By Anna Zivarts
Watching the Sound Transit board vote at the end of May, I think I felt like a lot of transit riders. Who in this room is going to the mat for us?
It is a familiar feeling. In 2022, I was organizing disabled nondrivers who were trying to fight proposed transit service cuts in Washington’s Tri-Cities area. Their transit board, working to burnish their anti-tax bonafides, had proposed cutting the sales tax that funded transit, which would have eliminated Sunday service. Calling into the meetings, I was heartbroken that such a proposal was being considered, and that none of the elected leaders voting on it themselves relied on, or even rode, public transit.
In organizing disabled transit riders throughout the state, I had heard similar stories about other transit boards. From Vancouver to Bremerton, Skagit Valley to Walla Walla, as I wrote in this PubliCola op-ed from 2023, transit riders shared how they’d show up at their local transit board meeting to advocate for improvements only to hear that none of the elected leaders on the board rode transit, often refusing to do so because it took “too long” and they were “too busy.”
Inspired by the success of Intercity Transit in Thurston County, whose members lobbied hard in the 1980s to be allowed to have community representatives serve as voting members, we started working to pass legislation that would allow the other 20 transit agencies in Washington governed under this state law to add two additional voting seats to their boards. We believed that by including transit riders and organizations that serve transit-dependent communities, these agencies would provide better service and improve communication with the communities they serve.
Our greatest allies on this bill were local elected leaders who sat on transit boards and saw how thin they were stretched. For elected officials, a transit board appointment is often just one of multiple duties of a part-time, sometimes volunteer elected position. Having the time to deeply engage with the issues facing the transit agency can be a stretch, even for those elected leaders who want to be transit champions. (We heard this same critique from King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci in her recent comments in PubliCola on the need for Sound Transit governance reform).
Our bill was killed before being introduced in 2023 and failed to pass in 2024, but we were finally able to get it passed last year. As of January 2026, all 20 transit agencies can update their charters to add these seats. But so far, none have done so. Worse, some agencies appear to be actively campaigning against adding transit riders to the boards.
I wanted to share the history because I hope the research on best practices and the conversations we are having with local transit agencies can inform the Sound Transit governance restructuring debate, and vice versa. Granted, the scale of Sound Transit’s budget and its ambitious light rail plans will require some different considerations, but I think there are useful parallels, especially as we look at how different transit governance structures function in other communities outside of Washington.
Last fall, as Nondrivers Alliance we started meeting with elected leaders who sat on transit boards across our state, one of the most common concerns was whether it is feasible to have appointed members, in addition to elected officials, serve on transit boards.
To help address this, I encouraged UW sustainable transportation grad student Naomi Rubin to create a report on transit agency governance structures last fall. She found that many agencies have appointed boards, and sometimes there are specific seats designed for transit riders. For example, on the MBTA (Boston’s board) the governor makes appointments, and one appointee must be a transit rider; another must be from an environmental justice population. In Oregon, the boards of larger transit agencies (Salem and Portland, for instance), are appointed by their governor as well, and one appointee must be a regular transit rider.
Transit governance and restructuring is a hot topic in many jurisdictions struggling to rebuild from pandemic ridership declines and over budget transit expansions. Chicago is going through a process to restructure their regional transit agency. The new board will include two appointed representatives (one voting, one non-voting) from the disability community. In Denver, a proposed restructure of the RTA board would eliminate two-thirds of elected members and replace them with a mix of elected and appointed representatives.
In Los Angeles, as their County Board of Supervisors expands from 5 to 9 members, LA Metro’s board is being restructured to accommodate this new representation.
Like Sound Transit, LA Metro is also expanding their system, and fights over alignments and the appeasement of NIMBY concerns have delayed and added costs to projects. With the current governance structure, “no one prioritizes what makes the best transit network, or what is best for riders,” reflected transit advocate Nick Andert.
The decision on how LA Metro’s board will be reconstituted ultimately lies with the state legislature, although the current board wants to present the legislature with a preferred alternative, which they’ll vote on in July. The LA transit advocates I spoke with aren’t sure yet what board configuration they’ll support. Even the simple prospect of adding four county supervisors to the board has been highly controversial because no one wants to dilute their own power.
The LA advocates looked at San Francisco Bay Area’s BART, where board members are directly elected to the transit board. But because of the politics of some LA county communities, such a system in LA could result in anti-transit transit board members who would stonewall any efforts to expand transit, the advocates worried. This was a problem with the BART system in the past before the current pro-transit slate of board members won election.
For context, I reached out to Dr. Rosalie Ray, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography & Environmental Studies at Texas State University. Dr. Ray published a typology of transit governance in 2020 and continues to research how representation, experiences and identities impact transit board decision-making. (I got to know Dr. Ray because we co-authored a chapter in Edward Elgar’s Handbook of Transportation and Public Policy about how disabled nondrivers are excluded from transit governance and what could be gained through reforming board structures for our inclusion.)
Dr. Ray studied the power-sharing efforts in the formation of King County Metro’s Equity cabinet, and so I asked, from her perspective, if she thinks a transit board that includes some appointed members with specific qualifications would better serve Sound Transit. She thought it would, especially if there was an intentional effort to prevent knowledge loss as members cycled on and off the board. But she also pointed out there were tradeoffs: When elected officials in charge of land use decisions sit on the transit board they (theoretically) have a stake in creating land use policies that make transit work. Without this direct connection, transit and land use decisions risk being decoupled.
