Seattle’s transit buildout is running straight into the accountability test — and how that goes could shape every bus change, bike lane, and bond measure voters are asked to trust next.
This is The Seattle Daily Fix. Today: transit growth under pressure. We’re talking ridership, SoDo bus reroutes, downtown bike-lane gaps, Sound Transit debt, and City Hall’s next labor-and-tech fight.
Let’s get into it.
First up: the numbers behind the ride.
From Michael Smith at 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.
Yes, transit nerd catnip. But also — this is accountability in spreadsheet form. If agencies are going to keep rebuilding the bus network around Link, riders should be able to see, route by route, what’s actually working.
And now, the construction tradeoff.
From Ryan Packer at The Urbanist:
The SoDo "E3" bus way between Royal Brougham and Spokane Street is a quiet workhorse of Seattle's transit system, providing a dedicated pathway for local and regional buses through South Downtown, but Sound Transit will be building a light rail guideway in its place, connecting to West Seattle and ultimately a second rail tunnel underneath Downtown to be built as part of Ballard Link.
This sounds boring right up until your bus is the one crawling through it. If Fourth Avenue is about to take on hundreds more buses a day, the fixes can’t just look nice on a slide deck. They have to protect riders and keep transit moving.
On the bike network now.
From Amy Abdelsayed at 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 a lot of work. A greener map is real progress, but riders still care about the block-by-block experience: does it actually feel safe? Still, closing the last downtown gap after nearly a decade — that’s a milestone bike advocates have been waiting for.
Now to the money side.
From The News Tribune:
Agency officials recently announced the Sound Transit 3 (ST3) rail program is short a whopping $35 billion, equaling $10,294 for every person in Sound Transit’s district. The news sent shockwaves throughout communities around the Puget Sound, who are nervous about deleted projects, a high tax burden and future promises made on car tab relief.
That is not a rounding error. That’s a governance crisis with a transit map attached. If Sound Transit wants decades of taxpayer patience, it has to show decades of financial discipline — not come back with bigger bond plans and a shrug.
And finally, City Hall’s delivery-app fight.
From Erica C. Barnett at PubliCola:
A recent study by the city’s Office of Labor Standards now confirms what many drivers themselves said when testifying against the Nelson bill: Between January 2024 and July 2025, the average pay for drivers working for the five largest delivery companies average pay increased despite a reduction in tips, indicating that the legislation raising worker pay succeeded at its goal.
That’s a pretty clean rebuke to the delivery apps’ doom-loop argument. The workers said higher standards would raise pay without blowing up the market — and the city’s own data says, yeah, basically, that happened.
We’ve got links to every story from today’s briefing in the show notes, so if one of these stuck with you, go read a little deeper. That’s The Seattle Daily Fix for Monday, May 4th. This is a Lantern Podcast.