Metro GM Michelle Allison shares vision at Seattle City Club event

King County Metro General Manager Michelle Allison and Sound Transit Chief Strategist Officer Nadia Anderson were interviewed by Puget Sound Regional Council Executive Director Josh Brown on April 2, 2025. Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine made a brief guest appearance. Seattle City Club hosted the Civic Cocktail event, entitled “Transforming Transportation: Improving Efficiency, Safety and Access.”

Metro is appreciative of the great conversation with community members. We’re pleased to share the full video courtesy of the Seattle City Club, as well as quotes from Michelle Allison. Excerpts have been edited for brevity and clarity.

Josh Brown: It’d be great to learn a little more about you. I know the role that you’re in is all about public service. It’s about a commitment to doing great things for a community. I’d love to learn how you got here.

Michelle Allison: I came to King County Metro through a circuitous route.

I was born in Homer, Alaska, which had about 4,000 people year-round and 8 to 10,000 people annually because of the seasonal nature of tourism. I had a graduating class of 10. It’s really small and it’s really pretty. I recommend everyone go there. Don’t do a cruise. Drive from Anchorage to Homer and it’ll be worth it.

But the throughline is the community. When I was growing up in Homer, a very clear part of the storytelling was “How do you get places?’ Alaska is gigantic. We would go on basketball—I’m five feet tall and I was on a basketball team; that’s how small Homer is—and you would drive for 14 hours in the same state. You don’t do that by yourself. You do that with community.

So, transit—in its informal tone—was how I was raised. “Who’s going to Anchorage to go to Costco? I got a trailer. Put your stuff, grab your order, pay me 10 bucks for gas. “I’ve got seven children that need to get somewhere. How do we get them there? Who’s going to do this?” It was a lot about mobility in a really informal way that I never fully appreciated.

And then there was one pocket in my life where we lived in Curitiba, Brazil from when I was eight to 12 years old. Curitiba is where bus rapid transit was born. The buses were wrapped in green and they were beautiful. They were all about the environment and really leaning into mobility.

I had a four-year period where I lived in this country that had transit. My parents trusted it enough that I didn’t know the language, I didn’t know the culture, I didn’t know the rules, but my parents knew that it was a thing that was important. So my sister and I took the bus all the time—to ballet class, to parties, to school and to friends’ houses. It became a really informative part of “What is this thing that is doing all of the formal components of what we informally put together as a community in Homer?’

That was a really impactful part when we moved back to Alaska when I was 12. I saw this missing link of that mobility and that option. And I saw how the community filled it.

So when I found my way to King County as an intern for the King County Council as a I saw policymaking and I saw transportation, I thought, “A-ha. This is going to be the moment where I figure out how to make the world a perfect place.” That’s what interns do. (Audience laughter.) You think about perfection and you’re really wide-eyed about it.

I had the incredible opportunity to work on land use and transportation, and I got hooked. I saw that the most impactful way was to be closer to the work.

Policy is really important and it’s really important that we have good policymakers. And it’s also important that you have people that can operationalize that to get to the vision of that policy.

So I tried to find my way closer to the work and I found that through Metro. I had this incredible opportunity to join Metro seven years ago as Chief of Staff. And, through all of the different things, King County Executive Dow Constantine said, “Hey, you’re up. Go be the General Manager.”

I can’t even describe the experience of being that kid in Homer, Alaska who is literally scraping ice off the window as we drive to Fairbanks, recognizing the importance of mobility, to being the head of an organization that has 6,000 people and that provides service to over 300,000 people.

What we need to not take for granted is that those trips aren’t just 300,000 people a day. Those are people making it to school. They’re making it to work. They’re making sure our economy runs. We’re giving them a really good, living-wage job. This is the fabric of our community.

Every day, I get to be part of this beautiful internal and external conversation about service delivery from a public perspective. That is what my nerdy, intern-self wanted and every day I get to live it out through King County Metro.

Josh Brown: Pre-pandemic, the Seattle region had the fastest transit ridership growth in the region by virtually every measure. We know what happened during the pandemic. We’ve ha a lot of folks prophesize about our downtowns and about transit service. Let’s have a level-set. Where are we today? How has transit ridership changed? How is your agency responding? Where are we in terms of ridership growth in the system?

Michelle Allison: We’re definitely still in that space where we’re inviting people back onto transit system. Every year, we see growth over growth. Last year, I’m really pleased to say, we saw 12% growth in the entire system. This means we’re the second-largest transit system in an urban environment for growth. That means people want our service.

Twelve percent is a very good number. We’re at roughly 300,000 riders on the weekdays. We were at 400,000 in 2019. I struggle with that comparison because everything is different. It is not a fair comparison. It is a data point and a moment in time, but the point in Josh’s second question is the right one: the travel patterns have changed. People need us differently and we need to provide that service differently to get those people back onto the system.

