Local News:
- Wilson Proposes Doubling Transit Measure to Beef Up Seattle’s Frequent Network (The Urbanist). Also on the SDOT Blog.
- Tap into Seattle summer: ORCA releases limited-time promotional 3-day pass (Metro Matters). This pass has been in the works since last year.
- Kitsap Transit is piloting a new fare-free shuttle in downtown Bainbridge starting June 13 (KT Headways).
- Behind the Scenes of the Limited-Edition SEA26 ORCA Card (Metro Matters).
- Sound Transit Board OKs Major ST3 Update, Casting Ballard into Limbo (The Urbanist); also on PubliCola.
- Supporting an electric future: University Bridge Trolley Pole Replacement Project (Metro Matters).
- Bellevue Set to Expand ‘Supercharger’ Building Incentive Program to More Neighborhoods (The Urbanist).
- U District event canceled, but some businesses deny having been opposed to the two-day “block party” scheduled for last weekend despite signing a petition to cancel it (The Seattle Times, $; free via SPL).
- Coal Creek Trail reveals hidden history of Eastside’s mining towns (The Seattle Times, $; free via SPL).
- What’s next for Federal Way theme park Wild Waves? (The Seattle Times, $).
Further Afield:
- Mamdani Advances a Bus Lane Plan That the Trump Administration Blocked (The New York Times, gift link)
- Don’t just build smaller houses, get people to like them (The Seattle Times, $).
- Interstate 5 Bridge funding plan leaves light rail future uncertain (The Oregonian).
- Quick Note: Cars and Suburbs Commoditize Location (Pedestrian Observation).
- Does Your City Need a ‘Department of Sidewalks’? (Streetsblog USA).
- The capital of Kazakhstan, Astana, opened an automated light rail metro system last month (Urban Transport Magazine).
This is an Open Thread. Uncivil comments will be moderated.
Ah yes, more regressive sales taxes. Just what the people love. How about cutting waste instead?
What waste is that?
So people don’t care about transit at all and don’t need it? The only issue is sales taxes, and the money goes to nothing?
How do you know there is waste? Much less enough waste to raise the same amount for transit? People like to throw the word waste around without any evidence, or they point to something they call wasteful but it is needed.
Well, 80% of the people loved the 2020 Seattle transit measure, which is about as much agreement as close to unanimous as anything will get in a city of 800k people.
Oh great, are we really turning this reply into a really long thread with a bunch of yap?
I debated whether to delete the thread as a non-specific ad hom against sales taxes and alleged waste, but perhaps it’s important to address this head-on sometimes. We’ve got a federal adminstration that’s arbitrarily cutting programs over nonexistent or overexaggerated “waste, fraud, and abuse”, while similtaneously expanding other programs in a wasteful, fraudulent, corrupt, and unconstitutional way. So the whole issue of alleged waste is becoming a more critical issue, and it needs to be refuted head-on sometimes so it doesn’t grow as quickly.
I’ve been reading that Americans have an expansive view of “corruption” and “waste” as inclusive of policies that they don’t support. As in, someone may view military support or someone may view “housing first” policies as waste and corruption.
That’s not to say that waste or corruption in the more literal sense doesn’t happen (it certainly does) but I think it helps explain some of the rhetoric surrounding government spending.
Looking for waste shouldn’t be refuted or denied, it should be welcomed, and be a continual process within all levels of government.
Of course government should continually look for real waste and fix it. The issue is preventing false allegations of waste or baseless assertions that “every sales tax is wasteful” or “government is 100% waste” from undermining needed services. If we don’t do that, government will become worse and society will shoot itself in the foot.
I have enjoyed reading and viewing Seattle Now & Then and HistoryLink so much over the years, that I want to mention the passing last week of the founder/co-founder of each, Paul Dorpat. As the Seattle Now & Then website puts it, “Seattle’s leading public historian has officially joined his city’s past.” Here’s a YouTube video featuring Mr. Dorpat explaining the history of 5th and Mercer area (Gates Foundation), which used to be the North Seattle Trolley Yard.
https://youtu.be/U6Geq5UKtII
Yeah, that’s sad. Dorpat was great.
