Transportation in Seattle - History

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 to 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 came in 1884, with horse-drawn cars plying 3.5 miles (5.6 km) 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.

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 and 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 inexpensive 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 188 miles (303 km) 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 fare of $2.25-$3.00.