Tag: Sound Transit

Transit

How Do We Get Transit Champions on Transit Boards?
Sound Transit Special Selection, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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. 

Mayor Wilson

No More Laissez-Fare: Pilot Program Will Install Fare Gates at Up to 14 Stations
From Sound Transit presentation

By Erica C. Barnett

Sound Transit is recommending a “pilot” project that would add fare gates to as many as 14 light rail stations, citing high rates of fare “evasion” by riders who board trains without paying at ORCA card readers. The proposal would cost between etween $79 million and $88 million, according to staff, and bring in an additional $30 million a year by increasing fare compliance rates from a current estimate of 63 percent to 95 percent or higher.

In addition, Sound Transit’s executive director of security and fare evasion Brian de Place said, “There’s been a significant amount of attention, in transit circles at least, around other benefits from fare gates, including increased perceptions of safety [and] lower maintenance costs. And importantly, fare gates also allow the opportunity to de-conflict compliance-related actions that sometimes result in escalations and can put our workers at safety risk.”

In other words: Putting gates between riders and train make it less likely that people will board for free and argue with fare enforcement officers when they get caught.

According to a staff presentation, the pilot stations will likely include every Seattle station between Northgate and the International District, plus Redmond, Bellevue, Lynnwood, and SeaTac Airport. The pilot will exclude stations that are at-grade, largely for technical and safety reasons, Sound Transit principal architect Gavin Schaefer said.

In a “typical passenger journey,” Schaefer said, the “addition of the gates improves our passenger experience by making the transition [into the]” fare paid zone more legible. Currently, Sound Transit uses signs and yellow paint to designate the parts of stations where only paid riders are supposed to go.

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Although “fare evasion” is typically coded as a kind of illicit turnstile-jumping, a large percentage of people leaving stadium events, like Mariners games, routinely board crowded trains without paying. Both Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson and Pierce County Executive Ryan Mello asked why Sound Transit isn’t proposing fare gates for the stadium station; Wilson also wanted to know how much this middle-class fare evasion contributed to the overall percentage of non-paying riders and whether Sound Transit had considered the impact of long lines for fare gates after sports events.

De Place said Sound Transit hadn’t calculated how many people fail to pay for light rail after stadium events, adding that “we do see people not paying at those times. Adding fare gates at Husky Stadium, where riders descend to the platform, “could actually help with that queuing and crowd control,” de Place added.

Wilson also wanted to know what the break-even ridership level would be if Sound Transit decided not to install fare gates and simply waited for fare payment to rise back toward pre-pandemic levels. “You would probably need to get back to” the pre-pandemic high of around 85 percent, de Place said, an outcome Sound Transit considers unlikely.

Wilson (who once made the case in PubliCola for a business tax to fund free transit) also wanted to know whether Sound Transit would make a more concerted effort to enroll people in its low-income fare discount program, which is open to people making up to twice the $16,000 federal poverty level.  A staffer said fare ambassadors already tell people about the program when they check for payment on the trains, suggesting that the burden for signing people up for reduced fare passes will continue to fall on social service providers.

King County Executive Girmay Zahilay also asked about “unintended consequences” of fare gates in other cities. But unlike Wilson, he praised some of the outcomes the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) has reported since it installed “hardened” fare gates that can trap riders who fail to pay. “They saw, I think it was $10 million in increased revenue, a 41 percent reduction in crime, [and] hundreds if not thousands of hours saved on cleanup time,” The new 7-foot-tall gates were controversial when they were introduced, with some riders calling them “prison-like” and complaining about long backups at the slow-moving new fare checkpoints.

Transit

Sound Transit Sacrifices Light Rail to Ballard, Moves Long-Deferred Graham Station Forward, in Latest “Realignment” Plan

By Erica C. Barnett

The Sound Transit board voted to approve a new “affordable” light rail plan on Thursday afternoon that indefinitely defers construction of light rail to Ballard, builds rail to West Seattle without a planned station on SW Avalon Way, and adds the long-deferred Graham Street Station back to the list of “fully funded” projects.

The cuts, or “realignment,” are Sound Transit’s response to a projected $34.5 billion budget shortfall over the next two decades. In order to restore Ballard and other projects that voters approved in the 2016 Sound Transit 3 plan, the agency will have to come up with between $9 billion and $11 billion in new revenues or cost savings.

