Your e-purse works to pay your ferry fare, no need to get a pass unless you are one of us island commuters. https://orcacard.com/ERG-Seattle/p2_002.…

Does the catchment area for the planned new high school at Seattle Center include downtown? If it does, the monorail will be the coolest schoolbus in town. And yeah, add it to the Orca Card!

Just out of curiosity, how many of those two million monorail rides per year are not tourists?

@3 -- I have no numbers, but my guess is a surprising amount. A little backstory, and this includes a tiny civics lesson. A few years ago, people on the Seattle Transit Blog were whining about this and that, and I mentioned that the monorail is treated like second class transit. It doesn't show up as a transit option on Google, and you can't use the ORCA card. A fair number of people said that the current situation sucks, as they like to take the monorail from downtown to their place in Lower Queen Anne (it is faster than a bus). But they need cash to take the trip, and have to pay twice if they transfer.

Someone then explained that the monorail is handled by a private company, under contract with the city. As it turns out, the contract -- for ten years -- was about to be renewed. It was pretty much business as usual (same management company) and they were going to rubber stamp the renewal. But then people started asking about it, and next thing you know a letter writing campaign was started (OK, an email campaign). People wrote in, asking the city council to include ORCA support as part of the new contract. They decided to study the issue, and now the mayor is using the results of this study to push for ORCA use. The system works (sometimes)!

It is a minor thing, but it should make life easier for a surprising number of people, all because ordinary citizens got involved.

@5 -- This is probably revenue neutral. The additional cost of supporting the ORCA card will likely be offset by the new customers. The company running things was simply being very conservative. They had always done things the old way (charging cash) and saw no reason to change things (they are making decent money without ORCA support).

Anyway, the big cost would be to actually improve the monorail, so that it can handle more people. They changed the way it worked a while ago, and the tracks actually converge close to Westlake (which is how they ran into each other a while ago). Changing that -- so you can trains on both tracks at the same time -- is expensive. There are other improvements to be made as well, detailed here. Charging OVG for that improvement is reasonable. Whether that happens or not is another story.

Alluding to what @5 was probably getting to, this move on the part of the mayor to push for ORCA usability on the monorail is part of the arena battle with SODO to make monorail much more usable for the thousands of people that will be commuting to the Key to see the NHL and possibly the NBA. I don't believe this was an idea that was hatched and pursued with gusto by the city a long time ago, but this is a measure, or rather a weapon, that is being pushed by the mayor to beat the SODO Arena project.

Next thing to do is to reduce the long headways between trains.

@6 it should be noted, the monorail is one of very few transit services to be farebox-positive, despite low ridership.

@4 - Sounds like a populist win! Personally, I have zero objection to using Orca cards on the monorail, wtf not? Our city's bizarrely fragmented transit situation is... well...bizarrely fragmented, and I'm in favor of anything that will help make it work better, and with less dumb convolutions (like having to pay twice if you transfer from the monorail to a bus).

@9 -- Yeah, it is a cool thing. It is easy to assume that political discussions on blogs are pointless. Quite often they are. But in this case, you can see the evolution of a comment thread as it went from questions and complaints to real action: https://seattletransitblog.com/2014/11/2…. That thread is long, but it resembles what democratic action should look like. People asked questions and shared their opinion. But the key breakthroughs were when "Ricky" explained the monorail management process, and folks stopped being so cynical, and started writing their representatives. We often assume that the people that run the city (or any other public entity) know all about the various issues, and know what people think of the situation. In this case, my guess is the city council never considered ORCA support for the monorail, and also assumed that no one but tourists rode the thing. Once the emails started flooding in -- often written by people in the city who would use the monorail just to get to lower Queen Anne -- the city council changed their tune.

In the grand scheme of things, it is a minor thing, but I think it is still pretty cool.

If Seattle weren't a hick town at the end of the road this would have happened the same day the first Link train started to roll.