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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Top Transit Projects Coming in 2026!
Eight new transit links, one very mobile year. We’re diving into the projects that will actually change how U.S. cities move in 2026—from a light rail that glides over a floating bridge to a long‑awaited people mover that finally tames LAX’s traffic loop.
If you care about frequency, airport access, and walkable neighborhoods, this tour is your roadmap to the projects that matter. Hit play, share with a transit‑curious friend, and tell us which city got it right. Subscribe and leave a review to help more riders find the show.
This week on Transit Tangents, we cover eight new transit projects in the U.S. opening in 2026. From Los Angeles to St. Louis, there are great projects coming soon. All of this and more coming up on Transit Tangents. 2025 was a huge year for public transportation in the United States. We started this year with a list of 10 transit projects that were going to open this year, and all of them basically went to plan, some delays here and there, but for the most part, that list came to fruition, and it was a really popular episode. So we are doing it again this year, but this time with eight new transit projects that will be opening in 2026. And there was a little bit less to choose from this time around. I think last year was exceptional because we did 10 of them, but there were way more than 10. We got a lot of flack for missing different projects in different parts of the countries. I'm sure we're going to miss some here too. So let us know down below if there is a project that we missed. The first one we're going to kick off with on the list is in Seattle. And this is the Cross Lake connection, which connects the two-line light rail to the one-line in Seattle.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and we just did an episode on this, so please go back and check that out where we talked about the uh extension to Federal Way, which is now open. Uh, so some exciting, exciting news there. Uh, but this new project, it's a nearly eight-mile connection uh between Seattle and Bellevue. What's really cool about this is that it goes uh across Lake Washington, has a stop on Mercer Island before continuing to the other side of Lake Washington. Uh but the coolest thing is that it is on a floating bridge, and uh as far as we are aware, it is the only uh rail mo mo rail mode of this type, or I think of any type that crosses a floating bridge uh in the world. So really, really cool technical feats there with this opening.
SPEAKER_01:Definitely. And it will feature eight-minute frequencies at peak, which will kind of cover the Bellevue side of this, and then uh the two-line will connect into downtown and run north uh into Seattle and all the way up to Linwood, and then that north stretch between Seattle and Linwood, where both the two-line and the one line run, the frequencies will be every four minutes because of the interlining there. So uh definitely exciting stuff if you live in Seattle or Bellevue.
SPEAKER_02:I still can't believe four-minute headways, and I I'm very skeptical still, but uh that's really, really impressive if they can pull that off. Potential ridership on this is pretty huge. As it stands now, there's about 125,000 riders per day. Uh, so we can only expect that number to go up. So now we're gonna move over to the middle of the country, to St. Louis, Missouri, and the Metro Link extension. Uh, there's a 5.2 mile extension of the existing system that's basically gonna connect uh the line that's there now to the airport. Uh and that's about it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yep. Uh it's literally just one new stop being added. So most of the five miles is just getting you from, you know, the end of the existing line to the airport. It's set to open sometime over the summer. Uh, there were other extensionslash new lines being proposed in St. Louis. I know at one point there was a Green Line rail project that was being proposed that has since been kind of downgraded to being a BRT project, but it's still kind of a little bit further out uh in the process. When I look at this, and and to be totally clear, I I've never been to St. Louis. I'd like to go to St. Louis. Um, it's a great name for a city, if I do say so myself. Uh that's good.
SPEAKER_02:But uh I wasn't even making that connection when you started that sentence.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. But uh like at glance from afar and folks in St. Louis, you can correct me if I'm wrong here. It feels to me like instead of investing, you know, in five miles connecting just to the airport with one stop, you know, if you were to build five miles of light rail or even three miles of light rail uh in the city that would be in areas where a lot of people live and commute back and forth to work every day. You very likely would have seen a lot more ridership, a lot more development along the line. But I again could be fully, fully wrong there.
