Facing looming budget issues and increasing threats from the second Trump administration, King County Executive Dow Constantine is defending his administration’s focus on transitioning Washington’s largest transit agency to a zero-emission vehicle fleet. In an exclusive interview with The Urbanist, Constantine cited a likely need for King County Metro to tap into new revenue to sustain itself into the future. But he doubled down on the need for the agency to push forward on fleet electrification, despite the strain on service plans and finances.
Between 2025 and 2029, King County Metro is poised to spend over $1 billion on projects intended to allow the agency to transition to a fully zero-emission fleet by 2035, a goal the King County Council adopted in 2020. With those expensive electrification projects eating up a significant portion of Metro’s fiscal reserves — and potentially sending the agency into fiscal crisis — many transit advocates see Metro’s leaders putting those zero-emission goals ahead of its service expansion goals, which are also ambitious.
“I don’t think there is a prioritization of electrification or zero emissions over expanding service,” Constantine told The Urbanist. “When we were coming out of Covid, and we had all these Covid service restrictions, I was presented with a choice: we could add service to respond to the need as it was, at present, or we could add service to try to provide the frequencies people would need to induce them back onto transit, and I chose that route, which meant spending more money earlier in order that we might build ridership. And that has been a successful strategy. Our ridership has increased faster than just about anybody in the country.”
King County’s greenhouse gas emissions are also rising, which was what spurred the focus on electrification in the first place. Last year, a progress report on King County’s climate action plan recognized a need for “serious course correction” when it comes to the transportation sector, and cited increased investments in transit service as a major strategy that the county needs to find ways to deploy. Meanwhile, only around 2% of transportation emissions in King County come from public transit, and expanded service could entice more people out of cars — which are the region’s top source of emissions.
During the pandemic, Metro’s ridership also plummeted more than the average American transit agency. So, even with the recent rebound, ridership and service remains well below pre-pandemic levels — some peer agencies have fully recovered from pandemic service cuts. For most riders, Metro’s new normal is a bus that comes less often than it did in 2019.
Last fall’s Metro service change, coinciding with the launch of the RapidRide G Line and Lynnwood Link, marked the first major expansion of bus service on the county’s network in years, following a long struggle to maintain existing service in the face of operator shortages and bus maintenance issues. But the G Line’s high frequencies (at least during the day) come at the expense of nearby routes, which had their frequencies slashed to make up the service hours.
Over the next few years, Metro plans to continue adding more service, with 94,000 additional service hours in 2025 and ramping up to 144,000 in 2027, according to preliminary budget requests. But without new revenue — or a reset of Metro’s capital plan — sustaining that service may not actually be possible.
Some policymakers acknowledged the tradeoffs present here, with County Councilmember Claudia Balducci putting forward a budget amendment last year looking explicitly at the point where investment in electrification would compromise Metro’s service expansion goals. That report is still in development.
There’s no question that Metro’s current electrification pace is not enough to meet County goals. When the agency announced late last year that it would be purchasing four new battery-electric vehicles from Solaris, a European bus manufacturer that had never secured a contract with a U.S. transit agency, that deal highlighted both the degree to which the American battery bus market remains incredibly limited and Metro’s own role as a trailblazer in the space, one Constantine clearly takes pride in.
In 2016, Metro was one of the first agencies in the country to put a battery-electric bus (BEB) in service, and the move was supposed to be the start of a wave of purchases, but nearly a decade later, Metro has just 40 BEBs in operation across the entire county.
“The U.S. manufacturing industry is just stumbling along,” Constantine said. “Part of the issue, just as we did with hybrids, is to drive innovation by putting money toward the kind of vehicle you want, right? It’s like, ‘Here it is, if you can deliver it.’ And other agencies are doing that too with electrics and hydrogen. And for some reason, unlike China and India and Europe, the U.S. bus industry can’t quite get it going. And that is presenting some very practical challenges for us, but I do think that it will happen because there is demand, coming not just from us, but from agencies all across North America to get lower or zero emission vehicles on the road.”
While Constantine and Metro have mostly glossed over the drawbacks of current battery bus technology, a recent auditor report highlighted that battery buses have significantly less range than the typical hybrid bus alternatives and warned they’re also less durable, leading to a need to buy more buses to provide the same service that hybrid buses would provide for less — and potentially replace those battery buses more often. On the other hand, Constantine emphasized that hybrid buses lock in climate emissions.
“The real challenge here is that it’s not about whether we run a diesel-hybrid bus, for an extra week, for an extra year,” Constantine said. “It’s about whether we buy a new one that’s then going to be in service for an extra two decades, right? Because once you buy it, you’ve essentially committed to two decades more of emissions. So if we keep our current vehicles going and cycle in low- or zero-emission vehicles, we will be in much better shape in terms of our overall county climate emissions. Are we going to save the planet by ourselves? No, we’re not. Do we have an obligation to do everything we can to make that happen? Of course we do, and it is obviously, a really significant challenge with a new administration that’s not committed to that work.”
Constantine framed Metro’s budget as being constrained by the same forces impacting the county’s other departments, given the limited number of revenue tools available and an inability for the county to keep up with basic inflation. The agency does have a dedicated revenue stream in terms of an existing sales tax, but it has not always been able to keep up with demand. In 2020, the county considered asking voters to approve a countywide measure to fund expansion of service, but the Covid pandemic put that effort on ice.
Instead, Seattle put forward its own scaled-back measure to fund city-specific service, with a significant share of those dollars now being invested outside of service hours.
“We have continued to try to manage our money well, even in the face of the state’s outrageously misguided tax system, which is preposterous, and it will likely be necessary to go to either the legislature or the voters for increased revenue over the course of the next half decade,” Constantine said.
The federal government may turn that move from likely to inevitable. Last week Dwight Dively, the head of King County’s budget office, gave the county council a blunt assessment of where things currently stand when it comes to federal funding, noting that King County Metro is particularly vulnerable to a capricious Trump administration that continues to cancel existing contracts and add additional red tape to others.
“In Metro Transit, they have $250 million, approximately, of grant applications with the Federal Transit Administration that they are waiting on, and they have about $130 million of revenue that is budgeted in 2025 from that, including a lot for bus purchases,” Dively said. “One of the principal uses of money we get from the federal government in Metro is to help pay for the acquisition of buses in our system, and that’s been true for a very long time.” Many federal funding agreements operate by reimbursing local governments, so in many cases dollars that Metro may be waiting on for reimbursement may in fact never be coming.
With Constantine handing off the reins in 2026, the question of whether his successor will push Metro’s electrification efforts as strongly as he has will be something to watch. Ultimately, Metro’s ability to support the region’s expected growth and existing needs depends on getting it right.
“We can walk and chew gum at the same time,” Constantine said. “It is about trying to figure out, not the easiest way to do things, but the smartest, best way to do things, and if we can stage our acquisition of new vehicles and the investment in new bases and capital equipment in a way that also allows us to continue increasing service, as we have, to say: not with but ahead of demand, then we’ll have struck the right balance. That’s what we’re seeking to do.”
Ryan Packer has been writing for The Urbanist since 2015, and currently reports full-time as Contributing Editor. Their beats are transportation, land use, public space, traffic safety, and obscure community meetings. Packer has also reported for other regional outlets including Capitol Hill Seattle, BikePortland, Seattle Met, and PubliCola. They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
