The ‘risky business’ behind Puget Sound transportation planning

Washington Policy Center Transportation Director Charles Prestrud told The Center Square that “they assumed all of the things that Sound Transit couldn't afford” and that the RTP “assumes full build out of everything in the original ST3 plan.” 

Funding has proved a challenge for local governments when it comes to transportation infrastructure maintenance. However, the ST3 updated defers several light right extensions, including between Ballad and Chinatown/International District, as well as two other stops between Seattle Center and Ballard, Smith’s Cove and InterBay.

“The difficulty, or the problem, as I see it, is it creates this disconnect between the PSRC's very ambitious vision, and what is really most likely to happen,” Prestrud said. “Even though the vision is appealing in a lot of ways, it misleads cities and counties and businesses, for that matter, that are trying to figure out how to plan for themselves. Instead of the nice consistency between the two plans, they no longer line up, either in terms of their budget expenditures or in terms of what gets built, and this is not a good thing.”

Other transportation analysts have weighed in on the RTP update's decreased projection of transit ridership's share of total trips. John Niles and Maggie Fimia, co-chairs of Smarter Transit wrote in a public comment submitted for the PSRC General Assembly, that there’s been a “trend with each new edition of the Plan toward a shrinking market share of transit riders in 2050, especially light rail ride.”

Smarter Transit also noted that under the updated RTP, Sound Transit is the only regional transportation entity projected not to not have a revenue gap.

In an interview with The Center Square in May, PSRC Executive Director Joshua Brown said many of the changed transit projections in the 2026 TRP update are due to changes in workplace trends since the last update 2022, which reflects a shift towards remote work.

“Travel behavior really shifted after the pandemic,” he said. “When we did work to develop our transportation plan in 2022, a lot of the data that we used…was pre-pandemic. A forecast is just that. This is why we update these plans every four years.

“The travel behavior of so many people who continue to work from home has evolved,” he added. “Those all-day riders, people that have to rely on transit because they didn’t have a car, those folks…never left transit.”

While he noted that "the data is ours and that is accurate" in Smarter Transit's public comment, he argued that the comment came to a "false conclusion."

By 2030 with the next RTP update, he said projections could change showing increased transit ridership.

“We might see economic conditions and travel behavior shift. Maybe culturally, more of a strong return to work," he said. "‘We don’t know’ is the short answer, and that’s why we update those plans every four years.”

Nevertheless, Brown also said he is also optimistic about the region’s light rail system’s long term ridership.

“I think what you can expect is we’re going to have the busiest light rail system in the country," Brown added. "Los Angeles has a much larger light rail system than ours in Seattle. We’re going to have more ridership.”

He also noted that with the existing light rail lines such as Lynwood, “those trains are packed during peak periods.”

Prestrud said that potential changes in transportation trends due to things like remote work “makes forecasting a risky business."

"I worked as a long-range planner for a long time, and my crystal ball was usually pretty foggy," he said. "When I thought I knew what was going to happen in the future, sometimes didn’t turn out that way at all.”