SPEAKER_02:I feel like uh probably similar to Kansas City. St. Louis is is maybe a city people um sleep on a little bit. They they don't go there, they don't know what all is there. I went a long time ago and I had a great time. Uh I'd be curious to go today and see how it is. Um, but I've actually ridden this uh metro line before from around the arch out to Forest Park. I think I actually picked up the Metro line at the Union Station downtown and then took it out to Forest Park, which is a beautiful, huge, huge park with like art museums and all this stuff in it. It's really cool. And then they have the historic train station downtown too that has like shops and dining and stuff in it. It's less of a train station and more of uh just a downtown destination center. But anyway, very, very cool uh city would definitely go back and now with the airport extension, fly right in and take the train to downtown.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, definitely. Honestly, I think that this would be a good candidate for a city in the day using only public transit episode. And I think in the past we've had people requesting it, so uh it would be a good one for us to add to the list, I think.
SPEAKER_02:Uh yeah. But on the other side of the state.
SPEAKER_01:Yes, yeah, moving along to a place that we have talked about more than any other uh on this show, the great city of Kansas City is having their streetcar's riverfront extension opening. So we covered earlier this year the extension of the the main street extension to the streetcar. This will be an extension to the north side. Instead, uh, if you want the full kind of exhaustive review of the main street extension, you can see that video already on the channel. We'll make sure it's linked for you. But the riverfront section goes just short of a mile to the north. It connects some newer housing developments that are kind of in a park area as well as the soccer stadium for the area. So it will be a really nice option for folks going to and from soccer games, trying to access the park, uh, as well as some of the newer housing development that was built up uh kind of in conjunction with the streetcar line here.
SPEAKER_02:We are really excited. I think this extension is going to open sometime in early 2026. So again, congrats to Donna and Lauren for all the hard work they do on this. This is definitely not going to be the last time we talk about Kansas City. I know we, as Lewis said, have talked about this city probably more than any other, and we got four episodes out of it when we visited. So we have a we have a very you know soft spot in our soft spot in our heart uh for Kansas City. There's a lot of potential uh new developments in the future, so uh we will definitely keep talking about it.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. Uh moving on though, next city on the list is Los Angeles and the D-line extensions uh scheduled to open later this year.
SPEAKER_02:LA is seeing more transit expansion than just about any city in the country, and a lot of that is because we're quickly approaching the 2028 Summer Olympics that will happen in Los Angeles. That's very, very exciting. Uh Lewis, I don't know about you, but I'm gonna try to go to some of that. Uh so excited to try try the new lines uh to go see the Olympics.
SPEAKER_01:That would be very cool. I feel like uh I probably will not be able to make that one happen. But uh that sounds cool though. I would I'll I'd like to go to LA in general, but um, I don't I don't sorry, I don't want to sound like a doomer about the Olympics actually.
SPEAKER_02:Well, you just you hate uh international cooperation and and uh that sounds exciting.
SPEAKER_01:Maybe I will also try.
SPEAKER_02:I think we're just gonna leave it at that. So uh we're talking about the D-line extension, and this is a four-mile underground uh segment of the LA D line. It will open up sometime in Q1 of 2026. Uh so again, exciting, exciting news there. Uh, it's gonna extend the D-line with three new stations from Koreatown to the VA hospital in Westwood.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and this section came in with a total cost of$3.5 billion. So definitely not cheap, especially for an extension. But again, this is a this is a full-on subway. I mean, this is underground with deep stations. Um, there were a few cost overruns along the way, but when we're talking about building true subway, essentially, in the United States, which we basically never do it, of course, there's going to be a high level of expense, and you're bound to kind of run into some issues, as we frankly just like don't have a lot of the people here who are used to building projects like this.
SPEAKER_02:I still want to compare this to the Chicago extension where it was five billion dollars for five miles above ground, and we're talking about three point five billion for four miles underground. So as far as US standards go, it still seems like we're doing okay here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I guess. Yeah, yeah, you you're not wrong. You're not wrong. Um but uh overall the oh go ahead. Sorry.
SPEAKER_02:I would say uh this corridor is is stereotypical LA, so you do see um some some decently dense corridor development along the the main corridor. When I say that, I mean, you know, zero lot line sort of properties, two, three-story commercial buildings, that sort of thing. Uh very typical LA street, but also very typical LA. Once you go one block off of that corridor, it's a lot of single family homes and low, low density. Uh so you do see. However, though. I'm sorry?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, how however though, yes, that may not be the case forever. Uh so if you have been kind of uh following any sort of uh like Yimbi adjacent kind of news recently, SB 79 passed earlier this year in California. That essentially allows for more dense zoning anywhere within a half a mile of a transit stop. So that includes these stops on the D-line as well as the stops throughout the LA metro. Um, it essentially just makes it easier for these areas that have been historically exclusively single-family zoning and makes it so that it's easier for either small things like duplexes and fourplexes to row homes, and even in some areas, you know, multi-story apartment buildings kind of in these areas where, look, I mean, we're spending the investment to build a literal subway line through here. Uh, we should try to make sure that as many people as possible are able to take advantage of the accessibility to the rest of the city uh that that offers. So I was pretty excited to see that pass earlier this year in California, which is a state that should be trying to build more housing for people, but historically just hasn't. I mean, the California in general has just had very, you know, tight zoning restrictions, uh more NIMBY's than basically anywhere in the country, I feel like.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's it's really well known for that. I mean, San Francisco is as is like NIMBY central, surprisingly. Um, yeah, the zoning changes are gonna have uh a huge impact on LA. And uh it's something that was definitely worth a future episode about when we talk about transit-oriented development and how transit stops can impact investment in communities. But I mean, a half mile around every uh rail transit stop, that is still a huge swath of LA that now is open to more development. Uh and this is also exciting because it's not the end of the D line. There's also other phases that will open that will include uh four new stations and about five more miles of track. Uh so we will keep you posted on what is continuing to do to develop in LA.
SPEAKER_01:But probably one note too. One note too, if if you're interested in the housing element of this and the zoning stuff, we we had an interesting conversation with Cutter Gonzalez from the Welcoming Neighbors Network about a year ago that we'll make sure is linked below if you're interested in learning more about kind of the intricacies of zoning and housing and why all that is important. Because it can it can sound a little intimidating when you're first like learning about that sort of stuff because there's a lot of weird acronyms and rules and things like that. And I think Cutter does a good job of explaining the importance of some of that stuff.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. Definitely go check out that episode. Um, but probably one of the most exciting things that's happening in 2026 in LA is that the LAX transit center is open and the LAX people mover will finally be open between the LAX terminals and the transit center, finally bridging that gap so that you can arrive in LA uh through LAX, take the people mover to the transit center, hop on one of the metro lines, and then all of LA is yours or all of LA that touches a metro line is yours.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean it's huge and it makes it so that, you know, like you said, the the transit center opened earlier uh in 2025, so it now makes it so that you'd be able to connect to the Metro C and K lines in Los Angeles. And once that people mover is open, it will just be a very seamless connection. As it stands today in late December, uh you still need to take a shuttle bus to get to the transit center. So this will be a major benefit, no needing to deal with traffic. Uh that LAX loop, I've only been there once or twice, but it is just an absolute nightmare of traffic. People zigzagging in and out. And I'm sure they have some like priority bus lanes, but I'm sure that those still are terrible to navigate over to the transit center. So the people mover can't come soon enough.
SPEAKER_02:My my travel hack for LA is fly to Burbank. It's close enough.
SPEAKER_01:Skip LAX.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Uh the this line, uh, the people mover was originally supposed to open in early 2026, but like most transit projects we crossed the US, there's a little bit of a delay, um, probably by about six months. So sometime middle of 2026, we do expect the people mover to finally, finally be open.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and this was a pretty avoidable delay, it seems like actually. There's some disagreements between contractors, it seems like uh they're all kind of slow rolling the process, it's getting tangled up in some bureaucracy. So it seems like the specifics are a little uh in the weeds, so I'll kind of skip over some of it. But um, that is the reason for the delay. And as a result, uh, it seems like the people mover likely won't be ready for the World Cup, which is kind of a bummer. It it very well should have been able to be ready for it, but as a result of some of these delays, uh it no longer will be. But but it will be ready for the Olympics for for uh Chris's visit in the future. Next on our list, we are headed uh a little bit closer to Chris uh right now for this one up in Fort Worth with what?
SPEAKER_02:Oh, just just me. It would be you know in our own backyard.
SPEAKER_01:I was gonna say, I was gonna say closer to home, but I was just like, oh, I'm not there anymore.
SPEAKER_02:Not in Texas anymore.
SPEAKER_01:A little closer to Chris's home with the TexRail extension.
SPEAKER_02:This is just the latest of a few different transit projects that are happening in the DFW area. We've already done uh an episode about the Dart Silver line. We just did an episode about uh data and their fight to keep uh transit moving in the DFW area, but now we're looking at Fort Worth, which is a site of DFW that we really haven't spent any time on in the past. This is an existing 27-mile train line that runs from DFW Airport to downtown Fort Worth. With this new extension, it's gonna add 2.1 miles to the south of Fort Worth, adding one more stop to the service.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and this one new stop is in a big kind of medical district. You've got a hospital there as well as a ton of different medical facilities, offices, and things like that. And those are always really transit uh heavy usage areas. You have a lot of employees who work in these hospitals and doctor's offices and whatnot, but you also have a lot of people traveling to appointments as well. So you kind of end up with a steady stream of folks all the time. I know that hospital campus in Houston that we visited in our Houston episode was a really busy transit hub on their red line light rail. Um, so I think that you could see a lot of potential for folks to be using this to get to work, uh, as well as, you know, hit head to the other destinations that are already on this line, which is pretty long. It also, as you mentioned, goes from DFW on the Northeast as well. So you have a lot of potential connection, a lot of existing connections to help get more folks to this medical district, whether it be from DFW or over in Dallas where they could connect on the TRE. So definitely interesting uh to see this extension. I honestly wasn't aware of this until I started pulling the list together. This kind of snuck under the radar for me. Um, but revenue service is expected to begin sometime this spring.
SPEAKER_02:So definitely exciting there uh with all the multimodal connections that you have. Um, one that don't think we mentioned was from DFW. You also have access to the Orange Line and the Silver Line. So um great connectivity, not to mention Amtrak in downtown Fort Worth and also in Dallas. From Texas, we're gonna head back over to California to talk about Orange County, which is another place that we really haven't talked about on the podcast before. Uh, and really, transit projects in Orange County haven't been on my radar. I don't know about you, Lewis, but uh I haven't really seen anything coming out of Orange County until we started pulling this list together and we found the Orange County streetcar.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, this will be a brand new line that is about four miles long with 10 stops connecting the Santa Ana train station uh with downtown and a little bit further out as well. It is mostly in mixed traffic, uh, but eventually does meet up with a right-of-way of what seems like an old kind of streetcar line, which also bodes well for potential extensions and whatnot in the future. End to end right now, this is scheduled to be a 22-minute trip per the schedule, which from being honest, feels a little slow for going four miles. Four miles, ten stops. I'm not sure maybe it's uh something where there are maybe too many stops too close together, or if it's a transit priority kind of thing, but I thought that that was pretty notable um when I read it. But I do think that this thing has a ton of potential despite being such a short line, though.
SPEAKER_02:I would be curious to know what the driving time is on this line. We haven't done that experiment, but four miles in LA is you know a three-hour drive.
SPEAKER_01:Sometimes that is true. Not so much. So maybe maybe this is actually lightning. Maybe this is lightning speed. I don't know.
SPEAKER_02:Um total cost of this project comes in at$650 million, which seems really reasonable for transit in the US. Uh, it's actually very impressive compared to some of the other uh transit projects and extensions that we've talked about.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and uh about 300 million of it is coming from the federal new starts program. Uh so good to see that it qualified for that. And yeah, I mean, it is funny. I also agree with you that 650 million sounds like it's actually a good number. But it is also wild that, as I said here, it's like mostly kind of running an existing right-of-way like in a street, and it costs us, you know, over$100 million a mile to lay a couple tracks in the ground. But again, I do think that like as we do more of these things and build up the basis of knowledge of like contractors who are regularly working on these things, that these costs hopefully will go down.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, fingers crossed. Maybe we uh we can experiment and make our own uh map using what is it, subway builder, the new the new sort of name that you can design and build your own subway. We could recreate this one, see if we can get it for cheaper.