I also spoke to Chrisof Spieler, author of Trains, Buses, People, who currently serves as the transportation director of the city of Madison, Wisconsin. Previously he served on Houston’s appointed transit board.Spieler noted that many appointees to transit boards are there not because they wanted to be transit champions, but because they (and the people who appointed them) saw their board appointment as a resume builder in the context of larger political ambition.
Because of his experience in Houston, and what he’s seen in other agencies, Spieler is skeptical that governance structures matter. “Every structure has success stories and failures,” he shared. “Dysfunctional structures with the right people can accomplish extraordinary things.” And the reverse is also true.
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In the context of Sound Transit, LA Metro, and other agencies that are seeking to build rail extensions, Spieler noted that decisions about alignment and which lines get built in what order (or at all) will always be highly political, and even if a transit board consists of appointees, the big decisions will get negotiated between the people with the appointing power.
For Spieler, the key question is whether transit riders have the political power to hold the key decision makers, these elected leaders, accountable. In the context of Sound Transit, this would mean asking why, with the ability to appoint 10 of the 18 board members, the King County Executive wasn’t able to negotiate more for King County access in the recent re-alignment.
A partially appointed or directly elected board that includes representation for different geographies will face the same tensions between regions. In Europe, many of these tensions are resolved by the transit agency being managed by a single government entity: the city, county, or state that the transit serves. In Washington, this could translate into Sound Transit being managed by WSDOT, which could look at what the Puget Sound region needs overall. But how would a system that primarily serves the Puget Sound region fare in the context of competing interests from other parts of the state?
Drawing from my conversations with Dr. Ray, Christof Spieler and Los Angeles advocates, as well as our experience with how hard it has been to implement our local transit agency governance reform, I have come to recognize that there may be no magic bullet for transit governance reform.
But there is one point of concurrence among everyone I spoke with: Our transit agencies would work better if transit boards, transit staff and transit contractors actually relied on transit themselves.
“Require transit agency staff to rely on transit themselves,” Dr. Ray summed it up.
Because elected officials, transit agency leadership and contractors rarely, if ever, ride transit, they do not feel the urgency that those of us who rely on transit do in creating transit systems that are truly excellent. This lack of transit familiarity has real costs, not just in what we imagine is possible but also in our expectations for transit service and construction. I would argue this is the root of why US transit agencies and transit construction projects can’t keep up with transit in other parts of the world: the people in charge don’t actually believe transit will replace car dependency.
I kept wondering as I watched, biking my kid across the bridge to swim lessons over the years, the amount of construction worker time that was spent pouring and repouring concrete on I-90. Had more of the contractors working on the Sound Transit plinths been transit-dependent themselves, would there have been a whistleblower calling out the shoddy fabrication standards much sooner? Would things have been different if the project was managed by an international consulting firm with decades of transit construction experience rather than an American company that is trying to diversify from highways into transit construction?
Spieler concurred that this could be contributing to the challenges and cost overruns. “Look where consulting firms have their offices,” he said. A firm is unlikely to attract staff that ride transit and want to ride transit if their office is in a suburban office park that can’t be reached on the bus or train.
“At every level people don’t ride transit enough,” Spieler reflected. “We don’t force it. And we could.” He mentioned that during his tenure in Houston, the transit agency had an internal policy that required staff to ride transit. But many staff members were still reluctant to replace car trips, riding light rail to lunch instead of incorporating transit into other daily trips. And eventually the policy was abandoned.
Inspired by advocates from Houston, Atlanta, Portland and Minneapolis, this spring my organization, Nondrivers Alliance, conducted a survey of all 219 board members of transit agencies in Washington to ask when the last time they rode transit and how often they ride transit in the system they’re in charge of. We received responses from about a third of the board members, and even among the responses we received (a self-selecting bunch), ten percent of respondents reported never having ridden transit in their jurisdiction.
It’s not unreasonable to expect transit board members and transit agency leadership to ride the system they manage. We can set up this expectation through organizing challenges like the Week Without Driving, and we can also look at other ways to force transit agencies to institute policies and incentives to encourage this change.
Other transit agencies have also instituted transit incentives or requirements for board members. In Manila, for example, leaders of the transit agency announced in 2025 they will require staff to ride transit at a minimum once a week. In the US, a 1993 San Francisco ballot measure made it official city policy to require the mayor, Board of Supervisors, and other top city officials to ride public transit to work at least twice a week. But without an accountability mechanism, they didn’t follow the policy. More recently, in 2025, a bill was introduced in the California state legislature that, among other things, would have prevented transit board members from receiving their $150 daily stipend for participating in board activities if they failed to use the transit system for at least one hour or four trips per month. (The bill also would have added two non-voting members to transit boards representing riders and transit employees). Unfortunately, the parts of the bill regarding transit governance were struck.
Perhaps it’s time to consider legislation like this in Washington. Or perhaps we just need, as present and future transit riders, to concentrate our political power. With the recent Sound Transit realignment, we saw the anger from all corners of our region. Our communities are demanding reliable, comfortable, and frequent transit. Let’s use this anger to hold accountable our elected leaders who have failed to find solutions that meet this need, starting with insisting they ride transit with us. If it’s too slow, too inconvenient, too unreliable for them, that’s an indictment of their failures and it’s time to find leaders who feel the same urgency we do to build the system we need.
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