Category: Transit

City Council, Density, Mayor Wilson, Poverty, Transit

This Week on PubliCola: July 18, 2026

A marathon debate over transit funding, Katie Wilson’s flight patterns, a bill that would limit endless land-use appeals, and more news from the past week.

Monday, July 13

Seattle Nice Discusses Mayor Katie Wilson’s Track Record at Six Months

On the first of two podcast episodes this week, we discussed how the mayor is doing at six months, focusing on her approach to encampment sweeps (she’s doing them), her progress toward her shelter goals (falling short, but better than her predecessor Bruce Harrell), and the likelihood of budget cuts this year (thanks in large part to spending commitments Harrell made, without regard for future budget impacts, right before the 2025 election.)

Tuesday, July 14

Voting “Yes” On Prop. 1 Will Fund the Library System We Deserve

Guest columnist Brittney Moraski, who’s the advocacy chair for the Seattle Public Library Foundation Board, makes the case for the August library levy measure, which will expand collections, spiff up the aging downtown library, and fund programs like No Late Fines and Peak Picks—not to mentiona quarter of the library’s staff.

Seattle May Actually Limit Anti-Housing Land Use Appeals

Legislation from Councilmember Eddie Lin would get rid of land-use appeals to the city’s hearing examiner, which currently give people who oppose density the ability to stop zoning legislation and comprehensive plan updates in their tracks. The bill would still leave two other post-legislative appeal options open.

More People Will be Eligible for Utility Discounts

City Councilmember Dan Strauss’ legislation expanding eligibility for the city’s Utility Discount Program, which provides deep discounts to ratepayers who qualify, passed easily this week.

Wednesday, July 15

As Mayor, Katie Wilson Doesn’t Travel Much. When She Does, You’ll Find Her in 23F.

Unlike her predecessor Bruce Harrell, who spent large chunks of his term traveling, along with his wife, to conferences and junkets around the nation and world, Mayor Wilson has only left Seattle on city business two times in her first six months, and only once on the city dime. Also unlike her predecessor, Wilson travels in coach—Harrell used his personal wealth to pay for first-class upgrades, including five-figure plane tickets and five-star hotels.

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Thursday, July 16

Land Use Appeal Reform Moves Forward

The land use appeal reform bill we covered earlier in the week passed out of the land use committee, and heads to an uncertain vote at the full council.

Council Splits on Funding for School Meals

The city council appears to be split on a Families and Education Levy spending proposal from Joy Hollingsworth and Dionne Foster that would delay funding for universal school meals, which Wilson previously identified as one of her key accomplishments, and use the money instead to pay for take-home food vouchers for low-income kids. Eddie Lin told us it would take a lot to convince him to vote against universal school meals.

Friday, July 17

After Marathon Meeting, Council Committee Passes Wilson’s Transit Measure Mostly Intact

It took almost three and a half hours of speeches (and one called question—someone on the council’s reading Robert’s Rules!) but a committee of all nine council members ended up approving Mayor Wilson’s proposed transit sales measure mostly intact. Proposals to cut the size and duration of the tax failed, and there are lots of directives to report on this and that, but chalk this one up as a victory for the mayor. Once it passes full council, the proposal will head to voters in November.

Seattle Nice: Taxing for Transit, Nude Beach Ruling, and Mayor Wilson’s Frugal Flights

On the second episode of Seattle Nice this week, we talked about that marathon transit discussion, along with my story on Wilson’s travel and a court ruling this week that will allow the nude beach at Denny Blaine Park to remain nude, but not “lewd.”

Also this week:

I was a guest on Rachel Horgan’s The Weekly podcast, where I talked about what it takes to sustain a podcast long-term, the story of how Josh and I founded this independent news site in 2009 and how my business model works now, and what’s been going on in Seattle politics lately. Rachel covers local business news and a lot more every week.

If you’d like to read an entertaining blow-by-blow of Thursday’s big transit tax debate, I covered it live, in way more detail, on Bluesky.

