Since smashing ridership records following its blockbuster round-the-clock service during the FIFA World Cup, Link light rail has been plagued by a myriad of disparate service disruptions. Just a few days after the USA vs. Belgium match, an open hatch door took down the catenary wire near UW Station, leading to service being suspended in the central core of the system for most of the day. Mechanical issues disrupted trains on July 10th and again on July 20th, when brakes on a train wouldn’t release. Then the following day on July 21st, a power outage resulted in a temporary suspension of service between Beacon Hill and Tukwila International Blvd stations.
In an emailed statement to Seattle Transit Blog, Sound Transit spokesperson Henry Bendon provided a deeper explanation of the recent issues:
Sound Transit identified a hatch door becoming unsecured on a series 1 LRV as the cause of the disruption on Thursday, July 9. After we addressed the disruption and identified the cause, we inspected all similar vehicles before clearing them for service and also changed our inspection protocol. That issue has not recurred and we do not anticipate it posing future problems.
[The 7/20] service disruption was the result of an unrelated LRV mechanical issue. Service reliability continues to be a point of focus for Sound Transit. Our expanded monthly maintenance window program has dramatically cut down unplanned disruption time, and our incident response times have also improved. That maintenance program – and most of our planned work – was suspended for the duration of the World Cup. It will resume [the week of July 27th].
Although the recent disruptions all do seem to stem from disparate root causes, it appears that the suspension of the agency’s monthly maintenance program during the World Cup may have incurred some latent effects, compounding with existing known issues with the Siemens-manufactured Series 2 vehicles.
In response to criticism of perceived lackluster communication protocols during service disruptions, Sound Transit also highlighted both its digital and field efforts to keep passengers informed in real time:
We appreciate all public feedback and are constantly working to improve our operations and rider experience. In addition to web alerts, text alerts, and in-station screen announcements during an incident, Sound Transit deploys Fare Ambassadors, Staff Ambassadors, contracted security, and our Field Activity Specialist Teams (FAST) responders, all of whom are available to answer questions and who prioritize sharing information to keep passengers informed and moving safely to their destination.
Operators are also trained to deploy messaging informing passengers if a train is not moving for an extended period of time. Of note, operators, especially during a disruption, are monitoring and coordinating with Link Operations via radio, navigating changing schedules and routes in real time, and keeping passengers safe – all while incident conditions are constantly evolving.
Seems like a bar at the entrance to tunnels like those you see at parking garages would solve the issue of things on the train ripping down the overhead wire.
A bar would “rip down” the pantographs.
The ST report said the hatch ripped down the catenary which means it would have had to have been higher than the pantographs. But I guess the wire may be considerably higher relative to the top of the train at the entrance than places inside the tunnel. In fact, for a hatch to be higher than the catenary the pantographs must have been almost fully collapsed. You’d think there would be “door ajar” sensors on the hatches. I don’t know if this was a maintenance hatch or an escape hatch. If the later I assume anyone could attempt to open it while the train was in service.
Since the 1980s, mainline railroads have used defect detectors to find problems with moving trains. This includes hot axle bearings and dragging equipment. I’m sure they have detectors for this type of thing too.
True! Maybe a high-wide detector or some sort could be useful.
How are people answering ST’s survey question on how to increase the regular maintenance window for Link to get it reliable sooner:
A. More planned weekend Link closures (with bus bridges)
B. Ending Link service earlier at night
C. Starting Link service later in the morning
D. Single-tracking trains around work areas during service hours
E. Truncating service on some trips (likely late-night trips)
How would you order these from best to worst?
I’m leery of B or C (late evening or early morning) because the ST Express night owls will skip several core Seattle stations where most of the ridership and carless people are. ST already intends to curtail Link an hour earlier this fall (11-12pm). I don’t want to see that pushed further to 10pm or 9pm, or every day instead of a couple days a month. That’s when a lot of people are still going home or going to a late-night activity, and would be burdened if service dropped to half-hourly and they can’t get to Capitol Hill or southeast Seattle or the U-District stop were at I-5. The alternative for Seattle would be to take the 7, 36, or 49 to downtown and transfer to a half-hourly night owl. (Roosevelt would have to do something with the 67 and walking, and UW something with the 44.)
