I grew up in Massachusetts. When I go back and spend a day in “Boston”, it might actually involve being in Brookline, Cambridge, Medford, Somerville, Chelsea, Everett, and Revere. That is not my relationship with Seattle and the municipalities around it. Sometimes I don’t leave its boundaries for months at a time. Much of what I need and want to do is located within the city limits. That’s not true all the time, but it’s true often enough that it heavily influences the way that I think about measuring transit access in Seattle. I presuppose that a person in Seattle mostly cares about getting around Seattle. The access analyses of the city that I produce measure the ability to do that.
Making trips within Seattle is, of course, not everyone’s priority all of the time. Looking at access at the city level is also a somewhat awkward way to analyze transit in this area. Seattle does not run or plan the transit service located within it. It provides some funding and participates in the planning process, but most transit in the city is under the purview of King County. Sound Transit, operating the Link Light Rail, exists at the level of a multi-county consortium. City-level access analysis feels like the most instructive tool for evaluating everyday transit quality, but it’s unlikely to be the most relevant tool for the agencies making the decisions. Recognizing that, I produced a thirty-minute transit and walking access analysis for King County. I feared this would be impractically slow and expensive—a fear that was neither entirely born out nor totally meritless. There are caveats to calculating and considering access for the county that are not exposed at the city level.
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