Transportation in Seattle is largely focused on the automobile like many other cities in western North America; however, the city is just old enough for its layout to reflect the age when railways and trolleys predominated. These older modes of transportation were made for a relatively well-defined downtown area and strong neighborhoods at the end of several former streetcar lines, now mostly bus lines.
Due to Seattle's isthmus-like geography and the concentration of jobs within the city, much of the flow of transportation in the metropolitan area is through the city proper. North-south transportation is highly dependent on the Interstate 5 corridor, which connects the Puget Sound area with southwest Washington cities and the Portland metropolitan area, as well as cities to the north such as Bellingham and Vancouver, Canada. I-5 continues as British Columbia Highway 99 at the U.S.-Canada border's Peace Arch crossing, between Blaine and Surrey. State Route 99 is also a major arterial in the western half of the city; it included the now-defunct Alaskan Way Viaduct along the Seattle waterfront. The Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement tunnel was opened in place of the elevated viaduct in February 2019 on account of seismic instability.
Transportation to and from the east is via State Route 520's Evergreen Point Floating Bridge and Interstate 90's Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge and Third Lake Washington Bridge, all over Lake Washington. Those bridges are respectively the first, second, and fifth longest floating bridges in the world. State Route 522 connects Seattle to its northeastern suburbs.
Two public transportation agencies are based in Seattle: King County Metro, which operates local and commuter buses within King County, and Sound Transit, which operates commuter rail, light rail, and regional express buses within the greater Puget Sound region. In recent years, as Seattle's population and employment have surged, transit has played an increasingly important role in transportation within the metro area. By 2017, nearly 50% of commuters to downtown Seattle arrived via mass transit.
Washington State Ferries, the largest ferry system in the United States and the second largest in the world, operates a passenger-only ferry from Colman Dock in Downtown to Vashon Island, car ferries from Colman Dock to Bainbridge Island and to Bremerton, and a car ferry from West Seattle to Vashon Island to Southworth. Seattle was once home to the Kalakala, a streamlined art deco-style ferry that sailed from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Seattle contains most of Boeing Field, officially named King County International Airport; but most airline passengers use Seattle-Tacoma International Airport in the city of SeaTac. Seattle is also served by three Amtrak routes from the King Street Station: the Cascades, Coast Starlight, and Empire Builder lines.
History
Even though Seattle is old enough that railways and streetcars once dominated its transportation system, the city is now largely dominated by automobiles but has recently started rebuilding streetcar lines and light rail routes. Seattle is also serviced by an extensive network of bus routes and two commuter rail routes connecting it to many of its suburbs.
Organized land transportation in Seattle dates back at least to 1871; by that date, a wagon traveled twice daily from what is now First Avenue (near Elliott Bay) to Lake Washington; the fare was 50 cents, no small sum for that era. In 1880 a two-horse carriage carried passengers and freight from roughly today's Pioneer Square to Belltown every two hours at a fare of 12.5 cents in an open coach or 15 cents in a covered coach. This was shortly followed by similar services connecting out to Lake Union and Madison Park on Lake Washington.
Water transport was important even within what are now city limits. A steamer connected South Lake Union to Latona (between today's Lower Wallingford and the University District) and another steamer crossed Green Lake.
The first street railway, Seattle Street Railway, came in 1884, with horse-drawn cars plying of track up today's Second Avenue to Pine Street, then up First Avenue to Battery Street. Yesler Way and Jackson Street got their cable cars (from Pioneer Square to Lake Washington) in 1888, allowing public transportation on routes over hills too steep for horses. Electric streetcars appeared in 1889, making Seattle one of the first cities in the United States to adopt this innovation.. Newell also writes that the entrepreneur of both the first horse-drawn streetcars and the first electric streetcars was Frank Osgood from Boston; his partners in the enterprise were Seattle pioneer David Denny and Judge Thomas Burke.
The Great Seattle Fire did not slow this progress at all: by 1890, there were lines along the waterfront from South Seattle (today's South Park) to Lower Queen Anne and from the center of town to Capitol Hill, Madison Park, and Madrona. These were instrumental in the creation of a relatively well-defined downtown and strong neighborhoods at the end of their lines.
At the turn of the century, the streets were so bad that a boy named Joseph Bufonchio drowned in a sink-hole at the corner of Third and Jackson. As Gordon Newell noted in 1956, contemporary reports did not seem to consider this particularly unusual.
At that time, there were about 25 independent transit lines in Seattle. By 1907, the Seattle Electric Company, owned by Boston-based Stone & Webster, leveraged its foothold in the electric power industry to consolidate these into one operation, known after 1912 as the Puget Sound Traction, Light and Power Company. It cost a nickel to ride. Puget Sound Traction was bought out by the city in 1919 for US$15 million. However, under the city's management, the streetcars chronically ran a loss (even after a 1923 fare increase to three rides for a quarter, a fare of 8-and-a-third cents), and the quality of the system deteriorated.