HistoryLink is really fantastic. May he rest in peace.
Vancouver WA (yes, WA not BC) is rolling out its future zoning:
– neighborhood commercial in even the least dense residential areas
– large swaths of 75 ft, 110ft, and unlimited ft zones
– minimum density requirements across the board
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/82d081f7815941bd85ca07270144a125
You get the sense that they have actually put their money where their mouth is in terms of affordability and walkability
Sometimes the suburbs or smaller cities overtake Seattle. Spokane passed a decent citywide floor for residential zoning a few years ago, like Minneapolis and somewhere in Oregon. Shoreline has transit-priority lanes on its part of Aurora for RapidRide E, while Seattle was unwilling to do more than a couple scattered miles here and there until finally this year when it did something more substantial. Cities along Pacific Highway have more transit-priority lane coverage for RapidRide A than Seattle has/had for the E. And likewise, Seattle’s spot zoning in and around urban villages lagged behind a few spot advances in the suburbs. So the largest and densest and most walkable city in the state, who should be at the forefront and the example on this, sometimes gets overtaken by what a suburb or smaller city is doing.
“You get the sense that they have actually put their money where their mouth is in terms of affordability and walkability”
Isn’t this the same Vancouver WA that is advocating for the largest highway expansion in the PNW (the bridge replacement that includes new interchanges and widening on WA side)?
A guy was doing pushups on the floor of a Link train between stations. He did one set south of UW station, and then another set between UW station and U-District station. I counted the second set assuming 10 but he went on to 40. That impressed me because I gave enough trouble with 10 or 20 (and I can’t get down to the floor now. His clothes suggested he might be training for an MMA match, or maybe he’s on an exercise spurt. That could have been me when I was younger, though I did more dips and jumping jacks and calf raises while waiting for a bus. And of course, it would have to be weighed against the disruption if taking over the floor if a Link train. I was also surprised one can fit 40 pushups between stations. That suggests an alternate way the measure station spacing. UW to U-District has a 40-pushuo spacing.
Do we have a guess that whether effort of doubling transit measure would delay execution of service recovery plan? Is driver shortage the only thing that is holding agency back?
Is current 0.15% sales tax rate enough to bring back all the STM trips that still makes sense to bring back after light rail expansion?
The Metro driver shortage has been gradually shrinking and will disappear next year. Metro will restore all the pre-covid service hours in Fall 2027. (That’s for Metro’s baseline budget, not the Seattle Transit Measure hours.) The city surely coordinated with Metro on its intention before announcing the expansion measure to ensure there would be enough drivers for it. Metro knew an expansion was likely coming because people have been talking about it for months and it knew Wilson was eager for it.
That will get us through five years. Then Metro will hit a fiscal cliff around 2033, because its revenue and farebox recovery isn’t keeping up with service expenses and it will run out of reserves then. So if nothing is done by then to fix it, we’ll see a major cut like in 2014, and then the STM hours may go to reducing the cut’s impact rather service above current levels. But let’s at least solve the immediate problem and then work on the medium-term one.
This is also in the context of King County not having a countywide Metro expansion measure. It has been talking ever since 2016 about a Metro Connects measure to fulfill the long-term plan, but a vote has never come. It was going to offer it in 2020 but then covid hit and sucked all the oxygen out of the room, and then in November the county didn’t want a Metro measure on the same ballot as a Harborview measure, because it wanted to ensure the Harborview measure would pass. Then this year it started talking again about finally having that Metro measure, which would replace Seattle’s STM renewal and incorporate into a countywide expansion, but then it decided not to this year. So Seattle’s STM renewal is moving forward.
If King County had a countywide Metro expansion measure, it would require even more drivers than Seattle’s STM will, so if those drivers aren’t needed it will reduce the pressure on Metro even with the STM compared to what it would have been.
Yeah, I was thinking that as well. While this is a big improvement in service from Seattle’s perspective it isn’t from a regional standpoint (which is where labor is an issue).
Have at it Ballard hipsters
https://www.myballard.com/2026/06/03/strauss-says-ballard-light-rail-fight-isnt-over-after-sound-transit-vote/
If Seattle want’s a downtown to Ballard line sooner than later, it needs to stop thinking of it as a Sound Transit project, and build it themselves.