 

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Taxes, Transit

Seattle Nice: Taxing for Transit, Nude Beach Ruling, and Mayor Wilson’s Frugal Flights
File:Blick aus dem Flugzeug.jpg
Only losers think this view is cool, apparently. Lully, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Erica C. Barnett

Unlike the Seattle City Council, we sped through several local topics on Seattle Nice this week, discussing the Seattle Transit Measure that passed a key council committee yesterday, along with a proposal that would upend Mayor Katie Wilson’s plan to start funding universal school lunches next year using a local levy that pays for education.

During our discussion of the transit tax, Sandeep argued that there needs to be a point when Seattle stops routinely raising taxes, particularly regressive sales taxes (the transit measure renewal would impose a 0.3 percent sales tax, up from the current 0.15 percent). I agree, especially about sales taxes—if it’s gonna get challenged anyway, the legislature should just pass a true progressive income tax—but I also buy the argument that affordable, accessible transit saves low-income riders more money than the tax will cost.

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Worth noting: The incremental sales tax increase will cost the median Seattle household, with an income of $124,000 a year, an additional $29 a  year. Although Bob Kettle and Maritza Rivera expressed concern for, as Rivera put it, “our low-income folks,” low-income Seattle residents will pay significantly less than that median burden—more like an extra buck a month. That isn’t to say the sales tax isn’t regressive (meaning it falls disproportionately on poor people, who spend more of their income on purchases), but it’s important to put the actual cost in perspective. If people are able to take fewer trips in their cars, or get rid of their cars entirely, thanks to better transit service, that dollar a month is well worth it.

 

We also talked about a local judge’s ruling that will allow people who visit the beach at Denny-Blaine Park, a historic LGBTQ-friendly nude beach, to taking their clothes off. The city still has to take unspecified actions to abate the “public nuisance” of “lewd” behavior, a term King County Superior Court Judge Samuel Chung used 35 times in his 14-page ruling.

Also, I made two apparently necessary clarifications on my story about Katie Wilson traveling in coach, which blew up on Bluesky while I wasn’t looking.

1. My headline did not mean Wilson LITERALLY PURCHASES SEAT 23F every time she travels. I thought this was super obvious, but some people did not and they have very strong feelings about it.

2. Window seats are great, it is normal to want to look out, and a ton of y’all have very weird (passionate!) feelings about the type of people who do or do not prefer window seats and those who do or do not pull the shade down, blocking off the view. (Apparently people who like to look at clouds are babies.)

3. Presumably anyone who reads PubliCola already knows this, but to those admonishing me WHY ARE YOU COVERING THIS INSTEAD OF NEWS, I post news stories that are not about the mayor’s flying habits all week, every week, right here on this very wonky, very in-depth local news site (which you can support right here!)

 

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Taxes, Transit

After Marathon Meeting, Council Committee Passes Wilson’s Transit Measure Mostly Intact
Rob Saka holds up a button commemorating Shawn Yim, a Metro bus driver killed by a passenger in 2024.

By Erica C. Barnett

It took three hours and 37 minutes—45 minutes longer than the new film The Odyssey—but a city council committee finally approved Mayor Katie Wilson’s updated Seattle Transit Measure sales tax proposal mostly intact; the 0.3-percent sales tax measure is now headed to the full council and ultimately the November ballot. Approval, with a potential new amendment or two, is a foregone conclusion: The committee that approved the proposal includes all nine city council members.

The transit measure, formally known as the Seattle Transportation Benefit District, first passed in 2014; its purpose is to provide additional King County Metro service hours in Seattle, although it has since been amended to include additional spending priorities.

So why such a lengthy meeting? Mostly because council members proposed 30 amendments—23 more than the the last time the measure was in front of the city council, in 2020. Some of these amendments, which I covered in detail two weeks ago, were substantive. Bob Kettle’s proposal to cut the tax to 0.2 percent, later amended to 0.225, would have placed a measure before voters that kept transit service stable rather than expanding it, for instance.

Others were non-substantive directives to the city’s transportation department (SDOT) and King County Metro to study various concepts and performance measures, like the idea of replacing full-size buses with van-like shuttles on low-ridership routes.

The other reason the meeting was so long is that council members—particularly Rob Saka, the long-winded committee chair—insisted on making lengthy speeches before, during, and after almost every amendment, including many where the vote (pro or con) was a foregone conclusion.

