Sound Transit service disruptions + Expansion plans for 2024 | ARC Seattle

WELCOME BACK INTO THE DEEP END... IT'S GOING TO BE A BUSY YEAR FOR SOUNDTRANSIT. 2024 IS PACKED WITH PROJECTS THAT WILL BENEFIT COMMUTERS. JOHN GALLIGER IS THE MEDIA RELATIONS MANAGER WITH SOUNDTRANSIT AND JOINS US FROM THE ARC LOUNGE THIS MORNING. JOHN, THANK YOU FOR COMING IN THIS MORNING. BEFORE WE DIVE INTO FUTURE PROJECTS, LET'S TALK ABOUT A MAJOR SERVICE DISRUPTION ON LINK LIGHTRAIL. PEOPLE FEELING THE IMPACTS OF THAT TODAY. GIVE US SOME DETAILS ON THAT. Sure. It started this past weekend. Thank you for having me. It started this past weekend. Through February 4th, we're going to be doing work in the tunnel downtown. Two big projects that have to get done. One is a rail replacement and one is replacing some signal boxes. That requires us to single track through the tunnel. That means on weekdays, there's going to be service every 26 minutes between U-Dub and stadium stations. So instead of the usual like eight minutes, it's every 26 minutes. So people need to wait a lot longer for trains. They need to plan for that. There'll be trains running every 13 minutes on either end between Angle Lake and stadium and Northgate and U-Dub. People should check the headways, make sure they're getting on the right trains, because every other train will just be terminating at U-Dub or stadium. So check the headways, leave yourself extra time, because it's going to take you a lot longer to get to your destination. On weekends, the downtown stations are going to be closed altogether. We'll be running a bus bridge between Capitol Hill and Soto stations. So this is work we have to do now, when our ridership is at its lowest, to be prepared for the big openings that are coming this year, particularly with Lynwood. That brings us to our next point. Yeah, it definitely sounds like the current disruptions are going to really impact the morning commute and the evening commute this week. But as you mentioned, later this year, Sun Transit enhancing service between Snohomish County and downtown Seattle and the east side and Seattle. Can you tell us a little bit more about those expansions coming in the spring and in the fall and what impact that will have on commuters? Sure. It's going to be an exciting year. So this fall, we're going to be opening service on the east side between South Bellevue and Redmond Technology Center. That's going to be a portion of our East Link line. That's going to benefit riders on the east side. It's going to be a little taste of the full line, which will be opening next year across the floating bridge. We haven't set an opening date yet, but it's going to be sometime this spring. And then in the fall, we're going to be opening the line from Northgate all the way up to Lynwood with four new stations. And that's going to add thousands more riders on the existing one line. So it's going to get a lot busier riding the light rail. That's part of the reason we're doing the work now. But it's actually exciting to think of the additional riders and the options people are going to have. They're not going to have to sit in that soul-crushing traffic on I-5 from Lynwood down into town. Yeah, some riders are very excited to see that. So let's switch gears a little bit here, John. In 2023, so last year, we covered quite a few stories about violence at light rail stations in particular. And this expansion likely means more commuters. So what is Sound Transit doing to boost security and make people feel a little bit more safe? Sure. So we signed four new security contracts last year. And we've more than doubled our security presence on trains and in stations. We really have been making a concerted effort to beef up security. We have a rapid response team. We have, you know, make sure that when people see something, they can text something to security and we'll get folks out there rapidly. We know that there have been some high-profile incidents. Every incident that we see really disturbs us and bothers us. We take it very seriously. Overall, the numbers are relatively small. Really, we're only talking in the dozens. But that doesn't mitigate the fact that they're disturbing. And we know that they bother our riders and they bother us. And that's why we're taking every step we possibly can to make sure that the trains remain as safe as they possibly can. In addition to that, John, we've been talking about Sound Transit's new ticket enforcement policy that started in November and the proposal to add gates to stop people from skipping out on paying for a ticket. We actually put this out on social media and a lot of people said there's a lack of enforcement when it comes to checking tickets. So what do you all plan on discussing this week when it comes to that policy and how will that be enforced? So we're really only at the beginning stages of the fair compliance policy. So we really want to see how that's going to have an impact on compliance and what those numbers are going to look like. So we want to give it some more time to see what's happening. We are going to be talking to our board about, you know, what fair gates might look like. The stations weren't designed for fair gates. So we're talking about a pretty large construction project and a pretty expensive one. So that would be sort of a big and longer-term project. In the meantime, we really want to see what the fair compliance policy will do for us in terms of getting us to the numbers we want to. John, one more question for you. This just came to mind a moment ago. Can you sort of just talk about the challenging times that the agency is in with the increase in inflation that we've been seeing? I know that there's a lot of difficult decisions that need to be made about trying to make sure that what voters have voted on in the past couple of decades actually comes to fruition down the road. There's obviously been some delays with some projects. But talk about the difficulty that the agency faces in terms of money and how those difficult decisions have to be made to make sure that voters get what they want to see. That's a really good question. When voters voted on the most recent set of projects in ST3, we were looking at a very different environment. Over the past seven, eight years, construction costs and property costs in the region have really gone through the roof. Controlling those costs is really difficult. We've been doing our best to do that, but that is a really big challenge. It's not just a challenge for us. It's a challenge for everyone who's working on capital projects in the region. That's something we all are grappling with. That is a major external pressure on the agency. We're working to really deal with that and to handle it. But it's going to be a challenge that we and everyone else who's working on construction projects in the region are going to have to be grappling with in the foreseeable future. It's tough times all around, I think, for everybody. It's not just us feeling the impact when we go to the grocery store. It's agencies that are dealing with taxpayer money having to make those really tough decisions on projects that voters were hoping to see, and hopefully they will see them. John, we appreciate you joining us from the Arc Lounge this morning to talk about what's to come. There's a lot of excitement going back to what we're going to see with the Linwood extension, what's happening on the east side, too. I know particularly on the east side, a lot of people have been waiting for that with some of the delays that that project has seen. We're going to see some big expansions over the next year with these lines. It's going to help a lot of people with those long commutes that they currently deal with out on the roads. I'm looking forward to that because we do have a lot of people here in western Washington. In fact, we get a lot of people moving here year after year, and traffic's only getting worse. It's going to take some time, but I'm glad to hear that it's just right around the corner this fall with that new east link light rail expansion. It's going to be here before we know it, but it is going to take some time for them to get some work done. So just be patient in the process. I know guiding drivers every single morning. We deal with road closures, especially this week while they're doing that work through downtown Seattle. Be patient with those crews because they are working to bring us something special.