Dave Ross, of KIRO 97.3FM, invited WSDOT Secretary Paula Hammond, Developer Kemper Freeman, and Larry Phillips of Sound Transit on his show Sept. 28 to discuss regional transportation. Listen to the entire show here.

Security upgrades and added police presence are the backbone of an effort to increase public safety at the Federal Way Transit Center.
The transit center, 31621 23rd Ave. S., is owned by Sound Transit, but patrolled by hired guards and local police. The city of Federal Way, police and Sound Transit are working in collaboration to install cameras with higher resolution as well as a direct video feed from the transportation facility to the police station.

Islander Aubrey Davis is not a white-haired bureaucrat who tells stories about the past.
No, what you will learn during a conversation with Mr. Davis over a cup of hot chocolate at the new Starbucks on the North end is a man concerned not with the past, but the future.
An island resident for nearly 50 years, Davis has been a key figure in Mercer Island’s history.

Joni Earl, executive director of Sound Transit, talked in a wide-ranging interview with the Reporter Newspapers recently about the regional transportation agency whose mission it is to build an interlocking system of light rail, commuter rail and long-haul buses.

Joni Earl has a simple motto:
Under promise and over deliver.
Failure to follow that recipe for success is what got her agency, Sound Transit, in trouble before she took over as executive director in 2001.
Earl found an agency with a billion-dollar cost overrun because it had no way to track its finances and was promising projects it couldn’t deliver.
Earl brought to bear her expertise in finance and local government in reshaping the culture of an agency that was pretty good at managing and designing bus and commuter rail projects, but derailed when it came to running its basic business operations.

Sound Transit’s light-rail planning represents a progressive approach to mass transit, but the public has long been divided over whether the concepts hold any virtue.
Few people have more of a stake in the fight than Bellevue developer Kemper Freeman, who owns around eight percent of the real-estate in downtown Bellevue.

In the future, you could be paying for your right to use roads the same way you pay your utilities – a bill based on exactly how much you use.
According to Paula Hammond, secretary of transportation, and the state’s highest transportation official, the technology to do that isn’t that far down the road.

Sen. Patty Murray knows the impact of growth. As a child growing up in Bothell, she remembers the sign as people entered the city: Population 998.
“And look at it now,” she marvels of the city that now has more than 30,000 residents.
All that growth is wonderful for the economy, she said, but it has crated a “huge transportation problem.”
Fortunately, Murray is well-positioned to do something about it.

As the founder of research company Jim Hebert Research, the economist and Professor of Business has worked for a wide range of clients, from government agencies like Sound Transit and King County Metro, to cities, including Seattle, Bellevue and Redmond, and multinational companies, including Toyota. He was even hired by the attorneys defending Gary Ridgway, better known as the Green River Killer.
His clients pay him for his insight – to study what is really happening on the ground, to uncover trends, patterns of spending, of consumption, and, pertinent to transportation, of ridership, travel habits, and work and lifestyle choices.

Prediction: The next 15 years will see a transition in automobiles far faster than imagined today.