How would Seattle try to build the Ballard part on their own? The RFI to look for new technologies- how would that look in practice? If it uncovers that an automated system is best value with reasonable savings. Would this be the Ballard stub? I don’t think the DSTT2 tunnel is going anywhere with how the votes progressed.
Barring a Seattle only funding to help get further closer to Ballard, I just don’t see this proceeding.
King County Metro brought back the 4700 buses into service today.
2021 New Flyer Xcelsior (XE40)
https://pantographapp.com/pugetsound/vehicles/1/4700-4759
Hopefully the articulated ones (4800) come back soon. I have seen the 4700 test coaches running, but did not see any 4800 test coaches on the road.
I recall to see articulated one on 111 from time to time maybe 2-3 years ago.
Has that not happened recently?
Route 111 uses the 6800-6900 DELF buses used in the Eastside if articulated, but mostly Gillig Low Floors since ridership is low. Although I didnt check if they used it on the 111 back then… But I don’t think they did.
The 4800 numbered buses are the new electric XE60 articulated buses from New Flyer in 2021. They were mostly used on S King County peak commuter routes (102, 162, 177, and 193).
They got recalled along with the XE40 4700s due to battery issues. But it seems like at least for the XE40s they are finally back in service. I commented a couple months ago seeing these buses running as test coaches in S King County on the roads.
So, the other day someone mentioned the old bus tunnel. This reminded me of this post, from Seattle Subway: https://seattletransitblog.com/2015/02/18/westside-seattle-transit-tunnel/.
It is striking how prescient that post was. This was written before ST3 was on the ballot. They were still in the planning stages and it looked like we couldn’t build a line from Ballard to West Seattle. Then the board somehow magically found enough money to build things. Now they lost it again. Take away some of the particular numbers and it is as valid then as now:
It is becoming clearer that Sound Transit 3 (ST3) will not provide Seattle (‘North King’) with the [money] needed to fund a true subway from Ballard to West Seattle. This presents a dilemma: should we build the high quality segments we can afford (and risk alienating the neighborhoods we pass over), or give in to the political temptation to dilute the quality of the lines (surface running, stub lines, [skipped stations], etc) to serve more neighborhoods at once?
That is precisely what we did. Skipped stations, stub lines, alienated neighborhoods — you name it.
It is also worth noting that the solution is much better than what we are building. To be clear, I’m not saying a bus tunnel is what we should build next. I’m just saying that a bus tunnel like this one is much better than what we will end up with. I want to add that it also makes sense for the bus tunnel to include a station at First Hill (instead of “Midtown”) — something we discussed with Mike Lindblom when he published the same idea in the Seattle Times. That really changes the dynamic. Riders could quickly transfer to get to First Hill instead of just using whatever tunnel they happen to be on. The RapidRide G is great — it is both fast and frequent. But these buses would be faster and *more* frequent.
But even without a First Hill Station it is striking how much better this bus tunnel is. Frequency within the core (Belltown to SoDo) is much better. Headways are measured in seconds, not minutes. You serve Belltown along with Denny/SLU and the Seattle Center (AKA Uptown). Riders from Ballard or West Seattle don’t have to choose between a slow bus or an awkward transfer to an infrequent train. The bus goes through downtown and serves all the stations the new tunnel will. It still opens up the possibility of trains to Ballard (if we get more money) but in the meantime things are still much better for Ballard. Instead of buses from Renton, Kent and Tacoma being forced to run on busy streets they would continue on the SoDo Busway until they got into the new tunnel. Yet it probably costs a lot less. To be fair, all other things being equal, a bus tunnel is more expensive than a train tunnel. You have to pay for those entrances. But in this case the saving from not building West Seattle Link are more than enough to pay for those entrances (and the improvements to the SoDo Busway). It is just a better value for the vast majority of riders. I personally think we should mimic Vancouver but mimicking Brisbane would have been much better than what we are doing now.
https://publicola.com/2026/06/01/seattle-nice-how-badly-did-sound-transit-screw-seattle-over/#comments