SPEAKER_01:All right, and the last one on our list is the Westlake Corridor, just outside of
SPEAKER_02:And I think we've mentioned this one briefly on a prior episode, although we can't really remember which episode that it was. We're at as of this recording, 103 episodes released, so they all start to uh to run together over time. But yeah, this is officially the Westlake Corridor, and it is a new nine-mile commuter line extension uh with the goal of connecting uh Munster and Dyer, Indiana with downtown Chicago. Uh and this would be a branch of the existing South Shore line, uh, which was really more in northwest Indiana.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and the South Shore line is like, you know, in Chicago you have Metro, which are like a lot of the kind of commuter lines that spider out into Illinois and stay in Illinois. And then the South Shore line basically goes from that downtown Chicago and kind of skips making any stops in Illinois and only has stops uh more so on the Indiana side. So uh nice to see the kind of investment happening in Indiana, which you don't necessarily think of as being uh a big transit state.
SPEAKER_02:I think uh thinking of Indiana as a transit state, you really primarily think about what's happening in that that northern corner of Indiana that's closest to Chicago. You also have Indianapolis, which I'm sure has other projects going on. I think we we have talked about uh I think potential BRT routes in Indianapolis and some other stuff in the in the past. So there's definitely some transit happening in in Indiana, but I think the bulk of it's going to be connecting into Chicago.
SPEAKER_01:Uh this new line, though, at peak periods will have service every 20 to 30 minutes, which that's pretty damn good, especially for being more of a kind of commuter service. Uh off peak, it'll be about hourly, which again, still not bad considering how far out of the city um that we are and in some of these places at the end of the line.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, absolutely. These are primarily going to be weekday, you know, commuter focused lines. Um, not much uh I don't see much online right now about what weekend service would look like, but for daily commuters, this would be really helpful. Uh some some takeaways on this project, maybe some some controversies or or being critical of it. Uh, there are people who are concerned about ridership numbers, uh, primarily because it seems like the basis for the commuting pattern was based on pre-COVID commute patterns and not post-COVID. So it's to be seen what the that weekday commuter totals uh are gonna look like. Uh and the other uh sort of critical point about this is around land use. So a lot of this is going through uh towns or in these four new stops where the towns really haven't prepared for more TOD or or better land use around transit developments. Uh most of these are going to be passing through single-family neighborhoods and through lower density uh commercial and industrial zones, with the exception of the junction, which uh I believe is Hammond Gateway. Um, that area is primed for more development. Um, but for the others, you know, it's to be seen if they if they get the uh the development investment needed to get to the ridership needed to make this a viable line.
SPEAKER_01:Right. And you know, we'll see. It very well could turn out that they that those towns are able to pull it together, but you would like to see that sort of stuff being planned kind of well before a line is opening. So I'm definitely interesting that that that's how the process has played out. Overall, though, I mean, uh there is plenty to look forward to in 2026. I think uh there's probably a few projects that we did not include on the list, and we want to hear those projects from you guys. So let us know in the comments down below. Uh, maybe they will get their own episode uh in the next couple weeks and months as we start to uh see a few of these projects actually come to fruition.
SPEAKER_02:And I love doing this list. Um, what I was really impressed with last year was, like you said at the beginning of the episode, that everything really happened as it was planned to happen in 2025. So we're hoping the same for 2026. But one thing I really love about doing these lists is that you know people all the time talk about how uh how dire it looks in the US without public transit. But we are doing things, we are expanding systems, there's a lot of extensions happening, there's new lines going in. So it's important to go back and look at these lists and say, hey, there is actually a lot of investment happening in the US. Is it enough? Absolutely not, but it is happening uh around the country.
SPEAKER_01:So despite the odds, despite the odds, too, it's not like an easy environment to be trying to push these projects forward, and we are still seeing uh lots of projects being being pushed, and even you know, ones that aren't on this list that are that are grinding to be able to try to get funding for years down the line so that these lists hopefully continue to have lots of things on them in the years to come. Um but uh thank you all so much for watching this. We really appreciate it. If you've got feedback, thoughts, uh things you'd like to see us do in 2026, definitely let us know down below. We have a lot of fun stuff in the works. Uh, if you want to support the show directly, the best ways to do so are via our Patreon, buy me a coffee, or checking out the merch store down below. Uh, you can also help us by just sending an episode to a friend, subscribing, liking the videos, all of that sort of good stuff. Um, but with all of that being said, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your transit engine Tuesday.