I posted live updates  throughout the meeting on Bluesky, where you’ll sense my growing frustration with the council’s windbaggy posturing. The rhetoric reached an apex during a discussion about Saka’s amendment to use funding from the transit tax to pay for additional security officers and transit cops.

Supporters, including Saka and Bob Kettle, suggested additional officers might have somehow saved the life of Shawn Yim, the Metro driver who was killed in December 2025 after leaving his bus to pursue a man who had attacked him with pepper spray.

Dionne Foster, one of two votes (along with Alexis Mercedes Rinck) against Saka’s proposal, pointed out that about 10 percent of transit measure funding already goes to transit security, and noted that the city’s 2024 Transportation Levy (thanks largely to a similar push from Saka) included about $9 million in transit security funding that the city hasn’t even figured out how to use yet.

Saka said it’s obvious that Metro needs to hire more transit security, citing data that shows more people are reporting incidents on buses. (This could also be because more people are riding buses). In one such incident, a man broke out several bus windows, reportedly with a machete—a wide, thin blade commonly used in Central America. Saka fixated on this apparently exotic weapon, pronouncing the word with an exaggerated foreign accent—”a mah-chet-EEE! A mah-chet-EEE!”—and emphasizing his point by asking, “Is this a banana republic?”

Despite the lengthy, mostly one-sided debate, Saka’s amendment had plenty of support. It identifies transit security officers, behavioral health specialists, and transit cops as one of the uses for the transit funding measure. Twenty-eight minutes into that discussion, Dan Strauss used a parliamentary move to stop Saka mid-sentence, mercifully “calling the question” on the amendment, which passed 7-2. Here’s that moment:

Few of the remaining substantive changes to Wilson’s proposal moved forward.

As mentioned, Kettle’s amendment to reduce the size of the levy failed, with only Maritza Rivera joining Kettle in voting yes. Rivera, who often brings up her working-class origins in the Bronx, said she didn’t want anyone to suggest that she didn’t support transit.  “I have so much support for the transit system, to include that for the almost first 30 years of my life, I exclusively used public transit,” Rivera said. Noting that sales taxes have the greatest negative impact on lower-income people, she continued, “We should not be judged by, sometimes, the decisions that we have to grapple with. It’s not just, do you support it or do do you not. It’s, we do, and there are other considerations.”

Another proposal from Saka, which passed as part of a consent package, directs SDOT, “in partnership with” Metro, to produce annual reports on a long list of data, including on-time performance and reliability; fare recovery rates along with a report on how Metro’s fare recovery compares to at least 20 comparable transit systems; fare compliance actions by Metro; and “On-time performance across service hours and routes served,” including year-over-year comparison reports.

As I mentioned at the outset, one reason this council had so many amendments this year is that they seem not to trust Metro to spend Seattle’s money wisely. Ten of the council’s 30 proposed amendments include requests for reports, which require Metro’s “participation.”

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The city can’t actually require Metro to do anything, which is why I described these amendments yesterday as a purely performative form of “accountability.” Metro may choose to dedicate staff time and funding to running down all the numbers and data the Seattle City Council is asking for with all these amendments (on Monday, Rivera said, she plans to introduce an amendment requiring reports on ridership across all routes serving all elementary, middle, and high schools across the city), but they are also free to ignore the council’s requests.

The council also spent considerable time yesterday debating how much of the transit measure should go toward capital projects like sidewalks and curb cuts, rather than transit service hours. A Saka amendment, which passed 5-4, directs SDOT to deliver a report to the council on any transit measure funding that goes unspent each year, and expresses the council’s “intent to reappropriate these funds” for capital projects.

Proponents for more capital spending argued that Metro wasn’t able to use all its funding for transit hours in the most recent levy and ended up using that money on capital projects anyway. Opponents, including Rinck, pointed out that the reason Metro didn’t use as many bus hours during the last levy is that there was a global pandemic that reduced ridership to virtually zero.

The bus system is still recovering from that pandemic, but there’s no particular reason to believe ridership won’t continue to rebound over the life of the next transit measure. A staffer attempted to explain this— “I think it’s always useful to remember that the last measure came right at the start of the COVID pandemic, we found ourselves with additional [transit measure] resources piling up, and so there was a decision made by previous councils and the executive to divert those resources to do more capital projects”—but Rivera cut off his explanation, saying, “Because they’re needed. I mean, that’s what I’m going to take away from that.”

