I-405 is a more important corridor than either Seattle – East Magnolia or Kent – Maple Valley, and more service would lead to more ridership, but I think we would be delusional to build rail on a corridor that doesn’t already have great bus service. Once Stride is done, maybe that will change things, but until then it’s just not responsible transit planning. There is one (1) place worth serving on I-405 between Renton and Downtown Bellevue – a stretch of 8.5 miles.

          Here’s my rule of thumb: if a proposed rail line gets lower ridership than the Metro Route 50 in absolute (~3k riders per day) or per-mile (~230 riders per mile) terms, it’s not worth building right now. If there are no corridors on the east side that meet this, then we shouldn’t build rail lines just to build rail lines. Some better corridors than I-405 by these metrics: Kirkland/Redmond (Route 250) and Issaquah/Seattle (Route 554). That’s not to say I’d prefer those, it’s just that maybe suburban areas are structurally better served by buses than by trains.

    2. Even if Skytrain built a Link a style light rail with tunnel, it would still be much cheaper than ST did.

  2. I was in London last week and rode some of the transit. Since the video is about London ill share some thoughts of my experience:

    Their transit is expensive. Elizabeth line is great but it’s 17.50 USD from Heathrow Airport to downtown. There is a cheaper, slower alternative (Piccadilly line). The tube is still notably more expensive than ST.

    Even though they use double decker buses in the city i didn’t notice any longer dwell times compared to articulated buses.

    A lot of their tube lines are really deep. A few stations have warnings when you try to use a staircase vs the elevator telling you it’s x number of stairs to get down. One case was 290 stairs. The consequence is that it’s common for it to be faster to walk the distance of 2 stops than take the tube even if the tube is going exactly where you want to go.

    The tube isn’t as extensive as i would expect for London. In the downtown core a lot of the times the fastest option was still some bus route. I didn’t have this problem at all in NYC for a comparison.

    The tube trains are of course cramped compared to link trains, although the forward facing seats on link make it feel just as cramped when standing in those areas. Every serious transit city I’ve been to recently (Tokyo, NYC, London) have exclusively sideways seating from what I’ve noticed.

    1. I also rode the national rail up to Cumbria and was shocked at how cramped the seats were. I couldn’t fit my carry on sized suitcase in the overhead luggage rack and my shoulders were wider than my seat. Im on a flight right now in economy and the seats are wider than the train. Amtrak is obviously much more spacious but even Shinkansen in Japan and Ave in Spain were notably more spacious.

      Besides that the train was just better than our amtrak. Even though they are building HS2 the leg between london and Birmingham is already 125mph which feels pretty fast. If we got cascades to that speed that would be huge.

    2. It is not uncommon for service to airport to have a surcharge.

      PANYNJ’s AirTrain AirTrain charges half price as you spent on Elizebeth Line by just sending you to nearby train station.

      Traveling in a group of three from SFO to DTSF can be cheaper on uber than on BART sometimes.

      2. And for the express or higher-speed option to have a surcharge. I’ve always flown to Gatwick. Gatwick has the Gatwick Express train to Victoria Station. It’s also on the regular train between Victoria and Brighton. I always took the regular train because it was less expensive and had only one or two more stops between the airport and Victoria. But the last time I was coming back I took the Gatwick Express because the crowd at the regular ticket machines was so long I was afraid I might miss my flight or I had a short amount of time anyway.

        1. I normally use Heathrow mainly because of the non-stops, although if I do end up at Gatwick the Gatwick express is the way to go. If you’re using Heathrow the Heathrow Express to Paddington beats the Elizabeth Line, to say nothing of the Tube which takes 3x longer. If you buy far enough in advance it’s around £10, which is cheaper than the Elizabeth Line (last minute/at the airport is quite expensive). Of course your decision will also depend on where else you’re going, but both Victoria on the Gatwick Express and Paddington on the Heathrow Express are centrally located and well-served by the Tube and buses.

          As you note, the higher speed/express options in most cities do have a surcharge, at least in my experience – Milan, Johannesburg, Stockholm, Seoul, Kuala Lumpur, yadda yadda yadda. In Copenhagen the automated Metro (the one we can’t figure out how to duplicate here) is so quick and convenient that although it’s marginally slower than the regular rail lines – which are frequent as well – I’ve only used the regular service if I am traveling onward by rail or have a rail pass. On the flip side, Bologna charges around $15 for a two-stop, 7 minute monorail (yes, really!) to the central train station that is infrequent enough except at peak that there are sometimes lines in the terminal for it. Unfortunately, despite Bologna being where rail services to basically all points in Italy meet, there is no other rail service to the airport and local buses are crowded.

          The Johannesburg airport train was interesting as it’s quite nice and part of their 50km “high speed” urban rail line (which is actually faster than Cascades), but fares to use it were 4 or 5x the standard fare from neighboring stations. They do this by having car(s) that are the only ones that open at the airport.

