Seattle is building the little connections that make transit actually work. And at the same time, City Hall is looking at a hard pause on data centers.
This is The Seattle Daily Fix. It’s Saturday, and we’re looking at busway detours, new ridership signals, a stubborn bike-lane gap, and a proposed timeout on server farms.
Alright, let’s get into it.
First up: Fourth Avenue, and the buses that are going to need it.
From The Urbanist:
The Sound Transit board looks to be moving full speed ahead on West Seattle Link, eager to start construction on the only Sound Transit 3 project in the pipeline that has received the federal go-ahead. With the green light to start work potentially coming as soon as the end of the year, there's a lot of work happening behind the scenes to get ready.
This is the part of a mega-project that sounds boring right up until it ruins somebody’s commute. If you close a key bus corridor, the detour can’t be an afterthought. It has to be treated like infrastructure. Fourth Avenue is about to become a much bigger transit street, whether it’s ready or not.
And staying with transit, from Seattle Transit Blog:
The Seattle Transit Ridership dashboard has been updated to include 2025 ridership data for King County Metro routes and Sound Transit routes operated by Metro. In March 2025, Metro only updated a few routes, mostly with frequency adjustments from Seattle Transit Measure funding. In August 2025, Metro introduced four routes and adjusted various other routes on the Eastside as part of its East Link Connections restructure.
This is transit-nerd data, sure, but it’s useful data. Service changes are the promise; ridership is the receipt. And the Eastside restructure is worth watching, because if routes like these catch on, that’s a stronger case for more frequent, better-connected bus service around Link.
Next, from Amy Abdelsayed at the SDOT Blog:
Seattle's newest protected bike lane will connect Belltown to Seattle Center's southeast corner, near the Space Needle and the Museum of Pop Culture. The City Center Bike Network map will be fully green for the first time since the broader downtown project launched in 2015.
That “well, kind of” is doing some work here. A map can turn green before the ride actually feels seamless. But closing the last visible gap in a downtown bike network? That still matters. It makes more of the city feel reachable without a car.
Now to City Hall, from City Council News Releases:
Councilmembers from the Seattle City Council have announced plans to introduce an emergency moratorium on the construction of new data centers in the city. The bill will create a 365-day ban while a resolution calls for impact studies on infrastructure, economy, and public health.
That is Seattle putting a very bright pause sign in front of the AI infrastructure boom. The politics here are pretty direct: if data centers are going to compete for power, land, and public tolerance, City Hall wants the receipts before more concrete gets poured.
If something in today’s rundown caught your ear, the links to every story are in the show notes, so you can dig in when you’ve got a minute.
That’s The Seattle Daily Fix for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.