As the Cascadia Daily News reported this week, the vision of a future “rapid transit” network in Bellingham has been scrapped in favor of incremental improvements to the Whatcom Transit Authority’s existing GO Lines. 

As someone who once worked at the Federal Transit Administration, regularly wrote about transportation at different parts of my journalism career, and edited a news publication that often covered the intricacies of federal-state-local intergovernmental relations, I’m not necessarily surprised that this is where the idea of rapid transit in Bellingham ended up. The prospects of future federal funding for such a transit project with the current political environment back east in the Other Washington would have been an especially challenging mountain to climb.

According to the CDN, WTA planning director Tim Wilder told the Bellingham City Council that developing a local rapid transit network as envisioned in WTA’s Rapid Transit Study would require tens of millions of federal dollars and consume a ton of planning capacity. Pursuing such a plan would essentially force WTA to put “all the eggs in one basket” at the expense of the overall bus system.  

Instead, WTA officials have decided to concentrate their energies and resources on improvements to the four existing GO Lines, the color-coded frequent transit corridors in Bellingham where there’s bus service every 15 minutes for most of the day.

A blue round bus stop sign reading "GO" and "WTA"
A WTA Blue GO Line bus stop near Western Washington University. (Photo by Michael Grass / BhamByBus)

This isn’t necessarily bad news. More frequent bus service, bus stop upgrades, and some targeted transit-priority improvements at congested intersections are all good things. While these public investments certainly aren’t free, they’re more within reach and can be developed incrementally.  

Beyond the federal funding challenges, the development of true “rapid transit” in Bellingham would have required far many more vocal champions of that vision than currently exist in the City of Subdued Excitement, plus local officials willing to make some politically unpopular decisions to make it happen.

If 2024’s Holly Street bike lane pilot project saga in Downtown Bellingham was any indication of the complex civic attitudes surrounding the reallocation of space in public rights of way, the creation of numerous bus-only lanes — the type of infrastructure investment needed to speed “rapid transit” buses through the city — would be a tough pill to swallow for some. Just imagine the My Bellingham Now Facebook comments and quips from CDN's The Hammer!      

WTA’s prior development of the GO Line network, where multiple bus routes converge on a common transit corridor to provide more frequent service, was the result of some smart planning that maximized agency resources while showing how a small transit agency could think big and deliver something that worked well.

So, what comes next? As the CDN reported, WTA and the City of Bellingham are planning to hammer out a memorandum of understanding before soliciting public feedback on potential GO Line improvements and finalizing a plan, potentially by the end of 2025.

If you care about transit in Bellingham, now is the time to start thinking about the low-hanging fruit along the Blue, Green, Gold, and Plum GO Lines that could lead to meaningful improvements, including street safety improvements like better sidewalks and crosswalks, the kind of upgrades that will make using transit more appealing.    

I’d add something else worth considering to improve the transit experience in Bellingham: Figuring out a way to mitigate the time penalty baked into the nature of bus transfers at Bellingham Station. 

In casual conversations with people around town who support transit but don’t regularly use it, a top shortcoming they cite is the time it takes to make bus trips across town. With WTA’s pulse scheduling — where buses converge on and are timed to depart Bellingham Station around the same time to facilitate easy transfers — unless a bus is arriving late downtown, there’s a 10-minute time penalty, at minimum, that WTA riders deal with when continuing their trip beyond downtown. 

Improving crosstown transit service would really unlock Bellingham’s transit potential. Figuring this out will be even more important as city leaders plan for more badly needed new housing while incentivizing car-free travel alternatives. But it’d necessitate WTA untangling at least some of those downtown transfers, which could be challenging. 

Many Bellinghamsters don’t necessarily realize that WTA punches above its weight class with the quality of the local transit network compared to peer cities. The GO Lines have been a solid investment and provide a strong foundation for future incremental improvements, even if previous rapid transit dreams are unlikely to materialize anytime soon.