          In a perfect world it would be great for our own passenger rail service to be a) much better/more frequent, and b) serve SeaTac directly – but the expense of that would be enormous.

        1. Ian,

          Not sure about the international perspective, but it’s a decidedly mixed bag for US airports. Of the ones I’ve personally traveled to:

          – ORD: “surcharge” of $2.50, but that doesn’t apply if you buy a $5 day pass, so it’s trivial to get around if you’re riding transit anyways.
          – DEN: $10 for an airport day pass vs. $5.50 for a regular one so $4.50 surcharge
          – MKE: no surcharge (bus only)
          – MSP: no surcharge
          – MSN: no surcharge (bus only)
          – PHL: 4 zone fare on regional rail, no surcharge on buses
          – IAD/DCA: no surcharge
          -OAK: $7.95 surcharge
          -SFO: $5.85 surcharge (BART has weird fare tables)
          -LAX: no surcharge
          -PDX: no surcharge
          -SAN: no surcharge (bus only)

          Of all these, I like O’Hare’s approach the best. Charge a full day pass cost for a one way fare at the airport. That way, travelers are encouraged to use transit first (since they already bought a pass), and it doesn’t punish airport workers or other regular riders too much.

        2. Is Seattle also unique in that the airport is not a terminus? In DC (both airport) the line extends beyond the airport station, which perhaps is why they also don’t charge a surcharge.

        3. I’m pretty sure that there are also no airport surcharges for rail systems in Salt Lake City (#23 of busiest US airports), St Louis (#35), Atlanta (#1), Boston (#16), Miami (#8) or DFW (#2).

        4. AJ,

          The airport is not the terminus for the Twin Cities, Phoenix, or LA. And depending on how you account for things like the OAK people mover, there are others too. If an agency has a fare structure more complex than a flat fare, implementing an airport surcharge should be easy regardless of where it is on the network.

        5. Here’s tidbits about the BART SFO surcharge:

          1. One objective of the surcharge was to keep dropoffs and pickups for BART from adding to airport’s dropoff/ pickup traffic since it’s right off of US 101. Their data says that it works because 0% of the riders are coming from a local home.

          https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/2024%20Ridership%20by%20Station.xlsx

          Dropoffs at nearby Millbrae are 16% and San Bruno at 20%.

          https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2025-12/Profile_OnePagers_121525.pdf

          Note: ST does not publish an arrival mode survey like this. I wish that they did.

          2. Airport employees at both SFO and OAK can get a subsidy in their transit passes to compensate for the surcharge.

          https://aedp.bart.gov/

        6. SeaTac station is unusual because it’s not an airport-only station: it also serves the city SeaTac. BART charges a surcharge if you enter/exit at the airport and don’t have a special employee’s pass. BART also has distance-based fares and tapoff, which make the surcharge viable both directions. You can see the difference in fares on the list: Millbrae-Berkeley is a normal fare, while SFO-Berkeley is higher than fares going a significantly longer distance.

          New York’s Howard Beach station has like a common core room with exits on different sides to the regular subway vs to the AirTrain to JFK, and you pay significantly more for a combined trip or pass.

          SeaTac station also has a common core room, but its usage its more complicated. The west side goes to the airport walkway. The south side goes up to the Link platform. The east side goes to the ped bridge across International Blvd to the bus stops and pedestrian exit. In a Howard Beach system you’d install fare gates at the airport exit with a surcharge. But then people going from the airport to buses or the sidewalk would have to pay several dollars to just reach the sidewalk door, and that wouldn’t fly. ST also abolished tapout, so it would have to reinstate that for the airport.

        8. The BART airport surcharge is demanded by the airport to rake in more profits. SeaTac isn’t demanding this; it just sees Link as a secondary way people travel to the airport, alongside taxis, shuttles, and cars. So if ST is to charge an airport surcharge, what problem are we trying to solve? To fleece flyers who are presumed to be higher-income? They’re already paying hotel/restaurant taxes aimed primarily at visitors (but paid by everybody who stays in a hotel or goes to a restaurant).

        9. @ Mike Orr
          “The BART airport surcharge is demanded by the airport to rake in more profits.”

          At a very, very early scoping meeting for Link, a Port of Seattle rep said basically the same thing- “The parking garage is our cash cow.”

          Although there are those who lament the long (it’s not really that long) walk, I’m happy the City of SeaTac insisted on the location. It should serve the city. Besides, us old people need to do a lot more walking!

        10. “The BART airport surcharge is demanded by the airport to rake in more profits.”

          The setting was a much more complex logic. It’s not done to “rake in profits” but is instead a complex political solution.

