Brent White is a dispatcher at a private transportation provider in Seattle. He has never owned a car. His frequent routes are Link, 60, 124, 128, 132, 180, A Line, F Line, and the myriad of routes that travel between UW Station and the U-District. His birthday wish is to get to use his ORCA card to ride the monorail.
Sound Transit’s new schedule books are out. The September 22 service changes include some bad news and little bits of good news. Seven ST Express bus routes, including the two with the highest ridership (routes 550 and 545), are losing trips. Routes 511 and 580 are the only routes gaining trips. Some routes are losing […]
In the 2018 primary election, STB endorsed three state senate candidates, including one devoutly-pro-transit incumbent (Sen. Marko Liias), one open-seat candidate (Joe Nguyen), and one challenging an entrenched incumbent (Jesse Salomon, challenging light rail opponent Sen. Maralyn Chase). All three of our endorsees came in first in the primary election. We’re hungry for more. Or […]
The Seattle Department of Transportation and King County Metro recently announced several useful measures they will take to improve bus priority on 3rd Ave. 3rd Ave has the densest collection of bus routes in the state, and is pretty much totally packed with buses maneuvering around each other during peak hours. Every measure taken to […]
Update: Erica Barnett at The C is for Crank has a rundown of what Councilmember Sawant’s proposed ordinance would do (putting severe restrictions on a lot more property than the Showbox) and rapid timeline for approval. The movement to save the Showbox has grown quickly, and attracted some wanting an opportunity to proverbially punch a […]
Portland TriMet recently rolled out the first-of-its-kind-in-the-US “virtual” smart card. The virtual Hop Fastpass account requires use of GooglePay on an Android smartphone, but doesn’t require getting or using a physical Hop Fastpass. The smartphone accessing the account provides all the functionality of the physical Hop Fastpass, using the same motion of briefly holding the […]
As part of the fare restructure that brought King County Metro’s $2.75 regular flat fare, effective this week, King County Metro has gotten all four counties in the ORCA pod to make the first Regional Reduced Fare Permit free for each recipient, also effective this week. Regional Reduced Fare Permits are for seniors 65 or […]
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and NYC Assembly Speaker Corey Johnson have struck a deal that will give low-income New York City transit riders a roughly 50% fare discount starting next year, under a program called “Fair Fares”. Up until the past week, Mayor de Blasio resisted the discount, saying the state should […]
SODO Station and the SODO busway: Future home of West Seattle – southside train transfers Photo by Joe Kunzler / flickr When ST3 is built out, it will have two major downtown transfer hubs, at already-very-busy Westlake Station and International District / Chinatown Station. In all likelihood, transfers at these stations will not be fast, […]
Correction: The original post referred to a “carbon tax” in I-1631. The initiative actually refers to a “pollution fee”, a methodology different from the carbon tax in Initiative 732. I recently ran into a couple stack petitioners seeking signatures for four initiative petitions, starting with Tim Eyman’s latest $30 car tab effort, and ending with […]
The Sound Transit Board of Directors took action last Thursday on the staff proposals for fare changes on ST Express, but the outcome wasn’t as planned. Last spring, a Regional Fare Forum called for the end of zone resets, a feature on ORCA readers that allows riders to request a one-zone fare on a route […]
Sound Transit Operations & Administrative Committee meeting April 5, 2018 The escalator presentation runs from 8 minutes into the video until 1:08. Last Thursday, Sound Transit staff gave a presentation to the Board’s Operations & Administration Committee in response to the March 16 breakdown of two down escalators on the same level at UW Station, […]
Ongoing updates: More US transit agencies that offer free monthly-or-longer passes for riders experiencing homelessness have been added to the post since publication. More will be added as they are found. On Wednesday, King County Metro General Manager Rob Gannon announced some changes to its fare enforcement practices, as a result of an audit. The […]
Video by Welwyn22 For those of you who, like me, have been caught miscounting taps before boarding Link Light Rail or Sounder, Sound Transit is going to make the system more user-friendly. Per ST spokesperson Kimberly Reason, a change to the “tap off” tone, to make it unique from the “tap on” tone, is in […]
Christiana Figeueres was the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, who led the COP 21 climate talks in Paris. She got better results on climate action from 195 world leaders than the state legislature has produced. This is an open thread.
Sine die came this evening in Olympia, with the Legislature managing to get its work done on time. There will be no extra sessions. The big drama of the session was over Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill 5955, which started out a year ago as a bill to simply reimburse newer car drivers for the difference […]
The House Transportation Committee met this morning to hold a public hearing and take action on Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill 5955, the car tab relief bill that would reduce the funding stream for Sound Transit 3. Rep. Judy Clibborn (D – Mercer Island), the chair of the committee, proposed an amendment that would strike most […]
This post was updated at 6:20 2.20.18 to include testimony and information from comments. In a disappointing legislative session marked by mostly defensive effort to protect the Sound Transit 3 project list from cuts, there has been one bright light: Engrossed Substitute Senate Bill 5288, allowing Thurston County Intercity Transit to add an additional 0.3% […]
While the state legislature has shifted from prioritizing wealthy new car owners over carbon-footprint reducing electric mass transit to prioritizing both over education, the bill to allow automatic camera enforcement on transit-only lanes is still getting a chilly reception. Substitute House Bill 2403 got out of the House Transportation Committee back on January 17, and […]
