L, while many people worked to build greater Seattle’s light rail system, nobody did more than Joni Earl, the workaholic executive director and CEO of Sound Transit from 2001 to 2016.
Earl transformed a bloated, bureaucratic agency into an LRT-building machine in which the public expressed its support through 3 major referendums.
Seattle Blasts Ahead, Victoria Locked in 1950
You can now take a tram from Angle Lake, south of SeaTac airport, to Northgate station, a distance of 38.6 km. Besides the airport, the line also serves downtown, U-Dub (University of Washington), and major league and university stadiums. It carried a record 25,129, 868 passengers in 2023. By 2041, the three King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties plan to have 187 km of LRT, plus commuter rail, streetcar and bus rapid transit (BRT) lines. Victoria’s transit plans are, in comparison, woeful.
Today, metro Seattle is unique among American cities in that it’s actually increasing transit’s share of the transportation market. In the US and Canada, infrastructure is so car-centered that there’s no change happening. For example, this aerial shot of the North Berkeley BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station shows a transit station surrounded by a “parking moat”. This land should have housing and small businesses. Terrible land use like this shows why housing is so astronomically expensive in the Bay Area.
