Light rail repair work in Seattle leads to overflow crowds and delays

Traffic Lab is a Seattle Times project that digs into the region’s transportation issues to explore the policies and politics that determine how we get around and how billions of dollars in public money are spent.

January was supposed to be the best month to replace worn-out rails in downtown Seattle, but the light rail corridor is still so busy some trains are taking 35 minutes to arrive this week, instead of the already-dismal 26 minutes between trips Sound Transit warned everybody about.

Crowded boarding platforms, confused customers and a technical snafu added extra travel time to the weekday slowdowns already caused by single-tracking, when trains take turns going around the downtown construction zone.

Trackwork began over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend, and full service won’t resume until Monday morning, Feb. 5. During weekends, stations close entirely at Westlake, University Street, Pioneer Square, International District/Chinatown and Stadium, with shuttle buses running between them.

Riders were settling into a slower groove Wednesday afternoon, which spokesperson John Gallagher said was somewhat smoother than Tuesday’s clogged commute. (Hard data, such as average trip times and passenger counts, were not immediately available.)

Still, he said that although Sound Transit scheduled the work months in advance, “I don’t think we anticipated the crowds to have that much impact on schedules.” Mornings have been relatively trouble free.

At downtown’s Westlake Station, the second-busiest in the 80,000-passenger corridor, everybody has to board trains on just the southbound side, doubling the usual cohort there. Then, if trains arrive 26-plus minutes apart instead of the customary eight to 10 minutes, even more footsteps accumulate.

Sheldon Rosevear, a busker in Sound Transit’s new station-activation effort, played “The Metro” by Berlin on his six-string guitar at 4:20 p.m. Wednesday. By the time the 4:33 train to Northgate showed up, it took an unusually long 72 seconds to unload and load people. (The normal target loading time is 20 seconds, according to Sound Transit manuals.) Railcars carried not quite 150 people, or half standing — not too bad and comparable to pre-pandemic volumes, or trains headed to a sports event.

Additional trains are moving north and south of downtown, as planned by Sound Transit, so that combined with other trains going the whole way, those ends of the line can get service every 13 minutes. However, that means many people must get off trains that are local-only.

Commuters William Duncan and Patrick Mendoza said they arrived from a Sand Point-area bus at the U District Station, then had to get out one station later at University of Washington Station around 4:15. To continue south, they waited on the gray tiles until 4:52 p.m. “Travel that usually takes an hour regularly has taken an hour just to get here,” said Mendoza, en route to Capitol Hill.

“This is crazy,” remarked Duncan, who didn’t know until this week about the delays. “Someone texted me and said this is fouled up.”

At least two customer-service ambassadors and five security guards helped people navigate at UW Station, and three police officers even rode through on patrol. Electronic signs mentioned a 25-minute delay because of “crowding,” but that wasn’t correct.

There was only the 26-minute construction delay plus about 10 minutes. There was also a hitch in the railway gate next to Stadium Station that sent a few extra minutes rippling through the corridor, Gallagher said.

Sound Transit says it has no more tricks in the playbook.

“What we hope is that as people adjust to the new travel pattern, things will sort themselves out,” Gallagher said.

He suggests people switch to buses who can do so, for instance, riding from Capitol Hill into downtown, or North Seattle passengers who can ride the Aurora Avenue E Line.

Crews are replacing worn-out tracks that are almost 15 years old, in the 90-degree curve between Westlake and University Street stations. Chips and gouges have sometimes appeared more than 2 inches long, while the spacing between tracks has spread one-eighth inch, causing a rough ride.

This is the third time in a year travelers will cope with less service downtown because of urgent repairs.

The tracks need to be replaced now, Gallagher emphasized, before the Northgate-Lynnwood extension opens sometime this fall, bringing even more people into the central city. Workers are also replacing damaged signal-equipment boxes that were ensconced in the concrete tunnel floors where buses damaged them from 2009-2019 when they shared the tunnel with light rail.

Sound Transit is at least 13 years away from building a proposed second downtown Seattle tunnel — making the line more resilient if one tunnel is blocked — as part of voter-approved West Seattle and Ballard lines whose costs have swelled to $15 billion. More downtown blockages are sure to happen as the agency refurbishes the 34-year old tunnel, whose aging parts range from fire alarm systems to dim lights and leaky walls.

Riders sometimes suggest a crossing switch be installed at University Street Station in the meantime, to add flexibility for trains to maneuver around major tunnel maintenance sites. “That’s certainly something to think about, but that’s also a big project,” Gallagher said. The transit board has not discussed the pros and cons.