So where to start here.
1) It is damned difficult to travel around this region, transit or no. You have a 26 mile long lake, right in the center of your population, crossed by two small bridges. Everything else has to go around. You have an even bigger body of water to the west. Everything is shunted N-S, whether it wants to be or not. No such thing as hub-and-spoke in this market. Blame the Ice Age glaciers.
2) Sound Transit is not a company. It is a government entity, officially the Central Puget Sound Regional Transit Authority.
3) Sound Transit consists of light rail (Link), heavy rail (Sounder) and express bus (ST Express.)
4) Sound Transit moves in a normal year a bit over 50 million passengers. About 175,000 per weekday. Since it is largely a commuter system, that is 175,000 people a day not using the highways. So the next time someone says ST doesn't benefit them, they either never leave the house or all full of it.
5) ST is run by an 18 member board of elected officials, representing the cities and counties in the taxing district. The taxing district was created by these folks to closely represent the areas that would immediately or eventually be benefitted by the additional taxation. Of course everyone wants their pie NOW so there has been some friction, but seems like the least unfair way to pay for this. The folks who only get an indirect benefit don't pay for it. The 18 member board is overseen by 3 (!) citizen committees.
Now comes the more controversial, I suppose:
6) OF COURSE there are empty trains. Every commuter transit system in the world has empties- if everyone is going into town in the morning, you still have to get those vehicles out to the burbs to pick up the next load. Often you will see empty busses in the middle of morning commute that say "out of service"; this means they are going to a staging point to start the next run into town; only a few are needed to pickup up downtown and go the other way. And when you run scheduled service, you have to stick to that schedule no matter how many folks choose to use you that minute.
7) OF COURSE the Amtrak (actually ST Sounder) has an easy time meeting schedules. It literally has the right of way in every situation. Those track beds have been around longer than the state. It BETTER be the most efficient. But it is the least flexible- you will never get a mile more of that track built in this region. Nowhere to put it, and far too costly. But since it is already there, why not take advantage?
8) If you get your information from mynorthwest.com, it may be a little biased against Sound Transit. Some of what is on that site is news, but much is by-lined by the commentators. The commentators come from KTTH, a very right wing station, and KIRO-FM, which has both progressives and conservatives. Sound Transit rarely makes news, it's pretty boring. SO if you see it on this site, the likelihood is that you are not getting news, you are getting opinion. That opinion is rarely going to be positive, because who is going to defend a transit system?
9) Same with the radio. If you heard about some news about ST on the radio, I can almost guarantee that is not news but rather opinion. My livelihood is largely tied up with conservative talk radio, and our radio spokesman says that whenever things are going slow and he wants to get the numbers goosed, he just starts yammering about ST. Lights up the phones. My son refers to the radio as the Boomer Outrage Machine and I don't think he is too far off here.
10) Find me one lousy multi-decade multibillion dollar program that doesn't have cost over runs and deadline issues, private or public. Good luck.
Yeah it would have been great if we voted to get this thing going in 1967 when there were lots of federal dollars and lots of empty spaces, but we chose not to do that. And we weren't willing to foot the bill in the late 90s to do a quick project either. It was built and will be built the way it had to be, in chunks as it can be paid for.