A proposal from Rinck to reduce capital spending from $5 million to $2 million a year, predictably, failed, but a separate amendment from Strauss guarantees that at least 75 percent of the transit measure gets spent on transit service.

Saka’s proposal to reduce the term of the tax measure from 10 years to 7 (increased from Saka’s original 6.75-year proposal) failed 7-2, with only Saka and Rivera voting “yes.”

homelessness, housing, Mayor Wilson, Police, public disclosure, Transit

This Week on PubliCola: July 12, 2026

A wide-ranging interview with the mayor, a proposal to replace universal free meals at school with means-tested vouchers, serious questions about public disclosure at the homelessness author, and more.

By Erica C. Barnett

Monday, July 6

Sound Transit’s Bespoke Wayfinding System Is Unnecessarily Baffling

The regional light-rail agency has made significant changes to its wayfinding signage over the past few years, in what the agency calls an effort to make the signs easier to understand. But many of the new features, such as the removal of location information from station exits, are more confusing than clarifying.

Tuesday, July 7

Wilson Turns Off Stadium Surveillance Cameras

Mayor Katie Wilson kept her word on surveillance cameras in the stadium district, cutting power to the cameras immediately after the World Cup games ended. But the future of police camera surveillance in Seattle still hangs in the balance as the city waits for a security audit by the NYU Policing Project to wrap up later this year.

Homeless Authority Director Tells Staff Not to Trust the Media

After the city and county announced they were taking control of the region’s homeless service contracts, a process that will lead to layoffs at the King County Regional Homelessness Authority, KCRHA’s director Kelly Kinnison sent an all-staff email telling her employees not to believe what they read in the media, “especially outlets with low journalistic standards with a history of one-sided, agenda-driven, or incorrect reporting.”

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Thursday, July 9

Mayor Katie Wilson at Six Months In: “Incredibly Proud of What We’re Accomplishing”

In part one of my interview with Mayor Wilson, she discussed the accomplishments she’s proudest of in her first six months; why the city is still sweeping encampments without providing shelter or services; the prognosis for her plan to add 1,000 new shelter beds in her first year, and much more.

Council Proposal Would Delay Universal School Lunch Program, Fund Means-Tested Food Vouchers Instead

A proposal from City Council President Joy Hollingsworth would undo one of the items Wilson ticked off on her list of signature achievements, by replacing a plan to use the city’s families and education levy to fund universal school meals with one that would provide vouchers for meals on weekends and holidays to low-income kids. Hollingsworth said her proposal was more fair because it would largely benefit low-income Black kids in places with more food insecurity, as opposed to helping all kids, including some whose parents could afford to pay for school lunches.

Mayor Katie Wilson Says She’s “Doing a Reset” on Housing Agenda, “Very Hopeful” About Police Chief

In part 2 of our interview, Mayor Wilson talked about some of the pushback she’s gotten on her affordability agenda. We also discussed the $175 million budget deficit the city is facing next year, and whether the police department will face cuts or if other city departments, as usual, will have to take bigger cuts to keep SPD’s budget growing.

Friday, July 10

KCRHA CEO Sought to Shield Records From Public Disclosure, Emails Suggest

Emails between KCRHA CEO Kinnison and agency staff suggest that Kinnison sought to exempt many of her emails from public disclosure through a number of methods, including “sensitivity labels” designed to ensure some emails wouldn’t show up in records request searches. Kinnison also appears to have put an IT manager, rather than a certified public disclosure officer, in charge of doing initial searches for records. Kinnison’s decisions raise questions about whether the agency has withheld records from disclosure that it is legally required to produce.

Opinion, Transit

Sound Transit’s Bespoke Wayfinding System Is Unnecessarily Baffling

 

International visitors have likely never seen anything quite like it.

By Erica C. Barnett

For Sound Transit, the World Cup games could serve as a test of the changes the light-rail agency has made to its wayfinding signage over the past few years. Sound Transit has said the changes put the region’s transit agency in line with “international standards” and make the signs easier for international travelers, non-English speakers, and people with certain disabilities to understand.

