Category: Transit

Mayor Wilson, Transit

Fulfilling a Campaign Promise, Wilson Announces Denny Way Bus Lanes Coming This Year
Advocates and city and Metro staff surround Mayor Katie Wilson at Wednesday’s Denny Way bus lane announcement.

By Erica C. Barnett

It took electing a mayor who knows what it’s like to be on a bus that’s crawling through gridlock traffic to finally address a choke point on Metro’s Route 8 between downtown and Capitol Hill. The bus, which runs from Seattle Center to Mount Baker via Capitol Hill and Judkins Park, gets stuck in traffic as it heads east from Seattle Center toward I-5, where cars stack up for blocks waiting to enter the freeway.

On Wednesday, Mayor Katie Wilson announced a two-phase plan to add a dedicated bus lane along the most congested part of Denny Way and create a new pathway to the South I-5 on-ramp that will divert cars off Denny at Boren, closing down the perpetually clogged pathway at Yale. The first phase, which will conclude later this month, will include a new south- and eastbound bus lane starting on Queen Anne Ave. and ending at 2nd Avenue, where the Seattle Department of Transportation will also add a bus “queue jump” lane to give buses priority.

Work will shut down for the World Cup in June and July and resume in August, when crews will paint nine new blocks of eastbound bus lanes on Dennybetween 5th Ave. downtown and Fairview Ave. N just before the freeway, where they’ll join up with an existing bus lane that will be shifted from its current location in the middle of the street over to the south curb. Yale Street, a notorious choke point, will no longer provide access to I-5; instead, southbound I-5 traffic will be funneled along Boren Ave.

The new bus lanes will be funded with $4 million from the Seattle Transportation Levy. The Seattle Transit Measure, which funds additional Metro service (and will be up for renewal this year), will fund additional service hours on the 8.

Source: SDOT

About 8,000 people ride the 8 every day, and about 26,000 ride the routes that travel along Queen Anne Ave. and Denny way just north of downtown, which include the 1, 2, 8, 13, 24, 33, and the RapidRide D Line.

On Wednesday, Wilson was surrounded by members of the Transit Riders Union, which she co-founded and directed before becoming mayor, and the Fix the L8 coalition, which held a “race the L8” event last year in which people—including then-candidate Wilson— easily outpaced the snail-like bus while walking, dancing, unicycling, and hopscotching along the route.

Speaking at Wednesday’s announcement, Fix the L8 organizer Jason Li said he grew tired of hearing people say that Seattle can’t convert general-purpose lanes to bus lanes because we aren’t a big city with a thriving transit network like New York. “The thing is, the city has done this before, and it was a wild success,” Li Said. Just a couple of miles away, Madison Street used to be just like Denny—an arterial with two lanes in each direction that was chronically clogged with both local and I-5 traffic, and it had a slow and unreliable bus, just like route eight.” Think about what happens when you replace 5,000 cars with a fleet of 13 buses.”

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Wilson, the first mayor in recent memory who does not own a car, recalled joining up with other transit advocacy groups to form the Move All Seattle Sustainably (MASS) Coalition to advocate for better mass transit in 2018. “I have to say, being stood up by your bus is honestly one of the most dispiriting experiences that you can have,” Wilson said.

“And I know every transit rider out there, here today and around the city, knows exactly what I mean. There’s just nothing that makes you feel [more] like you’re not valuable, like your time is not valuable. And it’s serious, right? You can lose a job because you’re half an hour late because your bus didn’t come. … This is our opportunity to start fixing this problem.”

As part of the Denny Way improvement exercise, SDOT came up with a list of nine additional congested corridors “where transit investment can deliver high impact benefits for riders and the city overall.” These routes, detailed in an SDOT memo, could be priorities for future investments in transit.

Development, podcasts, Police, Transit

Downtown Seattle Association Leader Discusses Density, Return-to-Office Mandates, and Surveillance

By Erica C. Barnett

Jon Scholes, head of the Downtown Seattle Association, had a lot to say about the present and future of downtown when he came on Seattle Nice late last week—most of it surprisingly positive.

Yes, the DSA is still focused on filling up vacant office space with people who may prefer working from home, a goal that seems at odds with the group’s stated commitment to reducing climate change. (The most recent Commute Seattle survey found that drive-alone commutes into downtown grew at twice the rate of trips by transit.) According to the State of Downtown economic report, 32 percent of the office vacancies in the central business district remains vacant six years after the start of the pandemic, suggesting a long-term trend.

