An important quote on transit from Seattle's mayor

System map at full buildout, Seattle LINK light rail.  The distance from Downtown Seattle to Everett is about 30 miles. It's about 35 miles to Tacoma.

Apparently, there is an issue with funding and staging for Sound Transit's Seattle focused Link light rail.  Extensions recently are more about spreading the system outward, polycentrically rather than more intensively on the core of the system.  

One of the reasons it's had major ridership growth is because of extensions to major activity centers in the city, such as the University of Washington.

Years ago, a UMN Center for Transportation Studies report, Economic Impacts of Transitways, Part 1: The Hiawatha Light Rail Line," made the point that the best return on investment for transit spending was on intensifying on the core.  

But most systems that are expanding tend to have a more suburban agenda, because of politicians, and pressure to receive the same kinds of resources as the "big, bad city."  

This is a big issue with the Frontrunner rail service in the Wasatch Front.  It keeps getting extended to new urban development spots amidst the sprawl, rather than focusing on extensions to significant places, like Logan, the home to Utah State University, and intensifications in the Salt Lake Metropolitan Area (I think there should be an underground of I-80 rail line to Park City, and one under I-215 to the University of Utah campus, in particular the research park.)

Seattle mayor Bruce Harrell held a press conference on the issue in the Puget Sound region ("Mayor Harrell: Don’t backtrack on Ballard, West Seattle light rail," Seattle Times).  And he said:

“We must deliver in the densest communities with the greatest ridership,” Harrell declared, in support of the two city extensions. “It’s almost Econ 101. Go where the action is, go where the jobs are.”

Image of NoMa by Skyline Scenes.

I'm not sure I fully understood this until 2004, when the Metrorail system in DC opened its first infill station, the New York Avenue/NoMa station ("NoMa: The Neighborhood That Transit Built," Urban Land Magazine, 2004-2014 10 Years and Growing Success Built on Transit).  

It's a textbook example of this, what a former director of the Metrorail system called "developer oriented transit."

But it was already a great location, just north of Union Station, still in the core of the city.  My lesson was "transit investment when done right, is the urban revitalization intervention with the fastest return on investment."

Graphic from a 2006 Washington Post article.

One unintended consequence was that it made the north part of the H Street neighborhood more accessible to transit, leading to residential in-migration of higher income residents.

This in-migration helped the provision of retail and entertainment amenities in the area, such as a Whole Foods supermarket and an amazing independent bookshop, although the nighttime economy of H Street NE has suffered partly because of competition from other nearby districts, and the loss of ride hailing subsidies by venture capital.

The graphic only covers office space.  At least one dozen multiunit residential buildings have also been built.