Sound Transit’s 2025 Passenger Experience Survey opens Nov. 6, and we want to hear your thoughts on riding Link light rail, Sounder trains, and ST Express buses. Passenger feedback is invaluable in helping us identify areas where we can improve our services.
The survey is open through Dec. 5. As a thank you for your participation, all respondents will be entered into a drawing for the chance to win one of several gift cards: Fifteen winners will receive a $100 card, and four lucky participants will win a $250 card.
We’re holding steady and continuing to make progress
Last fall, more than 17,000 riders across the region took the PX Survey, providing a lot of valuable feedback to analyze. Thank you for sharing your perspectives!
In 2024, passengers’ overall perception of Sound Transit remained consistent with the prior year’s results. On a grading scale where “A” equals excellent, “C” means average, and “F” is failing, passengers gave Sound Transit an overall B+ based on their own experiences.
In addition to asking passengers for their overall grade, we also ask how likely they’d be to recommend Sound Transit to friends or family.
On a scale of 0–10, passengers’ ratings increased from 7.8 in 2023 to 8.2 in 2024.
The annual survey also delves deeper into several areas we’ve identified as being foundational aspects of a great passenger experience, including safety, accessibility, dependability, access to information, passenger care, availability, cleanliness, and maintenance.
Averaging all our foundational passenger experience categories, which are rated on a scale from 1–5, respondents rated us at 3.9, which is consistent with previous years. Perceptions of safe operation of vehicles scored the highest (4.5), while information during unplanned disruptions scored the lowest (3.3).
Here’s what passengers say we’re doing best:
Offering dependable service.
Ensuring service availability so they can travel when and where they want.
Maintaining vehicles, ensuring that passengers feel they are in good working order.
Delivering timely and accurate information for day-to-day travel.
Areas of opportunity include:
Providing more information and support during unplanned disruptions.
Improving the feeling of safety onboard vehicles, at stations, and at stops.
Increasing maintenance at stations and stops to ensure everything’s in working order.
Responding quickly to spills and other issues to keep vehicles, stops, and stations clean.
A stronger analysis of your passenger experience
Over the last two years, we evolved the survey to gather more meaningful insights into certain areas noted in previous passenger feedback.
In 2023, we shifted away from high-level “performance scores” and redesigned the survey to:
Uncover drivers of satisfaction: why we’re performing the way we do in each area.
Identify actionable levers we can influence to improve service.
In 2024, we further refined the survey to get more granular insights that help us prioritize improvements by:
Adding geographic breakdowns to some categories to identify specific stations or lines with lower ratings.
Separating experiences by trip segment (on vehicle, in station, at park-and-ride lots) to see where interventions would be most effective. (This does not include specific locations.)
We’re continuing to update our methods, and although the survey changes reduce comparability to past years, these ongoing updates significantly enhance our ability to target improvements.
What’s next?
Passenger survey results are essential to delivering a better experience for daily riders and first-time riders alike. Teams across the agency work closely to implement improvements based on your feedback.
Interested in contributing more? Join our Sounding Board research panel for even more opportunities to share your feedback and win prizes.
Thank you for sharing your feedback and see you on board!