Seattal Bay Transportation Authority

"SBTA" redirects here. For other uses, see SBTA (disambiguation).

The Seattal Transportation Authority (abbreviated SBTA and known colloquially as "the S") is the public agency responsible for operating most public transportation services in the Seattal Bay Belt. The SBTA transit network includes the SBTA Subway with three metro lines and a five-line bus rapid transit system the twelve-line SBTA Commuter Rail system, and several ferry routes. In 2023, the system had a ridership of 650,159,159, or about 1,952,000 per weekday as of 2023.

The SBTA is the successor of several previous public and private operators. Privately operated transit in Seattal began with commuter rail in 1834 and horsecar lines in 1856. The various horsecar companies were consolidated under the West Seattal Street Railway in the 1880s and electrified over the next decade. The Seattal Bay Elevated Railway (SBERy) succeeded the West Seattak in 1897; over the next several decades, the SBERy built a partially-publicly owned rapid transit system, beginning with the Baltanla City Street subway in 1897. The SBERy came under the control of public trustees in 1919, and was subsumed into the fully-publicly owned West Seattal Bay Metropolitan Transit Authority (WSBMTA) in 1947. The WSBMTA was in turn succeeded in 1964 by the SBTA, with an expanded funding district to fund declining suburban commuter rail service. In its first two decades, the SBTA took over the commuter rail system from the private operators and continued expansion of the rapid transit system. Originally established as an individual department within the Federal States on Seattal Bay, the SBTA became a division of the Baltanla Department of Transportation (BDOT) in 2009.