Big milestone for Sound Transit: Ridership on Link light rail has surpassed that of ST Express

Rid­er­ship on Sound Tran­sit’s Link light rail line just keeps going up.

Today, Sound Tran­sit released its lat­est rid­er­ship num­bers, show­ing a 71% increase in Link light rail rid­er­ship com­pared to the same peri­od in 2015. The mas­sive growth is being dri­ven to a large degree by the Uni­ver­si­ty Link exten­sion, which brought light rail to Capi­tol Hill and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton back in March.

The num­ber of peo­ple rid­ing Link has now sur­passed exceed­ed the num­ber of peo­ple tak­ing ST Express bus­es for the first time in Sound Tran­sit history.

Impor­tant­ly, though, Link’s big gains have not come at the expense of ST Express rid­er­ship. The data shows those rid­er­ship fig­ures on the agen­cy’s net­work of region­al express bus­es have basi­cal­ly remained unchanged.

Sound Tran­sit says aver­age week­day board­ings came to 65,805, which is an 8% increase over the sec­ond quar­ter of 2015.

Crit­ics of Sound Tran­sit occa­sion­al­ly like to allege (with­out foun­da­tion) that intro­duc­ing light rail ser­vice will can­ni­bal­ize bus rid­er­ship. How­ev­er, the expe­ri­ence of oth­er cities has been that build­ing rail increas­es tran­sit rid­er­ship overall.

And that is what we’re now see­ing here in our own region.

We’ve now added three new light rail sta­tions this year: Capi­tol Hill, UW, and Angle Lake The result has been a net win for tran­sit, which is an excel­lent out­come for our region. As we con­nect more neigh­bor­hoods to the rail spine, we’ll like­ly see fur­ther jumps in rid­er­ship. Mean­while, we will con­tin­ue to have Express bus ser­vice as part of our mul­ti­modal tran­sit net­work, while adding two BRT lines with ST3.

Sounder com­muter rail con­tin­ues to see rid­er­ship gains too. Like ST Express, it was intro­duced years before Link began oper­a­tions, so it is a more mature tran­sit ser­vice. Yet it’s still grow­ing. Rid­er­ship is up over 2015, with aver­age week­day board­ings at 16,186. That is a 12% increase com­pared to the sec­ond quar­ter of last year.

Rid­er­ship on the Taco­ma Link street­car is down slight­ly, which was not whol­ly unex­pect­ed. Plans are under­way to extend the street­car so it goes fur­ther, and when new sta­tions open, that should help dri­ve rid­er­ship back in a pos­i­tive direction.

The next Link light rail sta­tions to join the sys­tem will be U Dis­trict, Roo­sevelt, and North­gate, all slat­ed to come online in 2021. The open­ing of those sta­tions will rev­o­lu­tion­ize trav­el between down­town and neigh­bor­hoods in North Seat­tle, pro­vid­ing peo­ple with a grid­lock-free alter­na­tive to Inter­state 5.