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King County officials are planning to ask voters this April to approve a $60 annual car-tab fee and a tenth-of-a-penny sales tax increase for the next decade to prevent catastrophic cuts to Metro bus service and keep local roads whole. Metro is also planning to raise bus fares by another 25 cents in 2015—the fifth fare hike since 2008—but will soften the economic blow by creating a cheaper fare for...

There are plenty of words to describe the ongoing drama over Seattle’s not-boring tunnel boring fiasco. Ironic, for one, given that the 8-inch pipe that brought the world’s largest tunneling machine to a halt was put in Bertha’s way by none other than the Washington State Department of Transportation, as part of the early feasibility studies for the very tunnel they’re now trying to build. Entertaining, because both WSDOT and Seattle Tunneling Partners,...

To inform debate over coal exports and oil shipments, Sightline is analyzing public at-grade rail crossings from Sandpoint, Idaho to Cherry Point, Washington. If fossil fuel companies succeed in shipping the volumes of fuel they have planned, they will—by sheer physical necessity—disrupt vehicle and rail traffic all along the rail route. In this chapter of the series, we examine the effects in King County. Coal and oil trains—loaded in the...

Earlier this year, the US House of Representatives—a body that has shut down the government over health care reform, taken a hatchet to food stamps, opposed regulating greenhouse gases, and held immigration legislation hostage—still managed to support a federal transportation bill that devoted roughly 20 percent of its funding to transit + bikes + walking and 80 percent to roads. How much worse could the road-heavy transportation package being floated...

There are places in this world the savvy traveler would never drive with any hope of finding street parking: Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco, for example, or just about anywhere in downtown Los Angeles. That’s what you might think, anyway. If you actually drive to Fisherman’s Wharf today, though, you will have no problem finding a curb spot. A space will offer itself on each nearby block, if you’re willing...

Here’s a picture of hundreds of people who crowded into a hearing room Tuesday to protest looming and massive bus cuts at King County Metro. If this looks familiar, it’s because we went through a similar exercise two years ago. This time, if the Washington State Legislature doesn’t grant the transit agency new taxing authority to backfill an immediate $75 million budget hole, Metro says it will begin eliminating 600,000...

Go to the Washington transportation department’s website and you’ll find this: Our highest priority is maintaining and preserving the safe and long-lasting performance of existing infrastructure, facilities and services. But go to the new transportation package proposed by the House Democrats and you’ll find a funding arrangement that looks like this: The House package represents a perplexing starting point for discussing transportation funding. The state has a massive backlog of...

And so it begins. Faced with mounting costs and uncertain funding, the planners of the Columbia River Crossing are hoping to “save” money by postponing parts of the project. And unsurprisingly, biking and walking investments are among the first things on the chopping block. If you want the details, BikePortland has the goods. Of course, it’s just a proposal at this point. But it’s a telling one. First, because of the...

For Seattle traffic-watchers, Mike Lindblom at the Seattle Times has the most important story of the month: the news that a new state traffic study predicts that high rush hour tolls on the Alaskan Way Viaduct tunnel will divert 9,100 cars into downtown Seattle during the afternoon commute. For those of you who are counting, that’s a diversion rate of about 42 percent. The Times editors considered it a bombshell. It...

Compared to the noise about congestion from a basketball arena in Seattle’s SoDo district, there’s an eerie silence when it comes to congestion from coal trains there. Yet coal trains would almost certainly create traffic problems in SoDo and elsewhere, with potentially serious consequences for Seattle’s manufacturing and industrial businesses. The proposed coal export terminal near Bellingham would add 16 loaded and empty coal trains per day, if operating at...