But some of the new features, such as the addition of station numbers to route maps and the removal of location information from station exits, are more confusing than clarifying.

Under the new wayfinding system, each station has a three-digit numeric code that’s displayed prominently on signs at stations, transit maps, and on trains themselves. Westlake, for instance, is now rendered as “150,” indicating that riders are at station 50 on the 1 line.

State law requires some kind of station identifier that people with limited English proficiency can easily remember. Previously, Sound Transit used a series of baffling pictograms; these included two types of bird, two types of boat, and both a moose and a deer. Unfortunately, the three-digit system seems like a marginal improvement, at best, over the twee old silhouette-style images.

Sound Transit spokeswoman Amy Enbysk said numeric station codes “are commonly used in many international transit systems to support riders with limited English proficiency, as well as visitors who may not be familiar with the region,” pointing to cities like Tokyo, Seoul and Dubai that use station numbers. However, most major cities on every non-Asian continent— London to São Paolo to Thessaloniki—use names, not numbers, to identify stations, and they indicate station locations with simple dots. The more visual clutter a sign has, the more confusing it becomes.

But maybe I’m an outlier? According to Enbysk, the new three-digit identifiers tested well in focus groups and “customer feedback on the station codes has generally been positive, including requests to expand them to digital signage and onboard displays, which we have done.” It’s notable, though, that each station now includes a key—in English—explaining how to decode the new numeric system.

Sound Transit also has duplicate station numbers on each of its two lines, so someone who is navigating entirely by station numbers will also have to remember if they’re looking for, say, stop 56 is on the green line (where it’s 156) or the blue line (where it’s 256).

The potential for rider confusion is only compounded by the fact that Sound Transit now uses the terminal station for each line to identify which direction a train is going, rather than simple directions (north/south, east/west) or common destinations (“downtown Seattle”/”Airport”). Thus, a rider going downtown from Beacon Hill has to decide whether to stand on the side of the station that’s bound for “Lynnwood City Center” or “Downtown Federal Way,” with no obvious indication where these two non-destination cities are located geographically.

According to Enbysk, Sound Transit doesn’t use cardinal directions because most people tend to think in terms of “landmarks and destination,” not which way they’re headed. And they don’t use terms like “uptown/downtown” or “Seattle/Eastside” because light rail isn’t a “hub and spoke” system where the lines radiate from a central location, but a system that “services multiple major cities in the region.”

This rationale strikes me as typical Seattle exceptionalism, not an actual reason to omit basic, useful information from wayfinding signs. The New York City subway system, which serves a population 10 times the size of Seattle, has trains going in all different directions and isn’t really a hub-and-spoke system either, yet stations have simple, basic information about where to board with signs that indicate whether a train is generally going toward Brooklyn or Manhattan, for example. There’s no reason Sound Transit couldn’t do the same thing. Instead, our bespoke signage requires people to memorize the names of far-flung stations just to know what side of the platform to stand on.


Once a rider gets off the train, there may be one last hurdle before they reach their destination: Underground station exits that have been stripped of information about where each exit emerges at the surface Instead of “northwest corner of Fourth and Pine,” for instance, riders emerging at Westlake station face options like “A1,”  “A2,” “B,” and “C.”

According to Enbysk, “Exit lettering (Exit A, B, C, etc.) is another common approach used by many rail and transit systems, such as Paris, Montreal, Rio de Janeiro, and Hong Kong, as it allows signs to remain concise in constrained spaces. We are then able to provide more detailed street and landmark information on maps and exit directories.” The difference between Seattle and all the systems Enbysk mentioned is that those systems do include information about exit locations alongside their station letters (here’s Rio, for example). Seattle’s system is the only one I’ve personally encountered that eliminates all potentially helpful information from its platform-level exit signs.

(Ironically, Seattle’s exit signs are only in English. It’s not that “Exit” is hard to decipher, but exits are one area where there is an internationally adopted image that indicates “exit” no matter what language you speak, and Sound Transit doesn’t use it.)