That’s an incredibly important part to both inform the choices we’re making and also for a comparison component. Three hundred thousand riders a day is a really good number. We’re going to see it increase over and over and over again over the next couple years because what we have also seen is when you continue to provide safe, clean and reliable service and when you start to invest your service hours where people need it, they will use your system. Because that reliability and that accessibility is what people need.

In 2019, when you asked people how they used transit, 54% mentioned work, 16% mentioned fun and 2% mentioned special events.

When we asked people more recently, 48% said work, 48% said fun and 31% said special events.

People are using transit differently. I’m using transit differently. People want a Tuesday 1:30 p.m. trip just as much as they want a Tuesday 8 a.m. trip.

We want an all-day network with frequency that meets our lives. We’re going to provide service that meets people where they’re at—they need to pick up their kids, drop their dry cleaning off, go to work and get home—in the same way.

That’s the kind of service we need to provide, which means an all-day network. We knew that in 2019, but we still had these really high peak service times—high a.m. and high p.m.—but we didn’t have that day connection. Now people are saying, “I will use you more and I will use you regularly if you get me that all-day connection.” We’re seeing that very clearly in our system.

This last September, we were able to reinvest 150,000 hours of service—that’s our currency, the monetary commodity of transit—in conjunction with new Link light rail stations coming online and RapidRide expanding. In every single space where you saw an investment in frequency, you saw investment in ridership, which proves the point. People want transit to be convenient to meet their needs. When we’re able to deliver it, they’re delivering us their loyalty, their commitment and their service. That’s what we’re here for.

We have a lot of work to do, although the thing that I love the most about this region is they actually want transit. When you go to other parts of the United States and I sit in conferences with other transit colleagues, they’re having their funding cut willingly. Their boards are cutting or threatening to cut their funding for transit because it’s not the essential fabric of their neighborhood, as we see it is here. People here are willing to say, “I’ll pay a dollar more for that if you give me my 1:30 p.m. on a Tuesday.”

That relationship and that exchange is incredibly real in our region. We need to find a way to meet it faster because that’s the appetite people have. “Give it to me today please or tomorrow please. Don’t make me wait 10 years.”

That’s where we’re seeing our recovery come from. We are also recovering together as a community. It’s not just how transit is recovering because transit recovery is at the pace of the community recovery. We’re also seeing a lot of other elements come back online—whether it’s workforce nodes or whether it’s community connections. This idea of a “third place” is real and it’s neighborhood-focused. It’s light rail providing a ton of infrastructure to connect Metro’s riders to that spine.

All of these things matter when you’re talking about what it looks like today versus what it looked like in 2019.

Josh Brown: Your agency is in the midst of amazing, transformational efforts, big initiatives. Tell us a little more about what you’re working on and what we have to look forward to.

Michelle Allison: We have got some work to do. We still have service hours that were suspending during COVID that we need to get back into the system. That’s not an inconsequential loss for our riders who really want some service back in their neighborhood. We see you, we hear you.

We’re doing a lot internally on workforce. We need to hire 1,000 operators. That’s hard. That takes a long time, but we’re focused on it. We hired 500 operators last year. We know we can do it.

We’re equally excited about Sound Transit’s Link light rail launches. Whenever they open a new station, it means opportunity for Metro. We’re an integrated transit system so when they provide a consistent spine for us, we say to that neighborhood, “We’re going to make some connections you never had or we’re going to make those connections better because Sound Transit is doing the workhorse for us.” Each one of those station openings is an opportunity for us to look at those neighborhood connections.

We also have some RapidRide coming. People may have experienced the RapidRide G Line opening and the RapidRide J Line groundbreaking. These are really big. We cut a ribbon and we throw some dirt, but let’s be really clear about the benefit, the impact and the generational change it means to those neighborhoods when you invest and launch hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure that stay. You can make life choices around that.

We’re going to continue to do that in the coming years with the different lines that we have coming, including the upcoming RapidRide I Line groundbreaking. We’re seeing a lot of really good use of the RapidRide G Line.

We’re really laser-focused on getting service reinvestment for the public back into the system. We have two service changes each year. We focus on what service we can put back, whether it’s frequency, whether it’s new connections, whether it’s just something around the margins like a schedule change or an adjustment. They have benefit to the public.

We’re working really hard to expand our capacity as much as possible over the coming years.

Josh Brown: Your agency is confronting headwinds, including at the federal and state level. Can you share the scale of the headwinds, how you’re managing them, challenges you never thought you’d have to confront or manage around?