The Ballard extension, which would include stops at Seattle Center and NW Market St. would have had the highest ridership in the entire system, with around 150,000 daily boardings—a point City Councilmember Dan Strauss, who represents the neighborhood, has made repeatedly in his effort to get Ballard back on the map. Under the new plan, the “Ballard extension” will terminate at Seattle Center, miles from Ballard, prompting Strauss to urge the board to “, change the name of the alignment—not the Ballard Link Extension, but the Downtown Tunnel.”

Since voters approved the Sound Transit 3 plan in 2016, Ballard has been upzoned by the city three times and grown in population, making it perhaps the most obvious contender in the region for a light rail stop. ”

The board rejected an amendment from Strauss that would have prioritized building the extension to Ballard over building a second light rail tunnel through downtown Seattle. Instead, they adopted two amendments that essentially direct Sound Transit to look for cost savings and new revenue and ask staff to come back with a date for opening the Ballard line.

Those amendments—from King County Executive Girmay Zahilay and Strauss, respectively—are essentially nonbinding and, unlike Strauss’ amendment to add Ballard to Sound Transit’s “funded projects” list, do not commit Sound Transit to actually build light rail to Ballard.

In rejecting Strauss’ amendment, board members said they were actually saving the rest of the light rail system, including the “spine” between Everett and Tacoma and light rail to Issaquah and Kirkland. Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin, who proposed an unsuccessful amendment to table Strauss’ proposal instead of voting on it, said the Ballard proposal “puts the entire system at risk, and for me that is an absolute deal breaker. We cannot risk the entirety of the system for this exploration, and we have to protect the delivery of light rail to all communities.”

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who appeared to be leaning toward a “no” vote on Strauss’ proposal on Wednesday, cast one of just four votes in its favor on Thursday (the others were Strauss, Renton Councilmember Ed Prince, and King County Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda).

There was positive news for Seattle light rail supporters on the other end of the line, as the board approved a change that moved the long-deferred Graham Street infill station to the “funded” project list. Advocates have been pushing the board to restore the station, which will fill a two-mile gap between the Columbia City and Othello stations, for decades, ever since Sound Transit “deferred” the voter-approved station for cost savings in the early 2000s.

The Graham amendment, sponsored by Wilson and Zahilay, commits the city to spend up to $30 million on the street-level station; combined with $25 million from an existing federal grant, that would leave a gap of about $130 million, ST’s deputy executive director for enterprise planning, said. The county has not formally committed any funds to the station.

At a rally at the Filipino Community Center Wednesday afternoon, Wilson, Zahilay, and City Councilmembers Dionne Foster and Alexis Mercedes Rinck supported a vote in favor of the station, which was originally proposed as part of the voter-approve Sound Move plan that first funded light and commuter rail in 1996. Without the amendment, the Graham Street Station would have remained among the projects Sound Transit plans to advance to 100 percent design.

“Just a few weeks ago, I had the privilege of being here with so many community members, some of whom I’m looking at right now, at a fantastic rally,” Foster said Wednesday. “And at that rally I looked around and I said, ‘Did we organize for 100% design, or did we organize for trains we can ride?’ And today we have our answer: We organized for trains that we can ride!”

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The Graham Street saga may be coming to a close, 30 years after voters approved the station in the 1996 Sound Move measure. (The station still has a $130 million budget gap, so construction is still far from a done deal). But the length of time it took just to get Graham—a street-level infill station that won’t require new track, much less a water crossing—back on the “funded” list is warning sign for anyone who believed that when they voted to fund light rail to Ballard, they were actually funding light rail to Ballard.

As Councilmember Rinck put it during public comment before the vote, light rail to Ballard “is not a ‘nice to have.’ This is essential infrastructure for the largest city in Washington state.”

The cuts the board made yesterday are the fourth, and by far the largest, “realignment” in Sound Transit’s history, and their magnitude appeared to surprise many board members when the agency announced the $34.5 billion shortfall last year.

The repeated realignments have led some advocates to urge changes to the way the agency is governed. Currently, the board that oversees and makes policy decisions for Sound Transit is made up of an ever-changing roster of elected officials from around the region. This setup was designed to ensure accountability—elected officials, unlike staff, can theoretically be booted for decisions voters don’t like—but it also means the board has no technical experts and little institutional knowledge, since most elected positions turn over frequently.

One of the longest-serving Sound Transit board members, King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, told PubliCola after Wednesday’s meeting that she thinks it’s time to reconsider how Sound Transit is governed. (As Balducci noted during the meeting, “I have gone gray in the service of expanding transit in this region.” More than 15 years ago, I covered her battle against fellow Bellevue City Councilmember Kevin Wallace to build light rail on the Eastside.)

“I really do think it’s time to start talking about governance,” Balducci said. “If we’re in this constant cycle of crisis, recovery, crisis, recovery, crisis, recovery, maybe a board full of people who are expert at transit running a transit agency and delivering transit projects would be more attuned.”

“I’m an experienced amateur, but an amateur,” Balducci continued. “None of us are experts. How did we not see $35 billion creeping up on us? A hole that big opened up before we took this on. …  Maybe it’s time to evolve.”

Balducci cast one of just two votes, along with Strauss, against the final “realignment” package. (She was one of just three votes, along with Walker and Wilson, against an amendment that moved $100 million away from the Issaquah light rail extension to fund a parking garage in Renton). “I hope to vote yes in the fall,” when staff have a more detailed financial plan, Balducci said before her vote. “But to get from here to there, I want to see more progress on transparency, around the dates that we are delivering projects,” and a “path for Ballard better than we have today.”

Editor’s note: This post originally said the Ballard station would have seen nearly 150,000 daily boardings; in fact, that projection is for the entire Ballard extension. We have corrected the error.

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

Elections, podcasts

Seattle Nice: Sound Transit’s New Leader, Katie Wilson’s Run for Mayor, and Ann Davison’s Challengers

By Erica C. Barnett

On our latest episode of Seattle Nice, we discuss King County Executive Dow Constantine’s likely appointment to a $675,000-a-year job as head of Sound Transit; mayor Bruce Harrell’s first potentially viable challenger, Katie Wilson; and a new candidate, Erika Evans, who’s joining the race against Republican City Attorney Ann Davison. We also poured one out for the short-lived candidacy of Tanya Woo, who briefly filed to run for City Council District 2 (the seat she lost to Tammy Morales before getting appointed to the council and losing to Alexis Mercedes Rinck last year).

It’s somewhat unusual for an incumbent city attorney to have so many challengers this early in the race (in addition to Evans, Rory O’Sullivan and Nathan Rouse are running). But in the case of Davison, it’s hardly surprising.

In her first unsuccessful campaign, in 2019, Davison ran against Debora Juarez from the right. As part of her appeal to voters, Davison proposed warehousing unsheltered people in former big-box stores, called climate change a pointless “luxury” issue compared to removing encampments and making Seattle “clean”; and claimed the city’s streets were covered in human feces.

In her second campaign, for lieutenant governor in 2020, Davison ran as a Republican, announcing that she had left the Democratic Party as part of the Walk Away movement headed up by (later-convicted) January 6 rioter Bradon Straka. (State elections are partisan, but Washington state does not require voters to register as a party member, so there’s no way to confirm Davison’s previous Democratic affiliation).

After losing that race in the primary, Davison defeated police abolitionist Nicole Thomas Kennedy in 2021, running on a law and order platform. She has spent her term advocating for the right to prosecute people who use drugs in public, crack down on sex workers, and banish people who commit drug and sex work misdemeanors from parts of the city.

Under Davison, the city shut down community court, which provided an alternative to jail for people accused of certain misdemeanors; created a new “high utilizers” program in which people arrested over and over are subject to a higher level of punishment; and began pursuing charges aggressively under a new drug law that makes simple drug possession or using drugs in public a misdemeanor. She also supports limiting the number of times people are allowed to overdose before they’re thrown in jail.

We debated whether Davison is really a Republican (she is, ) or if she’s maybe some kind of moderate Democrat (as Sandeep seems to believe).

Last month, Davison belatedly joined a lawsuit filed by other cities against a Trump executive order threatening to withhold federal funds from cities that won’t help the federal government conduct immigration raids—a Seattle policy for many years. Unlike other city attorneys, however, Davison’s justification for joining was that the order violates “local control,” a tepid reason at best.

Notably, Davison has declined to denounce Trump generally or say whether she voted for Trump or Harris in the last election (we asked), and the policies she supports are, very generously, on the far right end of Seattle’s political spectrum. (Although, again, she denounced the Democrats and joined a national Republican movement in 2020, as Trump was running for reelection, and ran on a Republican ticket that was headed by a far-right MAGA extremist who went on to deny the election results.)

Check out our discussion on this week’s episode: