If you’re reading this, there’s some year in which you became very interested in Puget Sound area transit services. For me, that year was 2006, and I found Jim Kershner’s Transit: The Story of Public Transportation in the Puget Sound Region to be a concise, readable, and richly illustrated overview of all that has gone before.

Unlike other books ($) in this genre, this work starts all the way at the beginning, with horse-drawn streetcars, and takes us to the ST3 vote and beyond.

Seattle’s streetcar system began as an amenity common to all modern cities, and entered a period of public ownership in 1919. The system ultimately collapsed due to poor fiscal judgment among city leaders, the apparent superiority of auto ownership at Seattle’s mid-century wealth and population level, and even competition from “jitneys” — the Uber and Lyft of their day. For a work targeted at transit fans, Kershner is admirably clear-eyed about the system’s weaknesses. Partially legitimate critiques of modern streetcars were doubly so for their poorly maintained, always-stuck-in-traffic forebears.

Worse yet, the system’s original sin was the City overpaying to buy the network in 1919. The resultant fear of big price tags would sabotage decades of plans to think bigger in the book’s second section. A precipitous decline in transit ridership coincided with isolated victories in building the bus tunnel and extending decent service to the suburbs via the formation of Metro.

The region finally emerged from its funk in the 1970s, beginning a period of ridership growth headlined by Sound Transit. The last segment of the book takes us through Sound Transit’s difficult path to the present, where the future of rapid rail transit is assured. The book is particularly strong in explaining the contribution of key people like Joni Earl and Greg Nickels to the survival of Sound Transit. Readers interested in understanding why these are monumental figures of our late transit history will find this part satisfying.

A richly illustrated book under 200 pages long has to make tough decisions about what stories to tell. It is quite strong on the various organizations, voter sentiments, and leaders that have shaped our transit history, although the Seattle Monorail Project gets less attention than some other failures. What it is not is a history of Seattle’s routes. With isolated exceptions, this is not the book to tell you how specific routes have evolved over time, how Seattle Transit and Metro evolved their service allocation principles, or to firmly connect the transit system to the larger economic and land use context of the day.

There are a few irritating mistakes that made it through editing. The Center City Connector is not yet under construction, and one chart shows ST3 passing in 2018, not 2016. Nevertheless, Transit is an accessible explanation of why things were the way they were whenever you got to Seattle. Aside from its informative value, it’s an attractive volume for your living room, for thumbing through on a rainy weekend or making a statement about your passions.

21 Replies to “Book review: Transit”

  1. How much does the author talk about Forward Thrust? To me, we’re still paying for the failure to approve both literally and metaphorically.

  2. Does the book mention the part Mayor Nickles had in killing the Monorail project? How about the part where Sound Transit realized that the taxing districts they gave the Monorail project were wrong but didn’t bother to let the Monorail project know? This led in part to the underfunding of the Monorail project.

    1. The Monorail was DOA because no local politicians wanted it. It took them many tries to kill it, but kill it they did.

    2. The folks down at the Seattle Monorail Project killed the project all on their own with their ineptness. Nickles just stepped in near the end, because, you know, someone had to do the rational thing.

      And for the record, Nickles had no direct legal control over the project. Ya, eventually he told Weeks and Horn that they needed to come up with a new plan if they wanted city permitting. They didn’t come up with a new plan and things went south from there.

      Eventually the SMP had to come up with a new plan which they submitted to the voters for approval. But the voters said “enough” and voted a solid No.

    3. The monrail’s budget was completely unrealistic. The folks who wrote it didn’t know what they were doing. It wouldn’t accept transfers because it needed that revenue to make ends meet. That would put me in the situation of not being able to take the monorail if I didn’t want to be double-charged, so I’d end up taking a bus parallel to it and would be very sad. It depended mostly on MVET, which was maybe not bad in itself, but that was wiped out by the earlier car-tab initiative. I supported the monorail but after it was defeated I learned how unsustainable it was. Its maximum speed was 35 mph, whereas Link is 55. In the later days they reduced one segment to single-track, which would have capped frequency at something like 20 minutes — that defeats half the purpose of building it. Rapid transit is supposed to be frequent. They they finally deferred half of it; I forget which half. I voted yes to the monorail every time, but in retrospect we’re better off getting Link instead.

    4. The main reason I supported the monorail is this was the early days of Link planning, when I was afraid Link would get watered down to mostly surface like all the previous American light rails had been (Portland, San Diego, San Jose). Monorail is incompatible with street-running so that guaranteed it would be 100% grade-separated. You need that for speed. That’s what made the 35 mph cap ludicrous: you’d be building grade-separated rail that can’t run at grade-separated speed, so what’s the point? But there is the lovely view.

      Fortunately Link turned out better than that. Rainier Valley and SODO got surface, but after that, as later segments went through planning, every one of them objected to surface and said they were willing to pay for grade separation, so Tukwila got elevated, Roosevelt got a tunnel, and everyone after that did too. Although two parts in Bel-Red and Redmond reverted to surface to pay for the downtown Bellevue tunnel. (Federal Way and Lynnwood are surface along the freeway, but there are no level crossings so it can run at full speed.)

  3. Thanks for the review, Martin. Looks like a wonderful book, coming out at a very good time. But sometimes wonder if Seattle’s pantheon isn’t desperately missing a Goddess (or given natural gender-capability more likely God) of Failure.

    Look at transit projects as tools in a kit. Monorail or screwdriver, no shame in pulling one out, checking it for fit, and deciding to put it back. For 57 years, the Seattle Center Monorail has been providing excellent service as the horizontal elevator between Downtown and the city’s major exhibition ground.

    Nothing we even have to tear down. We’re just in process of building something else in addition. Like any human endeavor, neither of the Forward Thrusts carried a guarantee of permanent limitless success. Possible to argue it was good we waited ’til the 21st Century to try the I-90 Bridge and Lynnwood.

    Guess I’ll have to buy the book to find out- fact that somebody else wrote it robs me of any position to declare the Failure of our phased approach to regional rail transit using buses for twenty years. To me, real tragedy would’ve been two-decade argument over color choice of lines and dots on a map.

    Suspect that most attractive thing about the Perennial Failure Claim (PFC) is its use to excuse present and future lack of action. Luckily, reason we’re still around as a species is that we constantly resupply ourselves with children. Whose general opinion of both Link and the monorail is All Thumbs Up. And “Mommie, I’ll Sit Down When I Can SEE!!!”

    I truly think that Transit’s most effective move ($) politically is to follow the example of the average European political party and add to our K-12 school system an energetic Youth Wing. Around Seattle and the rest of the ST territory, 100% focused on public transit.

    Child-passengers’ every natural inclination demands a mandatory pre-through-high-school math program with a lot of trains of every rail-count in the story problems. And enough buses to understand problems in coupling them, along with lane and signal preempt.

    And while snitching is dangerous to encourage, should be no problem encouraging kids to be sure their own accompanying grown-ups always “Tap Off.”

    Mark Dublin

  4. With the Forward Thrust backbone there would be have been abundant capacity for expansions of considerably more capacious and speedier trains. What we’re building now is a regional metro, but we’re doing it with light rail technology. Cars are narrower with less standing room as a result. They’re “low-floor” with steps in them, further limiting the standing capacity.

    That “No” vote was a huge unforced error.

    1. Exactly. The fact that the DSTT already existed really helped Link get approved and shortened the construction time and cost. Forward Thrust would have been 1970s technology (“Hi BART and MARTA!”), but we could have incrementally modernized it rather than building new rights-of-way in the much-more-expensive 2000s after the population had grown so much.

      Forward Thrust would also have reoriented our growth and urbanization. It was planned before I-5, 405, Southcenter, and the rise of the exurbs. The orientation was a cone from downtown east to Lake City and Renton, and across the lake to Bellevue and Redmond, plus Ballard and West Seattle. What’s missing is Northgate, Southcenter, Sea-Tac airport, and Lynnwood. Those weren’t significant then. 90% of King County’s population lived in Seattle. Snohomish and Pierce were small and rural, and the Auburn-Tacoma and Everett job markets were separate from Seattle, with the exception of Boeing workers who drove all over the region.

