Transportation, Waterfront, and Seattle Center Committee

The Seattle City Council's Transportation, Waterfront, and Seattle Center Committee convened for a comprehensive briefing on two major infrastructure projects just 98 days before the 2026 FIFA World Cup begins. Committee Chair Rob Saka opened the meeting with sobering traffic safety statistics, noting that Seattle has had one pedestrian fatality in 2026 so far—one too many—and announced quarterly traffic safety presentations would become standard practice. The committee received detailed updates on Memorial Stadium's $150 million renovation, which remains on track for completion before the 2027 school year, and extensive FIFA readiness preparations that will accommodate between 500,000 to 750,000 additional visitors to the city. The Memorial Stadium project represents a transformative redesign from the original 1940s facility, reducing capacity from 12,000 to 8,000 seats while dramatically improving accessibility and integration with the Seattle Center campus. The new design features transparent structures replacing massive concrete walls, creating better sightlines to the Space Needle and surrounding attractions. Critically, the project incorporates comprehensive renovation of the Memorial Wall honoring 762 Seattle-area students who died in World War II, moving it from its obscured position behind parked cars to a place of prominence with dedicated forecourt space. FIFA preparations revealed a sophisticated multi-agency coordination effort spanning federal, state, county, and city levels. Congress recently allocated $8.4 million for transit services specifically for the World Cup, supplementing the $9 million already appropriated by the state legislature. Seattle's approach features a distributed fan celebration model across four major sites rather than a single centralized location, designed to spread economic benefits throughout the city while reducing crowding pressure on any single area. The transportation planning effort represents the largest coordinated transit expansion in recent Seattle history. King County Metro will deploy an additional 60 buses on match days and 30-40 buses on non-match days, while Sound Transit will run trains every eight minutes until 1:00 AM. The newly launched tap-to-pay system eliminates the need for international visitors to obtain ORCA cards, while a new three-day visitor pass accommodates cash-paying tourists.