Community and Mobility Hubs

Imagine a welcoming, joyful space where you can easily connect to transit, grab a shared bike or scooter, get to a nearby library or grocery store, and maybe take a moment to sit and connect with a friend over coffee. Maybe there’s something interactive on the sidewalk for you or your child to engage with, like artwork encouraging movement or literacy.  

That’s the idea behind community and mobility hubs.  We’re working on bringing together many pieces of work we already do – like seating, wayfinding, pedestrian lighting, crossing improvements, art, landscaping, and more – into a space that feels better. A space that elevates dignity, care, and joy. Where you feel safe and comfortable getting to, from, and waiting for transit. 

Background  

• The idea of mobility hubs in Seattle goes back nearly a decade, with early roots in our New Mobility Playbook (2017).
• In 2024, our Climate Change Response Framework and Seattle Transportation Plan propelled this idea forward, with clear guidance to develop a program focused on mobility, transit access, equity, safety, community, and placemaking.
• SDOT’s Transportation Equity Framework (TEF) provides a north star and path for working more intentionally with historically underserved communities – to create spaces together that center the needs and ideas of our most underrepresented neighbors.
• With funding from the Seattle Transit Measure, this idea is being brought to life. 

Values guiding this work 

• People first: Center and uplift the most vulnerable and underrepresented community members. Elevate dignity, care, and joy. Bring play into the process and outcomes.  
• Partnerships: Take time to build relationships and trust. Actively work with community, across SDOT, and with other agencies to bring community ideas and priorities to life.
• Try things out: while taking time to engage, move toward near-term action. Start small, learn, make changes, grow. Be responsive to community and actively demonstrate what hubs can be.  

Near-term goals (2025 – 2027) 

• Try it out. Work with community partners to demonstrate small-scale hubs, starting with more temporary materials that can be upgraded over time. Design and update these locations with input from community members who aren’t typically centered in design processes (youth, elders, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color communities, people with disabilities, immigrants and refugees, LGBTQIA+, low-income community members, and others). 
• Package it up and share with others to increase our reach. Develop a kit of parts – all the different elements and tools that could go into a hub – and early implementation guide to help move this from concept to reality. Share this with staff across SDOT and with partner agencies (King County Metro, Sound Transit, and others), so efforts like future light rail station designs, transit and multimodal corridors, and other projects start to build these pieces into larger projects that will have lasting impact. 

Potential locations and how we’re prioritizing them 

The Seattle Transportation Plan identified 4 types of hubs and more than 100 potential hub locations, based on intersections where frequent transit comes together and where there’s high ridership. Learn more in the Seattle Transportation Plan’s Transit Element (pages 49 – 51). From there, we’re looking at ¼ mile radius (often how far people are willing and able to walk or roll to get to a nearby destination) around each of those locations as the basis for our work moving forward. To prioritize the list of 120 locations, we’re using several data sets related to equity, safety, and community spaces/destinations. As we develop this new program, we’re also working on a Racial Equity Toolkit to understand who might benefit from or be burdened by hub investments, what any unintended consequences might be and how to mitigate them, and how this work can actively advance equity.  

Demonstration Projects

As we build this new program, we’re trying things out along the way. We’re collaborating with the community, partner agencies, and other SDOT teams to work on these demonstration projects: