Sound Transit CEO Julie Timm was our guest for The Urbanist’s monthly talk series in May. Timm took the reins in September after coming out on top in a national CEO search to replace Peter Rogoff. She left her post as CEO of Greater Richmond Transit Company in Virginia to take the top job at Sound Transit.
The discussion features a wide range of topics facing Seattle’s light rail, from the issues with escalators to the order of stations opening. Timm provides a very frank observation many of the high visibility problems faced by the system. Given the size and complexity of this moving, well-used system, it is not about avoiding outages outright, “the question is how are you going to minimize it.”
If you’d like to read a deeper dive on the subjects covered, we’ve got you covered.
- Next project openings from Tacoma T Line Streetcar to Lynnwood Link and East Link.
- Light rail vehicle availability pinch for Lynnwood Link, due to lack of access to East Link’s operations base.
- Escalator and elevator repair plans.
- Project delivery process improvement recommendations from an outside panel of panels called the Technical Advisory Group.
- Repairing the Westlake Station roof and restoring light rail service after a jewelry store botched a post clock installation.
- The bus operator shortage leading to service cuts and the meager recruitment efforts to stem that so far.
For those that would like to take your live meeting recap with you, the event audio is available via The Urbanist Podcast feed.
This is our first try distributing both the event video as well as the audio through the podcast channel. Let us know if you enjoy getting audio from the meetups in this podcast feed, and we’ll continue making that happen. Get in touch with at podcast (at) the urbanist (dot) org.
Ray Dubicki is a stay-at-home dad and parent-on-call for taking care of general school and neighborhood tasks around Ballard. This lets him see how urbanism works (or doesn’t) during the hours most people are locked in their office. He is an attorney and urbanist by training, with soup-to-nuts planning experience from code enforcement to university development to writing zoning ordinances. He enjoys using PowerPoint, but only because it’s no longer a weekly obligation.