As Sound Transit prepared to extend light rail from Link’s southernmost station, Sea-Tac Airport to South 200th Street in the City of SeaTac, the agency knew that effective public outreach would be essential. It’s the first segment of voter-approved extension of Link service, so expectations were high and area residents were anxious about construction.
Before final design and construction began, Sound Transit asked EnviroIssues to assist with community outreach efforts in the surrounding communities, including the cities of SeaTac, Tukwila, and Des Moines. These communities are vibrant and wonderfully diverse, with multiple languages and cultures represented. They are also home to a broad base of Sound Transit users – a core constituency with important opinions about how transit can better serve their needs.
EnviroIssues conducted a series of stakeholder interviews that informed and improved their outreach efforts. In these interviews, we asked what types of community outreach they found to be most valuable in their communities and how Sound Transit could best reach audiences that can be hard to engage. Through this effort we learned how these audiences currently use transit, how they’d like to use it in the future, and how construction activities might affect the community as the extension was built.
Now, construction is underway and in a few years? Those stakeholders just might be the first riders on an expanded light rail line.