The advent of the automobile sounded the death knell for rail in Seattle. Tacoma–Seattle railway service ended in 1929 and the Everett–Seattle service came to an end in 1939, replaced by automobiles running on the recently developed highway system. When the city received a US$10.2 million federal grant to pay off transit-related debts and modernize its transit system, rails on city streets were paved over or removed, and the opening in 1940 of the Seattle trolleybus system brought the end of streetcar service in Seattle in the early hours of April 12, 1941. This left an extensive network of buses (including of trolleybus lines) under an independent Municipal Transportation Commission as the only mass transit within the city and throughout the region.
The new transit system was jammed and profitable during the gasoline and rubber rationing of World War II, but the automobile reigned supreme after the war. Fares rose to 10 cents, the first of many increases that would lead to a present-day regular adult fare of $2.75. Various proposals to expand mass transit were rejected in the 1950s and '60s. In 1972, voters approved the establishment of Metro Transit to run bus lines in King County. A further expansion was approved in 1996, following yet another defeat in 1995.
Streets, roads, and automobiles
Seattle set its first speed limit in the 1880s, in the days of horse-drawn vehicles. At that time, traffic in the Pioneer Square neighborhood was limited to .
The city is described in a mid-20th-century civics textbook as "a city of islands—islands created both by water and by abrupt valleys that can be traversed only by bridges." Already by 1948, 221,500 vehicles a day crossed the city's bridges across the Lake Washington Ship Canal and Duwamish River; except for the high Aurora Bridge (officially George Washington Memorial Bridge) across the Ship Canal, these were all drawbridges. This was before the construction of the Interstate Highways or State Route 520; the original Lake Washington Floating Bridge (opened 1940) provided the only road out of town to the east; construction of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the first limited-access highway through the city center, was still underway.
Even with the lesser population of that time and fewer major highways, difficulty parking downtown had already become "practically an institution". The total number of vehicles parking downtown in a day would already have filled a parking lot the size of downtown had they all been there at once; naturally, many of these were there only briefly for shopping. Parking meters had been introduced in the early 1940s, and multi-level parking garages provided some relief (and would later provide more), but the impact of the automobile on the city was very apparent. The city was considering various proposals, such as the establishment of large parking lots on the periphery of downtown with shuttle buses into the center. The city was seeking (and failing to get) state permission to use the right of eminent domain to acquire property for multi-level parking lots. Later, in the mid-1960s, the historic Seattle Hotel building was torn down for just this purpose; the reaction against that sparked the preservationist movement for the revival of Pioneer Square and made it clear that the city would not solve its problem by demolishing a ring around downtown.
Over 15,000 Seattleites are members of the car sharing program Zipcar (formerly Flexcar). While not all members are frequent users, the use of these shared cars has been substantial enough to justify the purchase of over 150 cars and other light vehicles for the program, with an additional vehicle purchased approximately every ten days. Two other car-sharing services, Car2Go and ReachNow, formerly operated within Seattle.
The city maintains over of sidewalks that cover approximately 27 percent of streets in Seattle. Large areas of the city's annexed suburban neighborhoods, including north of North 85th Street and south of Interstate 90, lack sidewalks. , 13,500 blocks lack sidewalks.
SR 99 Tunnel
The SR 99 Tunnel is a bored double-decker highway tunnel carrying a section of State Route 99 (SR 99) under Downtown Seattle from SoDo in the south to South Lake Union in the north.
Since the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, the replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct has been the source of much political controversy demonstrating the Seattle process. Options for replacing the viaduct, which carried 110,000 vehicles per day, included either replacing it with a cut-and-cover tunnel, replacing it with another elevated highway, or eliminating it while modifying other surface streets and public transportation. The current plan emerged in 2009 when government officials agreed to a deep-bore tunnel.
Construction began in July 2013 using "Bertha", at the time the world's largest-diameter tunnel boring machine. After several delays, tunnel boring was completed in April 2017, and the tunnel opened to traffic on February 4, 2019.
Freeways in the metropolitan region There are 21 different freeways and highways that make up the Seattle freeway system. They are: Interstate 5, Interstate 405, Interstate 90, Interstate 705, US 2, SR 3, SR 16, SR 18, the Alaskan Way Viaduct/SR 99, SR 167, SR 303/Waaga Way, SR 410, SR 509, SR 512, SR 518, SR 520, SR 525, SR 526, SR 599, the Port of Seattle owned Airport Expressway, and the City of Seattle owned West Seattle Freeway. Interstate 5 is the major north–south route through the region. Interstate 5 is four or five lanes for most of its way through the metro area. The freeway connects the metro area to California, Oregon, and British Columbia.