Michelle Allison: There’s a couple of components. There’s the federal level, which is so uncertain. It’s chaotic and can become distracting. Our job is to be mission-driven. We have a job to do as local service providers. That is the expectation. That is the contract we have with our riders and the folks who pay into our system, the taxpayers. We stay focused on that. It hasn’t changed.

The state implications are becoming clearer and they will have impact on us.

There are also local implications. We see a softening economic forecast. At King County Metro, 85% of our service is funded by sales tax revenue, which is incredibly volatile. We see that. We acknowledge it. We’re OK today. We’re OK tomorrow. It might be harder in the years out so we’ll plan for that and be mindful about it.

Choices made at each of these levels of government will have impact so we need to transparently articulate that to the folks that need our system. Projects may be delayed or slowed down and yet we are a mission-driven organization whose job is to deliver that service every day. When we need to adjust or change course, we will and we will include people in that process along the way.

It’s also really important to see the work that we are doing and not just the fear of the unknown. I’m not a Pollyanna-person and I don’t believe in that, but I am also way more motivated by hope than fear.

I love living and working in this region because we have dedicated elected officials all the way through our state and local government, and our institutions themselves believe in the work that we do, the connectedness of us as a community and the support that we have in delivering service. I am incredibly motivated and buoyed by that. I will continue to provide that clarity to the organization and to our partners.

We’re going to figure it out and there’s going to be bumps along the way. There’s certainly a lot of chaos involved right now and yet every day tens of thousands of trips go out serving hundreds of thousands of people. That’s an incredibly comforting thing to see when you think about the uncertainties that are facing us. To ground yourself in the work that we’re still doing and the service that we’re still providing even though there will absolutely be tough choices that we will need to make and we will need to make them transparently so the community understands the trade-offs.

Josh Brown: FIFA Men’s World Cup is coming to Seattle. How is an international event like this getting your agency to think about transit differently?

Michelle Allison: It’s an incredible opportunity for us to showcase the importance of a well-functioning transit system because we’re all connected. It’s going to require all of region’s transit agencies to be really connected. We’re going to rise to the challenge and do a really good job.

We’re also going to highlight the spaces in our systems that need additional support. We need a lot more technology a lot faster. We need a lot more customer communication. There’s these things that we know that we’re going to have to find a way to turn on faster.

The other part that I want to call out that we’re all planning toward: Yes, there are 750,000 new people coming that are going to use our system for an extended period of time and we want to still serve the people who are on our system. So how do we hold both of those things in a planning exercise is very real.

I’m grateful for the really smart folks who are working in a very coordinated way with FIFA and the local jurisdictions who are thinking about that. It’s simple tools. It’s wayfinding. It’s how you pay. It’s where you queue. It’s where you don’t let single-occupancy vehicles and where you promote a different form of transportation. It’s all of those elements combined so it’s definitely going to be a community event. It’s going to showcase that mobility can do a lot for a region for both the newcomers and the people who use it every day.

Josh Brown: Looking out 12 or 18 months, are there one or two items that you’re really wanting to lean into—maybe it’s a problem you want to solve or something you want to get better at?

Michelle Allison: King County Metro has about 6,000 people in the organization that serve a really diverse region. We are a county the size of Delaware. We have urban and rural. We have needs that expand through Access, through Metro Flex. We’re people serving people.

What I feel right now at Metro is an extreme call to make sure our employees are good, that they have what they need. Are they supported as an organization? Do they feel a sense of clarity about where we’re going? That’s one part of my brain that is always incredibly connected to the agency. “Am I doing enough to support those people (Metro employees) who are supporting all of you (riders)?”

We can never lose sight of how hard public service is and every day our operators are our ambassadors for our work. That’s very real and I will never lose sight of it. I will always appreciate our facilities workers, our vehicle maintenance workers, our operators, every single person.

Someone bought me a beer the other day. I was with my husband waiting for my daughter to get done with climbing. They said, “You’re Michelle.” I asked who they were. They said they change the schedules at the bus stops and we want to buy you a beer. I said, “That’s wonderful and thank you. Because you do incredibly important work for those of us who stand at the bus stop and want to make sure we know what time the bus is arriving.”

Every single part of the transit system has a human being doing that work. We always need to keep that in mind.

The other part is clean, safe and reliable. If we ever take our eye off the ball, we will lose the riders we so desperately want to serve. We need a system that is clean, safe and reliable. For as long as I am in this job, I’ll always be focused on those three things. They sound simple but they’re really complicated. It’s on us as partners, as service providers, as public agencies to really keep in mind what those elements mean and how to provide those conditions for all of those things to work together.

It’s our employees’ experience and it’s a clean, safe, reliable system. That’s what I will be focused on.

Related links:

• Video: “Civic Cocktail – Transforming Transportation – April 2025”
• Seattle City Club: “Transforming Transportation: Improving Efficiency, Safety and Access.”