          The base issue is that San Mateo County is not part of the BART district, meaning that they don’t pay BART taxes. So extending BART involved more than a good idea. It was and is instead a sensitive challenge about what’s fair to different taxpayers.

          SFO is an odd beast in that it is owned by the City of San Francisco but sits entirely in San Mateo County. So they don’t pay taxes into BART.

          The first extension plan was to use the vault built for BART that ran north’s-south under the garage. The problem became that the runway and apron concrete and marshy soil meant that tunneling to the vault was not viable.

          The next plan was to place the SFO stop west of US 101 and use the airport peoplemover to connect to SFO. That was found to be too inconvenient for travelers — culminating in a City referendum to require that BART have a station inside the terminal complex (note this vote was SF City only as the owner of SFO).

          So the resulting alternative was to build the stub station that eventually was what was built.

          The extra costs of the stub configuration combined with the intention of serving SFO riders that were mostly not San Mateo residents meant that that part of the BART capital cost had to be funded another way politically or the station for SFO would not be included in the project.

          SFO charged rent to airlines. They charged taxis surcharges already — and taxi companies felt that it would be unfair for taxis to continue to pay a surcharge while their “competitor” BART got access for free. .

          The funding solution was an agreement to pay for the stub station and approaches with the rider surcharge that exists today. The official logic was that BART would pay “rent” to SFO like an airline to be in the terminal and would recover it with the surcharge.

          It’s not talked about much, but the surcharge ended up more awash than intended for BART. The higher fares meant that the eventual SFO station activity was markedly lower than the forecasts since the opening year. Of course, the politics behind the surcharge still exist and the fragile deal to get BART to SFO remains in place.

  3. The first 2 Line outage on the East Channel Bridge. A train lost power Monday morning at 9:18am and got stuck on the bridge for 45 minutes. Passengers remained in the stopped train. ST was still researching the cause as of Monday afternoon: there was no visible damage to the infrastructure, and the crosslake segment has more electric substations and switches than the rest of Link to minimize outages.

    1. Jan and Feb Link ridership numbers are out finally:
      https://www.soundtransit.org/ride-with-us/system-performance-tracker/ridership

      Looks like FWLE and Seahawks parade gave a nice boost.

      I think we might’ve already overtaken BART in ridership since ELE opened. In Feb we had 88% of the ridership BART had (4mil vs 4.5mil)
      https://www.bart.gov/sites/default/files/2026-03/202602%20Monthly%20Ridership%20Snapshot.pdf

      Looking forward to seeing March and especially April ridership.

      2. Sorry I’m an idiot i was comparing ST ridership (including buses and sounder) to BART, not apples to apples. Link ridership was at 3mil (75% of BART)

      3. The ST data for March and April will be interesting. It will show the impact of sudden fuel price increases due to the Iran conflict as well as the crosslake opening.

      4. It looks like half of the FWLE ridership shifted from Angle Lake (with a few from TIBS) and the other half appear new (maybe shifted from STX or Sounder but it’s not very pronounced as far as I can tell).

    1. You’d have to ask ST. It’s partly because construction pauses when there are major events or significant I-5 maintenance or Link reductions, and those have to be made up at the end of the schedule.

    2. Reading a little closer, the target date is earlier: September 24. Still, it appears to have some undisclosed delay issues going on.

      1. Al, you should read the progress reports over the last several months. They’ve all said that the contractor was behind schedule and ST was working with them to establish a new schedule. Hardly undisclosed.

        It seems ST has accepted a new schedule from the contractor, and the forecast revenue service date is now October 31, 2026.

        Edit: OK, the February report had the new target date and the forecasted date was August 10, 2026. So float has decreased since February. That’s why float exists, and why ST hasn’t announced a formal opening date. The point is that the items under Risk Management are all items which have already caused delays and may continue to cause delays. These are clearly identified.

  6. One thing I’ve noticed living in Seattle is how intitled city dwellers are. They move to a high-density area with people stacked on each other than complain about high density problems. they are willing to give up retirement savings, education savings for their kids for the “convenience” of not having to have too difficult of a time going three to four blocks. They also gaslight concerning cars as if cars were a new mode of intruding transportation. Bikes, scooters, and ev bikes should be at the same level as cars in priority when in reality cars have been the main mode of transport for decades.

    1. Compare this to the entitlement of the suburbanites who demand to store their rolling living rooms wherever they like for as long as they like.

      1. That’s why we’re asking for basic regional transit and buses. But they’re too expensive and low ridership apparently 😁 Seattle only has 600k of the millions of people who live in the Metro area.

        Only a couple billion to build high speed fast long distance rail and electric bus networks compared to $20B for a single tunnel in downtown.

        1. It’s the suburban representatives who are demanding DSTT2, not Seattle.

          You should check your numbers on population and project costs. You don’t need to distort them to make your point, and getting them wrong weakens your argument.

Comments are closed.