Seattle's daily light rail ridership jumps to No. 1 in U.S.
Sound Transit's new light rail connection over Lake Washington has unleashed a tsunami of new passengers between Bellevue and Seattle, boosting the regional total to 155,000 daily boardings.
Transit staff verified the startling April number on Friday, and said similar loads continued through May. Those preliminary counts, based on laser scanners inside the railcars, represent an instant increase of about one-fourth.
The regional agency counted 122,700 average daily riders in February, prior to opening the world's first passenger line on a floating bridge March 28.
That was about six years later than voters were promised, following route disputes in Bellevue and a rebuild of concrete track ties Sound Transit called defective.
Besides new crosslake service, the start of Mariners baseball season is a perennial source of rail trips. On-time train performance, abysmal two years ago, has been improving lately.
Yonah Freemark, senior researcher at the Urban Institute, was the first to notice something was up, when he spotted an eye-popping count of 4.8 million Sound Transit light rail and streetcar boardings for April, in the National Transit Database.
The most ridden in the nation, above L.A., Boston, or San Diego," he posted on Bluesky this week.
New data has been long awaited, with much caution, since last winter when Sound Transit ran into methodological roadblocks, as it merged the north-south 1 Line with the east-west 2 Line, sharing the same tracks from downtown Seattle to Lynnwood. Its public "dashboard" still stops at February.
Agency spokesperson Henry Bendon said Sound Transit circulated a staff message Friday about becoming No. 1 in light rail - while pointing out the trackways are mostly elevated or tunneled, unlike midsized peers like Portland or Minneapolis running mostly at surface.
"The North Seattle section is arguably more like a subway, he said.
The number to beat is 185,000, which Sound Transit forecast postpandemic for its whole three-spoked, 58-mile network joining Lynnwood, Seattle, Redmond and Federal Way.
Sounder commuter train, express bus and King County Metro usage remain far below prepandemic levels, while light rail is setting local records, with appeal far beyond the traditional commuter base. Sound Transit's taxpayers and future customers are feeling battered by a $35 billion long-term funding gap, megaproject delays, and a possible cost cut that ditches promised service to Ballard.
But for now, light rail is moving the equivalent of more than two football stadiums full of people per day, or all vehicle drivers and passengers on the Interstate 90 freeway bridge.
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This story was originally published June 6, 2026 at 6:42 AM.