Transit agencies around the region will be free to ride all day (and most of the night) on New Year’s Eve. Some agencies are extending late-night service to accommodate riders celebrating the end of 2025 and the start of 2026.
These agencies will operate fare-free tomorrow until end of service:
Continue reading “Free and Extended Transit for New Year’s Eve 2025” | 12 commentsAlternatives for a Geary Street subway in San Francisco with BART, MUNI Metro, or automated Skytrain technology. (Tomo Tawa Linja)
Wordless 1900-era dream drama. MrWhippler combines Klovn’s ambient song “McKlaren” with a silent movie “In the Land of Nod”. The dream starts at 1:15, a main street inhabited with stop-motion toy dolls and animals on foot and in vehicles. The street is shared by pedestrians, wheelbarrows, horse carriages, tricycles, motorcars, and a double-decker buses. The characters get into street fights and mayhem and vehicle crashes.
This is an open thread.
30 commentsAs 2025 comes to a close, let’s take a look at the current state of transit lanes in Seattle. Since the SODO Busway opened in 1991, the City has built over 55 miles of transit lanes for buses and streetcars. To keep track of where transit lanes are and when/how they can be used, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) maintains a dataset of the City’s transit lanes. This dataset does not include the Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel or at-grade Link tracks. Using this dataset, the Seattle Transit Blog created a map that highlights the type and location of each transit lane. The red lines indicate 24/7 transit lanes and the blue lines indicate transit lanes with limited hours (peak only, daytime, etc). Darker lines are exclusive transit lanes while lighter shades allow some general purpose traffic, such as right turns. The table below the map has more details. Click here or on the map to view the interactive map in a new tab. Clicking/tapping a segment on the interactive map will show more details about that transit lane.
Each transit lane has been grouped into one of the seven categories below. Limited hours usually refers to peak hours or daytime hours.
Continue reading “Seattle’s Transit Lanes in 2025” | 65 commentsNate O’Brien moves to a tiny house off the grid on his own rural timber land.
A subway entrance in the woods. (Ambient soundscape by Miracle Forest)
There’s also the mysterious subway station and abandoned subway station. (Miracle Forest) The mysterious subway station is in the Budapest Metro. Can you spot two things unusual about the trains?
This is an open thread.
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More fare payment options are coming to ORCA in 2026, both motivated by the FIFA World Cup coming to Seattle next summer. Public pilot programs testing Open Payments and a 3-day PugetPass are planned for 2026, allowing more flexibility in how transit riders pay their fares. The last major updates to ORCA came in 2024 when Sound Transit and ORCA announced the ability to add ORCA cards to Google Wallet app on Android phones. Open Payments will allow users of iPhones and other non-Android phones to pay with their phone, too, but not with a digital ORCA card. Unfortunately, there is no update on when iPhone users might be able to put their ORCA cards in their Apple Wallet.
Continue reading “New ORCA features next year: Open Payments and 3-Day PugetPass” | 64 commentsThe Fremont Bridge is a double-leaf bascule bridge that connects Fremont and Queen Anne. Opened in 1917, the bridge served as the sole link across the Fremont Cut for 15 years. When the George Washington Memorial Bridge (aka: Aurora Bridge) opened in 1932, travelers between Fremont and Queen Anne had a more reliable connection. The Aurora Bridge carries SR-99 on six lanes 167 feet above the water and is not disrupted by the frequent maritime traffic below. At just 30 feet above the water, the Fremont Bridge opens about 35 times a day. The frequent openings cause traffic jams that delay drivers and transit riders and subject people walking and biking to toxic fumes from idling vehicles.
A few weeks ago, Jeremy Cole shared an idea about the Fremont Bridge in a Bluesky post.
Is Jeremy’s idea for a car-free Fremont Bridge feasible? Let’s take a look at the data to see why it makes sense to redesign the Fremont Bridge for people walking, biking, and taking transit.
Continue reading “The Fremont Bridge Should be Car-free” | 125 commentsHow many trains per hour can fit into one downtown tunnel, both currently and with tunnel upgrades?
Sound Transit’s current ceiling is 20 trains per hour, or one every 3 minutes. With capital upgrades this could be increased to 30-45 trains per hour, or one every 2 to 1.5 minutes, as many other metro tunnels around the world operate. 30 trains/hour is common in many subways like New York, London, Moscow, and St Petersburg. The Paris Metro gets up to 40 trains/hour. Automated Skytrain can reach 45 trains/hour.
The 1 Line currently runs every 8 minutes peak, or 8 trains/hour. The 2 Line will have the same, or combined 4-minute frequency and 16 trains/hour. Sound Transit is currently upgrading the signals in the tunnel to ensure it can deliver that reliably; that will require two weekend closures in January. That leaves a theoretical 4 slots unused to fit within the 20/hour limit, equivalent to a line every 15 minutes.
With three lines in the tunnel all at 8-minute frequency, that’s 24 trains per hour, or a train every 2.5 minutes. That’s 4 trains over the 20/hour limit.
If those three lines are each increased to 6-minute frequency, that’s 10 trains per hour each, or a total of 30 trains/hour. That would combine for one train every 2 minutes. That’s at the low end of the upgrade range, so the easiest to do. It’s also what the tunnel alternatives study seems to be targeting to meet ridership demand in the 2030s and 2040s with more Link lines to more areas.
It’s not that Link can’t go over the 3-minute limit now. It currently runs trains every 1.5 minutes after ballgames, with extra trains in the Stadium-Roosevelt segment, some reversing on both tracks, and southbound trains from Lynnwood coming in between whenever they can. But this level of service throws reliability out the window, so trains come whenever they can. And it wouldn’t be allowed for every day service due to the limited number of egress paths in the downtown tunnel stations currently (elevators/ escalators/stairs).
There are two sets of future tunnel upgrades. One is needed anyway regardless of whether the second tunnel is built, to bring reliability up peer cities’ norm. The other is to increase tunnel capacity if we put three lines in the tunnel or make Ballard a Ballard-Westlake stub line instead of building the second tunnel. Both of these lists of projects are still being identified, but we know both of them involve signal work, and the second involves adding egress paths to Westlake station and maybe others. Other kinds of upgrades are probably needed too, but ST is still identifying them so we don’t know what they are yet.
63 commentsThis is an open thread for miscellaneous transit and land-use topics. There will be no Sunday Movie this week. Instead Sunday will have another Link article, and next week will have five non-Link articles.
16 commentsTransit ridership in the Seattle area typically reaches its seasonal low in early months of the year as tourists avoid the Big Dark and locals hunker down after the holidays. Sound Transit often uses this time to complete disruptive maintenance and upgrade projects. At a Sound Transit Board committee meeting earlier this month, agency staff presented plans for construction, upgrades, and maintenance requiring disruptions to Link 1 Line service in January and February next year.
Read on for details.
Continue reading “Light rail work Jan-Feb 2026” | 9 comments