And yes, Scholes had plenty to say about how taxes are supposedly driving companies out of Seattle and into Bellevue, where employment has grown 12 percent.

But there were parts of our conversation that may surprise some listeners—starting with Scholes’ apparent optimism that at least some existing office buildings could still be converted into housing . “I think there’s great public good to be gained from more of us living more closely together,” Scholes said.”And if we care about climate change and protecting the environment and driving down carbon emission, we need to live more closely together, and we need to live close to transit, and we need to live where we’re maximizing the investment we’ve already made in utilities and sidewalks and parks.”

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Scholes isn’t wide-eyed about the potential for new housing downtown, however. In fact, I was amused to hear the skepticism in Scholes’ voice when we talked about former county executive Dow Constantine’s big plan to create a whole new office and residential district centered around Sound Transit’s future light rail station two blocks west of the King County Courthouse. (Current County Executive Girmay Zahilay briefly mentioned the plan in his remarks at the DSA’s State of Downtown event last week).

“The reality,” Scholes said, is that despite decades of robust development downtown, “we somehow still have a hole in the ground” across the street from City Hall and the county courthouse. “But I commend the executive for continuing to advance it and to figure out what is possible, what can be phased, what might be more incremental. It’s the right thing to do.”

We were wrapping things up when Scholes told us we were being too polite, and asked if we were going to talk about the city’s police surveillance cameras—an issue Mayor Katie Wilson has hedged on after expressing strong opposition during her campaign. Unless Wilson reverses course, the city will install many more cameras in the downtown stadium district for the World Cup games in June.

labor, Transit

Staffers Say Sound Transit Refused to Bargain on Return-to-Office Policy, Use of Consultants

 

Photo of Union Station by Steve Morgan, CC BY-SA 4.0 license, via Wikimedia Commons

But Sound Transit says they’re bargaining “in good faith,” and that staffers should have known they couldn’t work from home indefinitely.

By Erica C. Barnett

For months, Sound Transit staffers have been trying to negotiate with their bosses over what they describe as return-to-office mandate and an increasing reliance on consultants rather than staff. But, they say, the regional bus and light-rail agency has refused to bargain, ignoring or rebuffing their primary demands over months of negotiations that reached an impasse

Earlier this month, Sound Transit staff who recently joined the PROTEC17 union, including internal specialists who help oversee projects and keep track of costs, packed a Sound Transit board meeting to express their disappointment in the lack of progress. One staffer who testified accused Sound Transit of “stonewalling at the negotiating table”; another said the agency was pushing an “agenda of overspending, risky contract procurement and major sweeping changes without our input.”

This past March, after more than a year of interim leadership, the Sound Transit board appointed former King County Executive Dow Constantine as its CEO.

A Sound Transit spokeswoman, Rachelle Cunningham, said the agency “is committed to respecting employees’ rights to organize and to maintaining strong, collaborative relationships with our labor partners, grounded in inclusion, respect, and shared purpose.”

One major point of contention is Sound Transit’s return-to-office policy, which requires most staffers to come in to the agency’s office in the Chinatown-International District three days a week. (Staffers say they got just 30 days’ notice of the change). Because Sound Transit told employees they could work from anywhere in Washington state during the pandemic, some moved out of the Seattle area and are now expected to commute hours to the office after working remotely for the past five years.

Staffers told PubliCola Sound Transit never gave a clear reason for the policy change. “There really isn’t a good argument, as far as our work is concerned, to force everybody into one location,” one staffer, who requested anonymity to protect their job, said. “The only argument that’s been giving is the ‘revitalization of Seattle.'” Another staffer added that Sound Transit opened two new light rail extensions successfully during the pandemic, suggesting that employees could work effectively without coming in to a physical office.

For staffers who relocated outside Seattle on the belief that Sound Transit’s remote work policy would be ongoing, the sudden return-to-office mandate could mean factoring an hours-long unpaid commute into every workday spent at Sound Transit headquarters. “For me, it means being less productive—actually getting less work done, because so much of my time is going to be spent commuting,” the first staffer said.

Cunningham said the agency started implementing it return-to-office policy at the beginning of 2025, and that “there was never a policy that stated employees could live anywhere in Washington and work remotely on a permanent basis.” The union disagrees, arguing that return-to-office is a work condition that Sound Transit needs to negotiate with represented employees.

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The second Sound Transit staffer said parts of their job are now being done by contractors who were supposed to augment, but not replace, Sound Transit staff. “I had to kick, scream and claw myself into meetings” where they were previously part of decision-making, the staffer said. “These consultants don’t know what they don’t know in terms of Sound Transit processes.”

In addition to hiring more contractors to do agency work, Sound Transit is moving toward a new contract procurement method in which multiple contractors are awarded a single contract to compete for individual jobs. They fear that this, too, could be a way of boxing out Sound Transit staff in favor of  private contractors. “Leadership is hollowing out [and moving] our public agency towards a privatization framework, replacing us with consultants,” the first staffer said.

“There weren’t a lot of answers about the need for this big change,” the second staffer added. “It’s all up in the air, it’s all new, and there has been very little communication about our place in all this. …  There’s a lack of trust in internal staff and a feeling that we’re not important to the vision for the agency.”

Cunningham said there’s been “no change” in how Sound Transit uses contractors. “The need for consultant services changes to reflect the needs of project delivery and operations, but nothing is being done differently than in the past,” she said.

After the action at the board meeting November 6, PROTEC17 director Karen Estevenin said, “we have received proposals on some of our top issues, and had a decent negotiation session. We plan to keep up the solidarity and actions until we have an agreement we can all be proud of.”

Guest Contributor, Transit

Three Key Questions to Save Our Light Rail Future
Photo by Sound Transit Special Selection via Wikimedia Commons; CC-by-2.0 license.

By Claudia Balducci

It’s no secret that our region needed high-capacity transit yesterday — or better yet, four decades ago. As a lifelong transit rider and a regional transportation leader, I’ve spent much of my career fighting for East Link, passing ST3, improving transit service, and delivering the kind of system our communities deserve. This work is essential: transit connects people to opportunity, makes our region greener, and—more personally—helps my teenager find their independence.

The West Seattle and Ballard light rail extensions alone are historic in scale—the largest public works undertakings in Seattle’s history. These extensions will connect two culturally and economically prominent Seattle neighborhoods that can be hard to access. That’s why traffic-free rail to these destinations has been part of our civic vision for decades.

But Sound Transit’s recently reported rising costs threaten our ability to deliver on ST3—the bold plan voters approved in 2016 to expand rail and bus rapid transit throughout King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties. The reasons for these rising costs include increasing construction costs, high interest rates, and an uncertain federal transit funding picture. So, here’s the fundamental question: How do we meet the promise of light rail without breaking the bank?

I’m asking Sound Transit to consider three key questions this fall:

  1. Can we reimagine the second downtown tunnel?

ST3 originally proposed a second tunnel between the Chinatown–International District and Westlake Center to support a growing regional transit network. But before building new infrastructure, let’s explore whether technology and reliability upgrades could allow us to interline—running all three lines through the existing Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel.

Consider this: London plans to run more than 30 trains per hour in a tunnel that first opened during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, simply by upgrading to modern signaling systems. Surely, with similar technology, we can optimize Seattle’s existing tunnel—built during Ronald Reagan’s presidency—to meet our service needs. If feasible (and this will require detailed analysis from outside experts), using a single downtown tunnel could save billions—funds we could reinvest to bring light rail to Ballard and West Seattle. A central question is whether this can be achieved while maintaining reliable service. It’s a critical issue that deserves resolution.

  1. What strategies can we find to deliver projects faster and cheaper?

We must build on the work of the Technical Advisory Group (TAG), which I proposed during the last Sound Transit realignment process during COVID to identify cost-saving strategies. Can we break up transit megaprojects—an approach used by other mass transit systems across the globe—into smaller contracts to attract more bidders to a heated construction market, lowering costs and improving accountability? Can we streamline permitting at the local and state levels? And can we proactively acquire key parcels of land early to lock in real estate prices before they rise?

  1. Can we adopt service-led planning that puts riders first?

Service-led planning is the standard globally for delivering the best rider experience. Investments are prioritized based on how they support speed, reliability, and service integration. Voters endorsed ST3 for the freedom its services entailed, not the scale of what would be built. Therefore, the service enabled by any piece of infrastructure must be the highest priority.

Using these principles, if the existing Downtown Seattle Transit Tunnel can support the operations of three light rail lines by using modern signaling technology and design standards, the second tunnel becomes a nice-to-have, not a must-have. Even better, interlining will improve the rider experience by supporting easier transfers across platforms, rather than forcing long walks to adjacent stations, or cumbersome transfers across whole neighborhoods. It could also solve the longstanding challenge of how to serve the Chinatown-International District without digging up that neighborhood yet again.