I’m leaning toward A (weekend closures) because if Link is going to be out, let it be fully out and get several maintenance projects done at the same time. D (single-tracking) may be better than late evening, although it throws frequency to hell (every 20-30 minutes, or 40 minutes in one worst case). E (truncating) might be good if if preserves core Seattle service (the ones that late-evening would abandon), but who knows where ST would truncate, and in any case, it’s the core Seattle area that needs a lot of the maintenance, so how is that really any different from shuttle-bus replacement? Unless there would just be no service north of Northgate or south of SeaTac. I can’t imagine ST doing that, because it would anger the suburban subareas, and the north end has no alternative now that the north-south buses have been eliminated. (The south end has RapidRide A.)
Cutting service in early mornings and late nights is definitely the worst option, but it’s all bad. I still don’t understand why they even need to do all of this additional maintenance with disruptive closures. TriMet runs service from five in the morning to 1 in the morning on the Blue Line and they manage this without regular disruptions of the kind Sound Transit is proposing (and is currently doing). Not to mention places like Chicago and New York that manage 24/7 service (different contexts of course – but it is possible).
Because Link is objectively less reliable than any peer network, and WE need ST to fix it so that it will perform as well as the others. Fixing it requires downtime, so we have to schedule that time sometime or live with things as bad as they are now.
I predict that Link reliability will define its success or failure within two years. Part of that is how well replacement services operate.
They should have thought this through better several years ago. But they were too busy hyping new extensions to focus on that. Now the riders are at their mercy.
Yes, but how can we trust Sound Transit to actually use that time profitably? I haven’t heard them admit any fault about past overly-time-consuming closures, like the tile work in Rainier Valley or the repeated closures for 2 Line tie-in.
Okay, but why is it less reliable? And are we doing anything to fix that in the long term or are we still just playing whack-a-mole? I just don’t really get it on a fundamental level and I haven’t seen a good explanation.
“how can we trust Sound Transit to actually use that time profitably?”
What other choice do we have? We can’t fix it ourselves. We can’t transplant a metro from another city. Some of us don’t want to move to another city or can’t. So we either press ST to work on Link and not complain about the maintenance periods and maybe that will make Link more reliable someday, or we do nothing and it definitely won’t.
“why is it less reliable?”
It’s a lot of different things that add up. We know about some of them but there’s probably a lot more. Some things like “signal issues” and “power outages” just can’t seem to be fixed, but maybe eventually they will be. ST has been doing some definitive things like replacing ventilation fans. and that panel at BelRed whatever it is, and that track degradation at Westlake and that sinkhole issue at Stadium. It did get reliability better for a couple months before the World Cup and through the first three matches, so there is a light at the end of the tunnel.
@Mike Orr, I decline to consider ourselves to be held hostage by Sound Transit.
The alternative is to lobby to dissolve the current Sound Transit Board and departments, and replace them with someone who is actually incentivized to care about good operations. Until then (or until we get a detailed plan), I’m going to oppose any maintenance closures because I don’t trust the current Sound Transit to use them well.
Mike Orr,
Sure I get that. But I think support of any of these should be predicated on some kind of technical reporting or understanding on why it’s so bad here. Did they do a bad job building? Too much deferred maintenance? How long should we expect any of this to last? Is reliable night and weekend service a priority at the long term planning level? I just feel like every time I give Sound Transit feedback I’m left with dozens of questions that they don’t even gesture at having answers for.
I still don’t understand why they even need to do all of this additional maintenance with disruptive closures.
Good question. I’m not sure how it compares to other agencies. But ST has
always been more focused on new construction instead of operations. Thus it is quite possible that they simply haven’t put in much effort and are now struggling with a system that is fairly long and not that new.
I’m leery of B or C (late evening or early morning) because the ST Express night owls will skip several core Seattle stations where most of the ridership and carless people are.
Then fix the night owl. It is important to consider the basics here. Link has several connections that are considerably faster than an express bus, even if there is no traffic. But there are also plenty of trips that aren’t. Trips within Rainier Valley, Mountlake Terrace to Lynnwood, Downtown Seattle to Downtown Bellevue. Link saves money compared to running a bunch of buses and more than that, avoids a lot of traffic. Thus late night bus service can do a very good job of substituting for Link as long as it is designed well.
I’m leaning toward A (weekend closures).