      Housing and commercial-center development after Forward Thrust would have followed the 1970s one-story model that was popular then, but the presence of the stations would give at least the hope of some densification around them, so that more people could walk to stations and businesses. Renton would have become more prominent because it had a station, while Kent and Federal Way might have become less prominent. Of course we’d eventually extend it to Lynnwood anyway as the region approached 3 million, but the geographical orientation of the region might have been different, more compact and transit-friendly.

      1. I’m not optimistic we would have gotten good TOD in the 1970s. BART and MARTA suggest we would have just built parking around most stations.

      2. I-5 and 405 were built in the 1960s. Forward Thrust was in 1968 and 1970, so its planning would have started around three years earlier. The freeways would have just opened or still be under construction then. It took several years after the freeways opened for traffic-pattern changes and residential changes to solidify.

        I-90 replaced US Highway 10. I-5 was a bypass for 99, on newly-constructed right-of-way. 405 and 520 were also new. I-5 opened in phases; I don’t remember the order.

      3. “BART and MARTA suggest we would have just built parking around most stations.”

        There’s a chance it might have been slightly more dense than what did get built. Train stations attract concentrations of people, and there would at least have been a debate about whether to include some apartments and offices next to the P&R. Without rail there was nothing to attract concentrations and development spread like peanut butter. Rail doesn’t guarantee density nodes but it gives the opportunity for it, and a focus for activism to obtain it. That’s what we list in the failure of Forward Thrust.

    2. “A decade” (I-5 opened more or less in 1963 – my parents used to ride on my Dad’s motorcycle on the unfinished grade when they were dating, and the first Forward Thrust vote was in 1968), but yes, the freeways were already there.

      The bigger error was choosing a funding mechanism that undemocratically required a 60% supermajority. The first vote passed something like 52-48. My mother, who later in life traveled enough to use actual rapid transit elsewhere, was ticked at that for the remainder of her days. She was unable to use Link by the time it opened. I still believe Forward Thrust would have given us a better system – more conducive to connecting crosstown transit as we are trying to create today and limiting sprawl, expandable into the suburbs as necessary.

      Mike’s spot on about what likely would have happened; having read the design and planning report some years ago, interestingly enough some of the station designs eschewed parking for “kiss/ride” drop-offs. Also interesting was the fact that the system was specifically oriented to avoid freeways where they could because they did not want what happened with BART to happen here – “often people driving to stations simply just get on the freeway if traffic isn’t bad.” In 1968 that would have been most of the time here. The report also pointed out that the freeway would act as a higher-capacity bus conduit (as it does today), giving in effect three major N-S lines of transit in Seattle instead of the 1 to 2 we will have.

      I haven’t had a chance to get the book yet, but wonder if it covers the system envisioned in the 1909 Bogue Plan? I had to smile at Link’s opening ceremony when Dave Ross said “this was a struggle that took 50 years” – no, it took 100.

  5. Somebody whose specialty is railcar design, you’re welcome to weigh in here, but I really doubt that we need a time-machine to configure trains with any extra passenger capacity we need.

    Also equally likely the cars we’ve now specked out can let us put trains into spaces where bulkier cars can’t go. But doubt there’s either a judge or a jury of mid 20th century interurban engineers will award us any serious compensation for an unforced error over this matter. Too much “forced” stuff to be worth the court’s time.


    1. No, you just need trains with open gangways and no interior control cabins, to get a 20% capacity increase for free. Like Portland has. You need an agency that prioritizes low-hanging fruit like that.

      1. this x a billion.

        Good railcars exist out there and are used in many, many systems – but we always have to do things our own way here so that for some reason we can run three car trains if necessary, and also make sure everybody traveling to Lynnwood or Federal Way can have a seat, despite the fact the vast majority of people will be traveling within the city and to Bellevue and people who aren’t will get seats when those people get off (and will get them first on inbound trains).

        Anyone who has ridden in open gangway cars knows how much more spacious and pleasant they feel, and how much they help the feeling of safety – you can always move away from perceived trouble.

        As Mike says, a 20% capacity increase is low-hanging fruit (as is banning bicycles at peak hours to further increase capacity such as nearly all cities worldwide do, but that’s a bit of a third rail here).

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