Photos by Danny Ngan.
What an incredible night! Last Friday, more than 300 people joined us at the gorgeous Seattle Art Museum for Tuxes & Trains 2025: Together We Build. We left feeling so grateful for the amazing community of transit riders, advocates, and partners who make our work possible. Together, we’re helping to ensure that people in communities across Washington can access fast, frequent, and reliable transit.
We were thrilled to welcome two new inductees into our Transportation Hall of Fame: the Fix the L8 campaign, led by Nick Sattele and Jason Li, and Move Redmond, represented by Kelli Refer, Michael Leach, Jordan Adams, Maritza Lauriano Ortega, and Sophia Escalona. Fix the L8 has brought creative and effective advocacy to try to speed up King County Metro’s chronically delayed Route 8 bus. And Move Redmond has been leading the charge for safe, connected, and multimodal transportation on the Eastside. Read more about them in their own words here.
Next, our Executive Director Kirk Hovenkotter reflected on the past year’s successes, from winning a campaign to fund transit in Ellensburg with 65% of the vote, to defeating taxes on e-bikes and buses, to securing $100 million from the legislature to jumpstart a Megaproject for Safety. We even barked at the Sound Transit board to get dogs allowed on light rail!
But the biggest successes are yet to come. On December 6th, we’ll celebrate the opening of three more light rail stations extending down to Federal Way. And next year, the long awaited cross-lake connection will open, bringing Seattle and the Eastside together. As we urge Sound Transit to find creative solutions to Build the Damn Trains, these openings show the promise of everything we’re building.
We also have big and important challenges ahead. Pierce County Executive Ryan Mello spoke about the challenge of winning funding at the ballot to expand bus service in Pierce County, and the critical role that TCC and our partners like Tacoma On the Go will play in 2026.
Finally, we asked people to give generously to support our work. In total, we raised more than $389,000, far exceeding our goal of $275,000!
A huge THANK YOU to everyone who helped make this possible: each and every one of you who attended the event, donated, bought raffle tickets, or participated in our online auction, and to our wonderful sponsors, in particular our Title Sponsor, Expedia. If you didn’t get a chance to give, you can still donate today to help power our work in 2026.
And thank you to everyone who worked so hard to make Tuxes & Trains 2025 such a resounding success, including the Transportation Choices Coalition staff and board, Synchronicity events team, our emcee and auctioneer Sasha Summer Cousineau, the staff at the Seattle Art Museum, our amazing volunteers, and so many others.
Check out more fabulous pics by photographer Danny Ngan here, and feel free to share them with credit.