It’s easy to list reasons why something won’t work. The real test is imagining how it can. For every “that’s impossible,” we must ask “how can we?” In this moment of scarcity, our creativity is our greatest resource. At Sound Transit, we’ve shown we can innovate before. Now it’s time to do it again.

We owe it to our region to solve the real problem—connecting people region-wide—and leave no good idea unexplored.

Claudia Balducci is a King County Councilmember and Sound Transit Board Vice Chair

Guest Contributor, Transit

To End Car Dependency, We Must Change Who Has A Seat At the Table
Transit board leaders who don’t ride transit can’t fully understand what’s working—and what isn’t. Photo via Wikimedia Commons; CC-by-2.0 license

By Anna Zivarts

“If you could change one thing to make our communities less car-dependent, what would it be?”

That’s a question I get asked a lot in rooms full of climate and family-bike advocates, transit agency staff, and elected leaders working to build more affordable, dense housing. They are eager for checklists of steps they can take to make our communities more accessible for people who can’t, can’t afford to, or choose not to drive. They want to know what the solution is. 

They don’t always like it when I respond that the most durable and profound change comes from changing who gets to have a seat at the tables where the decisions that shape our communities are being made. If I could change anything, what I would change first is making sure that people who don’t have the option of driving get to redesign our land use and transportation systems. 

This is a radical proposition. It’s hard for most people to disagree that we need to “include” nondrivers in these decisions. But by insisting that nondrivers are treated as equal partners, we are asking for a revision to existing decision-making structures, and this kind of restructuring always meets resistance. 

The organization I work for, Disability Rights Washington, has been advocating for the past three years to allow transit riders to hold voting seats on public transit boards (This year, the bill is HB 1418). We’ve witnessed how the elected leaders and representatives who hold those seats are rarely, if ever, transit riders themselves, and so have little understanding of what makes these systems work, or not work, for riders. In fact, we keep seeing examples of transit boards voting to cut taxes and gut service. In the Tri Cities, Ben Franklin Transit’s board attempted cuts in 2022 and 2024. This year, Island Transit’s board is floating tax cuts.

While making sure transit riders are represented on transit boards seems like a commonsense proposition, we struggle against a slew of objections grounded in paternalism, and sometimes unacknowledged ableism or racism, toward those of us who rely on transit.

“But X doesn’t have the background, the education, the expertise to make that decision.” 

“Transit riders won’t think about the larger system and will only advocate for their own specific preferences.”

“People who rely on transit won’t understand fiscal responsibility.”

“If they want to make decisions about transit, they should run for office and win elections like the other leaders on these boards.” 

Of course, we would love to see more nondrivers—in particular disabled, immigrant and non-white nondrivers—win elected office and serve on transit boards in that capacity. But in most parts of our country, outside the cores of large, dense cities, a candidate needs a car (or the financial resources to hire a personal driver) to be taken seriously. That’s because candidates are expected to be in a lot of different places in a very short amount of time, in a way that is only possible with driving. 

It’s unacceptable that the people governing transit have zero experience with the system because they “don’t have the time” to utilize it. If car-dependent communities make it infeasible for nondrivers to win elected office, we need to make sure that these voices are still present on transit boards.

And this discussion of who gets to govern extends beyond transit boards, to any space where decisions are getting made or information is being shared about our transportation system or built environment. 

We also need people who rely on transit working at, and running, transit agencies. We wouldn’t accept the head of an agency or company who doesn’t believe enough in the service or product to use it—so why do we accept it from transit agency leaders? Our paternalism toward people who rely on transit shapes who we envision as capable or qualified. (This is why Disability Rights Washington is championing another bill this session to prevent employers from requiring driver’s licenses when driving isn’t an essential function of the job.

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Almost no one would say they aspire to spend hours driving to and from a job, getting in fights over parking spaces at Costco, or waiting half an hour in the car queue to pick our kids up from school. Yet when we design our communities to prioritize car access over all other ways of connecting, these outcomes are inevitable. Additionally, the financial burden of car ownership is significant. If we build our communities to require car access for independent travel, we are locking households into a system of car dependence that can be a tremendous financial stressor. 

But it’s difficult to untangle this dependence, because once you’ve purchased a car, you’re bought in. If it’s going to be faster and safer to get somewhere by driving, why wouldn’t you drive, when the cost per mile once the car is purchased is minimal? Even though many people would prefer a life where they didn’t have to drive so much, driving–for those who can drive and who can afford to drive–is the rational choice in pretty much every community in the US. That’s why we need the voices of nondrivers to disrupt this paradox. Because driving isn’t an option for us, we are willing to push for changes that would make it possible for everyone to live without car dependence, even if (and when) those changes require tradeoffs. 

