Sound Transit 2 - Our Story

Successfully Serving the People of the Central Puget Sound

There is rapidly growing demand for mass transit today in the Central Puget Sound region. Ridership on Sound Transit Express buses, Sounder commuter trains and Tacoma Link light rail has doubled in the past five years. From July 2007 to July 2008, ridership on Sounder grew 38 percent. During the same one-year period, there was an increase in ridership on ST Express buses of 25 percent.

Rising fuel costs, congestion and environmental concerns have contributed to particularly dramatic growth in ridership this past summer. Average July 2008 weekday transit ridership was up 25 percent over July 2007. Sound Transit today moves about 61,000 people each weekday, an increase of more than 10,000 over February 2008 ridership.

In 2009 Link light rail will connect Downtown Seattle and Southeast Seattle with Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, making stops at 14 different stations along a 15.6-mile route. Link will run up to 20 hours per day, 7 days a week and will carry 30,000 people every day. Before the end of 2008, construction will begin on University Link, a northward extension of light rail to the University of Washington that will triple light rail ridership when it opens in 2016.

Since 1998 Sound Transit has successfully delivered more than 40 major construction projects around the region, including new transit centers, stations and park-and-rides in growing communities across the region. Sound Transit weathered challenges and established a solid track record for delivering complex mass transit projects to the citizens of Pierce, King and Snohomish counties. With the region's voracious appetite for transit services, many of these facilities are already at or approaching capacity.

Now, with our population set to increase 1.2 million by 2030, the region has decided how its mass transit system should expand. Earlier, through an extensive process of gathering public comment in 2008, we heard from thousands of people and confirmed that expanding mass transit is of urgent importance.

This website outlines the integrated plan for the region that came from that process, a plan that responds to the public's call for immediate bus service expansions as well as investment in rail mass transit.