Sound Transit’s wayfinding system seems—perhaps not without reason—like a series of well-intentioned choices made by people who don’t actually use transit regularly. As a transit rider navigating a new city for the first time, I’m generally looking for the familiar visual language shared by most transit systems in the US and worldwide—a language that prioritizes information over the visual clutter of numbers, letters, and codes.

I kind of wish Sound Transit had surveyed World Cup visitors to ask them which is easier—memorizing information like “green/1 Line toward Lynnwood City Center, get off at Station 60, Exit A1,” or “ride the 1 line toward downtown and get off at Westlake on 5th Ave”? Based on the way most of the world does wayfinding, I can guess which one they’d pick.

City Council, Mayor Wilson, Transit

Council Amendments Would Slash Transit Funding Plan, Subject Measure to Annual Council Vote
Image by Atomic Taco, via Creative Commons

Other amendments would allow the city to divert funding from additional King County Metro bus service to transit security and introduce new levels of micromanagement to the transit funding measure.

By Erica C. Barnett

City Councilmembers Rob Saka and Bob Kettle want to heavily amend Mayor Katie Wilson’s proposed renewal of the Seattle Transit Measure—a sales tax that funds extra Metro transit service in Seattle—by cutting it to a level that would require cuts to existing service and lowering the term of the tax from 10 years to a baffling 6.75.

Kettle’s proposal would be the most dramatic change: He wants to reduce the proposed sales tax from 0.3 percent to 0.2 percent—an amount that would result in cuts to service compared to the levels the tax previously funded. Currently, the tax is 0.15 percent, which was enough to preserve existing bus service back in 2020. Because the cost to provide service has increased over the last six years, a 0.2 percent tax would require cuts to service, while a 0.3 percent tax would increase bus service by about 140,000 hours a year.

Or, rather, it could increase service by that much. Because in addition to Kettle’s proposal to cut the tax, Saka and other council members are offering amendments that would carve out part of the money for pet priorities, including many that are not the city’s responsibility or part of the original intent of the service enhancement levy.

Saka came into the amendment process having already won a bizarrely picayune battle that threatened to upend the legislation before it was introduced. During discussions with the mayor’s office, Saka, who heads up the Seattle Transportation Benefit District committee, told the mayor’s office he wouldn’t take up the legislation in his committee unless he got a $5 million annual earmark (up from the $3.5 million in the mayor’s original plan) for capital improvements that enhance bus service, like curb cuts.

Saka later boasted from the council dais that Wilson had agreed to this concession. But that didn’t stop him from proposing five new amendments, including one that could divert transit funding into more King County sheriff’s deputies and private security officers on Metro’s buses, which centrist Seattle leaders continue to insist are unsafe. His amendment would add transit security to the list of items the transit measure can fund, without any specific limits on how much could be diverted from service hours to security.

Many other proposed council amendments are attempts to micromanage Metro—which is, again, run by a completely separate and independent government—by dictating specific details of its service or requesting reports on council members’ pet priorities.

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For example, one Saka amendment would require King County to report on fare compliance, fare recovery ratios, the extent to which service was delivered “consistently and predictably,” and “On-time performance across service hours and routes served.”

The city does not have the authority to require King County Metro to produce reports—because, again, the county is completely separate from the city. But Saka’s amendment would attempt to force Metro’s hand by making the transit measure subject to annual approval, based on these reports, by the city council—a novel overreach designed to hold funding for the county’s bus system hostage to the Seattle City Council’s will.

Saka is also behind the amendment that would change the length of the tax measure from 10 years to 6 years and 9 months, with an expiration date of December 31, 2033. No other current city tax has a term that includes a partial year.

Other amendments—from Kettle and Maritza Rivera—would request reports from the Seattle Department of Transportation, “in partnership with King County Metro,” on “opportunities to expand” the use of shuttle buses rather than real buses during off-peak hours (Kettle); the feasibility of increasing the space between bus stops (Kettle again), the “performance outcomes” and feasibility of expanding service on two northeast Seattle bus routes, the 62 and 65 (Rivera), and more.

While Metro already compiles lots of information on ridership, reliability, and bus stop efficiency already, this level of micro-reporting has never been part of the Seattle transit measure.

The transit benefit district committee will meet to discuss the proposed amendments on Monday, July 6 at 11am.