That seems like the worst of all options. Weekend ridership is very similar to weekday ridership. There are plenty of people that need to get around that don’t own a car. There is also plenty of traffic on the weekends. This means that riders will be on buses that are stuck on the freeway. This is not only bad for riders but it costs more money.
Of course the devil is in the details. That is why these surveys are largely meaningless. It really depends on what the shuttle service is like and as we discussed on another thread, it sucks. But the best chance of having a good shuttle service is late at night or early morning — not in the middle of the day. No one is saying we should just have “Maintenance Mondays” and shut down the system on Mondays. Why then is it OK to shut it down Saturday and Sunday?
“Then fix the night owl.”
We can’t do that any more than we can make ST fix the long downtown transfers or ditch DSTT2. What we can do is tell ST which of its alternatives is best, as it asked us to do and it’s open to implementing it.
It made the decision on the night owls a few months ago, just like it decided to keep the 545 in the 2026 service revision and now in the 2027 revision it won’t reconsider it because it debated that last year and said no. We can only do what ST is open to doing now, by nudging it a little bit in one direction or another in one of its current alternatives.
Maybe in the future we can talk up night owl revisions and get politicians and a large public movement to demand it, but that would take a few years to build up to critical mass. It’s not a solution for now. But you can write to ST and tell it anyway, so that it will have +1 feedback for it.
“Then fix the night owl.”
We can’t do that
Sure, but you are conflating two different things. When there is an outage there should be shuttle-bus service provided by ST. This is different than late-night service. This goes back to the other comment about the unplanned outage and the routing from Bellevue to Seattle. Whether the outage is planned or unplanned there should be a good network for riders. But this is especially true for planned outages. It is pretty easy to imagine buses running at 10:00 pm that do a very good of substituting for Link. But it is also easy to imagine a really poor substitute. It is far more important that they get a have a high-quality substitute bus network. The best chance of that is late at night (or early morning) just because traffic is lighter.
“Sure, but you are conflating two different things. When there is an outage there should be shuttle-bus service provided by ST. This is different than late-night service.”
I see B and C as shortening the regular service span so that ST will have more maintenance time every day. We can’t be sure that’s not what ST intends to do.
I did not hear any board debate on the 2026 service change. It must have been behind the scenes. I heard one boardmember assure another that transfers at Federal Way station to/from Link were preferable to Route 574 with longer headway and the use of the congested airport roadway.
I hate filling out surveys like this and seeing stuff like “don’t worry about service stopping earlier, we’re offering a night owl bus now” when the night owl bus in question serves zero of the busy nighttime areas in the city and skips some of the busiest stations in favor of freeway express buses to the airport.
Yeah, it’s a bus, but it’s not one most Link riders can practically use. Even medium informed riders may not be aware that the night bus in question skips (and is planned to skip) the majority of stops in Seattle. It just sucks the life out of me.
Yeah, I agree. That is the problem with surveys like this. The devil is in the details. It wouldn’t be that hard to create a system of buses — especially late at night — that replace Link. Is that what this will be? Or will it be crap, like what Christopher mentioned on the other post.
It’s typical for ST to issue surveys that limit the responses to what they want. The mere fact that they don’t actively advertise the surveys at the platforms is saying that they don’t really care what responses they get.
And of course ST doesn’t tell the mass public that they’re skipping over half of the Seattle stations with this new night bus.
Yes, ST uses targeted questions to try and support the “conclusion” they have already decided on. Filling out these surveys just plays into that because what they want is to say, “see, the survey supports X” when there was no other alternative.
“when the night owl bus in question serves zero of the busy nighttime areas in the city”
Because said areas like UW, Capitol Hill, Judkins Park, Beacon Hill, and Rainier Valley are already well served with night owl service by KC Metro
7 (Dtwn Seattle-Rainier Valley)
36 (Dtwn Seattle-Othello Stn via Beacon Hill)
44 (Ballard-UW Station)
48 (U District-Mount Baker via 23rd Ave)
49 (U District-Dwtn Seattle via Capitol Hill)
67 (Northgate-Seattle Children’s via Roosevelt Way & UW)
70 (U-District-Dwtn Seattle via Eastlake)
124 (Dtwn Seattle-Tukwila Intl Blvd via Georgetown)
In my opinion, ST is thinking ahead about where gaps in service for the current night owl service exist and practical reasons like service reliability, speed, and efficiency. As some stations are not exactly easy to serve like Pinehurst, Shoreline North, and Judkins Park, for instance. Because you have do a fair bit of backtracking to get back onto the path in either instance.
Also think they’ll revisit the lines and tweak things once they have enough time to see how things are working.
Even in other cities with night owl service, they don’t always follow the path of the metro lines. Paris’s noctilien network only has a few lines in that are Paris centric, the rest are lines that radiate from the 5 main Paris train stations into the suburbs or the main airports, Charles de Gaulle and Orly.
@ Zach B:
Not only do Seattle residents pay the same tax rate as everyone else in the ST taxing district, Seattle residents pay extra taxes for things like nighttime bus service that other cities do not.
Unless ST is directly subsidizing Seattle Owl routes, the argument that they’re already covered is in my mind fallacious. That’s especially true when the daytime Link boardings are high like Capitol Hill.
And people are going from Capitol Hill to Bellevue, Redmond, Lynnwood, Federal Way, Tacoma, and Lakewood. That’s what an ST Express night owl is supposed to facilitate you would think. Instead people would take a half-hourly 49 one mile to downtown and wait for a half-hourly ST night owl to their home. Or they’d take one look at that and say that’s ridiculous, and drive instead. And we’d get people grumbling about safety transferring downtown.
“And people are going from Capitol Hill to Bellevue, Redmond, Lynnwood, Federal Way, Tacoma, and Lakewood.”
Yes skipping Capitol Hill for overnight service is particularly mind boggling. It’s the second highest ridership station in the system! It’s busy many nights a week! With two routes coming into Downtown from the south and one from the north, it looks so easy to just end one at Capitol Hill (or maybe UW).
ST could even coordinate timed transfers Downtown if the route started nearby. Imagine a Lakewood to Capitol Hill bus and a Lynnwood to Redmond bus with a coordinated timed transfer in Downtown Seattle!
I’m not happy about ST skipping MLK but none of those stations have the activity that Capitol Hill does, especially at night.
As it is proposed it’s almost as if ST actually doesn’t want riders on these overnight buses.
“it’s almost as if ST actually doesn’t want riders on these overnight buses.”
ST’s thinking is probably that ST Express is for the suburban subareas, who are paying for it. Westwood Village was the only part specifically benefiting Seattle. Lake City was not a primary reason for the 522, it was just on the way, so that’s why it’s going away. The ST night owls go to downtown because that’s what ST Express has always done, and downtown is the biggest single destination and transfer point and centrally located.
But at night the biggest destinations are the nightlife areas. That would suggest extending the ST night owls to Capitol Hill. But that goes against ST’s conventional thinking on ST Express, as well as ST thinking “Metro has that covered”. (Never mind that it’s the Seattle Transit Measure that has that covered, and if it’s not renewed the Seattle night owls will go away.)
“ But at night the biggest destinations are the nightlife areas.”
The data by time of day should be obtainable by KCM and ST. Where are the most Link boardings after 10 pm? ST can just look at Orca taps to get a rough idea! The door counters have these data too.
I would expect the highest boardings after 10 pm to be at SeaTac and Capitol Hill. Maybe Westlake or U District would be up there too but these two are definitely at the top anecdotally.
When will ST start using actual data to plan things as opposed to other factors like politics? If they are planning to drop rail service an hour or two earlier for whatever reason, they should be disclosing where the current riders that these affect are boarding trains.
These data are found nowhere in the discussion. And the Board members are not asking for it either. It’s just one more anecdote to ST’s saga of bad oversight and avoidance of quantitative decision-making.
I’d rate something like C > B > E >>> D >>> A
I’d very much prefer to see a consistent schedule (even if it covers a shorter span). Planned disruptions are obviously much better than unplanned ones, but I think it’s unreasonable to expect people to keep on top of and plan their lives around service disruptions. I think the recent trend of constant service disruptions is really damaging to ST’s reputation and to Link’s long term ridership
I work on weekends. Many people in Seattle who depend on the train work on weekends. My commute time literally doubles or triples when I am forced to take the bus instead of the train. Weekend closures suck for those of us who don’t have office jobs.