If those of us who can’t or don’t drive are in the room, sharing our passion and deep knowledge of getting around relying on transit, we’ll get better policies and more successful transportation systems for our communities. 

Anna Zivarts is a visually impaired parent and author of When Driving Is Not an Option: Steering Away from Car Dependency (Island Press, 2024). Joining the team at Disability Rights Washington in 2018, Zivarts led the Rooted in Rights storytelling project and launched the Week Without Driving challenge to address the needs of nondrivers in planning accessible communities. Previously, Zivarts spent fifteen years as a communications strategist for labor and political campaigns, working as a storyfinder for the LGBT & HIV/AIDS Project at the ACLU and co-founding the NYC-based communications and storytelling firm, Time of Day Media. 

 

Density, Development, legislature, Police, Transit

State Rep Says Inclusionary Zoning Near Transit Will Prevent Displacement, SPD General Counsel Filed Initial Complaint Against Laughing Cop

1. State Rep. Julia Reed (D-36), who’s sponsoring legislation (HB 2160) that would mandate on-site affordable housing in new developments near some transit stops in exchange for modest increases in density, spoke with PubliCola last week about her bill, which we called a “timid transit-oriented development bill” compared to last year’s more ambitious proposal.

Reed’s bill would allow low-density multifamily housing within a quarter mile of officially designated bus-rapid transit stops (like the RapidRide in Seattle), and larger apartment buildings within a half-mile of rail stations—a smaller radius than last year’s transit-oriented development bill, which would have allowed greater density in more areas that are not currently dense. Reed said she fought to widen the geographic scope of the bill and to include bus stops with frequent service, as opposed to official BRT routes, but was shot down. “I’m one vote out of 98,” she said.

As with last year’s bill, which  died shortly before the end of session, Reed’s proposal wouldn’t impact areas that are already dense.

In addition to enabling some transit-oriented development, Reed’s is also an inclusionary zoning bill—for every new housing development near transit, the bill would require 10 percent of units be affordable to low-income people. Developers oppose such mandates, arguing that they prevent housing from being built. Low-density buildings like row houses and fourplexes, for example, would have to have one affordable unit each, which developers have said would require them to make the market-rate units too expensive to rent or sell.

In addition to enabling some transit-oriented development, Reed’s is also an inclusionary zoning bill—for every new housing development near transit, the bill would require 10 percent of units be affordable to low-income people.

Reed disputes this. “I think it’s curious that affordability is always held up as the killer of development and never interest rates, or labor costs, or material costs, or the fees that cities themselves are charging on top of development regulations,” Reed said. “I’ve asked them to work with us on a compromise that ensures that we will have some affordability built in and they haven’t been willing to present one.”

2. In response to a records request, PubliCola has received a copy of the initial complaint against Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president Daniel Auderer, caught on body camera footage laughing and joking about the killing of pedestrian Jaahnavi Kandula by a speeding officer, Kevin Dave, last January. The complaint, submitted on August 2 by SPD general counsel Rebecca Boatright, confirms (again) that Auderer’s claim to have proactively “self-reported” himself to the Office of Police Accountability, filing a request for rapid adjudication of the case, was false.

Jason Rantz, a conservative commentator for KTTH radio, first reported Auderer’s self-serving version of events as a so-called “Rantz exclusive,” saying Auderer filed a complaint against himself before anyone else could because he feared his comments would be “taken out of context to attack the Seattle Police Department (SPD).” Rantz never corrected his inaccurate reporting, which was regurgitated by right-wing media around the country.

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Boatright became aware of Auderer’s shocking comments, made just hours after Kandula was struck and killed by SPD officer Kevin Dave while Kandula was walking in a marked and lighted crosswalk, from another SPD employee reviewing video footage from that night. Boatright’s complaint, filed at 11 am on August 2, quoted Auderer’s side of the conversation with Solan, in which he said “She [Kandula] is dead,” then laughed and, responding to something Solan said, added: “Yeah, just write a check. $10,000 – she was 26 anyways, she had limited value” before laughing again.

“These allegations, if proven, would violate” SPD’s policy on professionalism, Boatright wrote.

Dozens of other people, including the Consul of India in San Francisco, filed complaints against Auderer, which were rolled into Boatright’s initial complaint. That complaint is still pending.