Sound Transit uses proof-of-payment to verify passenger fares, employing fare ambassadors and transit police to conduct random inspections. Fares are calculated based on distance traveled and are paid through the regional ORCA card, paper tickets, or a mobile app.

Trains are composed of two or more cars that each can carry 194 passengers, including 74 in seats, along with wheelchairs and bicycles. It runs for 20 hours per day on weekdays and Saturdays, with headways of up to six minutes during peak hours, and reduced 18-hour service on Sundays and holidays. The 1 Line carried over 25 million total passengers in 2019, with an average of nearly 80,000 daily passengers on weekdays. The line connects the University District, Downtown Seattle, the Rainier Valley, and Seattle–Tacoma International Airport. It serves 19 stations in the cities of Seattle, SeaTac, and Tukwila, traveling nearly 25 miles (40 km) between Northgate and Angle Lake stations. Ridership is still way off because of the pandemic, and it isn’t likely that the agency will hit that rosy number, but I have long predicted that light rail really won’t matter until it goes places, until it gets to where commuters really are.The 1 Line, formerly Central Link, is a light rail line in Seattle, Washington, United States, and part of Sound Transit's Link light rail system. It expected to have 280,000 passengers a day by 2030. Ridership has never really reached the levels Sound Transit predicted either. Those all contributed to scaled back or delayed projects through ST-2, which passed in 2008, and ST-3, which passed in 2016. It would be easy to blame Sound Transit for all of this, but it would likely have been hard to predict the financial bubble that burst in 2009, a global pandemic in 2020, and the incredible spike in property values and construction costs.

To be fair, Sound Transit has been doing a much better job with scheduling and budgeting since then, but it is still running more than $6 billion in the hole today. So, when Sound Transit tells you it’s on time and on budget, that assumes the first 10 years of the agency and the financial mismanagement in that initial decade don’t really exist.

Sound transit light rail