Sound Transit 3 made headlines in March by releasing its plans for the next 25 years. I have to admit, I will take all of the above when it comes to transit, but I was also taken aback. Immediately after college I lived in Washington, DC. I know what a functioning CITY light rail system looks like. It enabled you to reach most neighborhoods in the city easily, without a car. Add a bike to the mix and I easily functioned in the city without ever needing to own a car. What Sound Transit is proposing was not a CITY system (sadly). So what exactly is Sound Transit offering?

Inspired by Radical Cartography’s voyage of Manhattan and hoping to build out something (someday) like True Size Of… I did a quick GIS exercise, where I took shapefiles of New York’s Subway, D.C.’s Metro, and San Francisco’s BART and projected them at the same scale as the future Seattle system (with a little help from the a properly scaled Seattle Times infographic.) First, Here is just Seattle’s system. (you can right-click on the images and open them in a new tab to see larger versions).

Seattle

Next, I added DC

San Francisco

And the granddaddy of them all, New York City.