An Intern to GM: Driving King County Metro’s Future

Sunday mornings after church in Michelle Allison’s hometown of Homer, Alaska, conversations would invariably shift to an announcement that a neighbor planned to drive the 220 miles to Anchorage—a 10-hour round trip.

Stops would be slated for Costco, the hardware store, the auto parts store and the like.

“What else do people need?” the driver would ask.

Soon after that followed shopping lists from other families, along with cash to help pay for gas, and the truck heading for the big city would be hitched with a trailer to haul all the food and goods needed to keep afloat the townspeople of Homer.

“That was a very regular part of what I was brought up thinking and understanding is this shared space for transit and connection and mobility,” says Allison, ‘10 MPA, who today is the General Manager of King County Metro.

Each week, Metro—the seventh largest transit agency in the U.S.—provides more than 1 million rides, removing countless cars from roadways and delivering a lifeline for people to not only travel to work or the airport, but also to the grocery store, doctor’s appointments and to visit friends and family. In addition to bus, on-demand, paratransit, vanpool and water taxi services, Metro also operates Seattle’s two streetcars, Sound Transit Link light rail and Sound Transit Express buses.

Overseeing this massive movement of people from her office in Pioneer Square—and guiding public transit’s recovery from the pandemic—is Allison. Her trajectory to leading the agency may have its origins in tiny Homer while observing the community-building potential in organizing a reliable transportation system, but it took off when she was a student in Seattle University’s Master of Public Administration program.

While attending SU and fulfilling a requirement of the program, Allison landed an internship working for a King County Council member. That internship turned into a full-time position, then a promotion, then another.

“I got to see the different ways the county is structured and organized, the different communities in different spaces and really understand the needs and their differences throughout the whole county,” she says, reflecting on the depth and scope of her experiences and opportunities.

After becoming Metro’s Chief of Staff and then Deputy General Manager, Allison was selected in 2023 to lead the largest transit agency by ridership in the Northwest.

When King County Executive Dow Constantine nominated Allison for the top transit position, he lauded her extensive knowledge and smart, steady management with a deep commitment to employees and the communities Metro serves. She was unanimously confirmed by the King County Council.

“Her leadership and vision are instrumental in advancing our goals of creating a more efficient, equitable and accessible transit system for the people of our region,” says Constantine.

It wasn’t transportation, but rather the focus on public service that drew Allison to Seattle University while working for a consultancy firm.

“That’s actually why I applied to SU in the first place,” she says. “The focus on community, the focus on equity and investment and engagement was what I was doing for profit. And I knew I needed to switch and do it for public service.”

Like her early introduction to the potential that transportation offers for community building, Allison sought a community connection at SU that balanced academic rigor and experiential learning along with the community offered by the MPA program.

“I’ve always had a positive experience in academics when I could build relationships with the people I was on the journey with,” she says. “So that really drew me in because I knew that I could have that really good dialogue with both the teachers and my classmates in a way that would live beyond the subject matter. And so that was really appealing. And then there’s the practicality of it. The master’s program is offered at night so you can keep your day job and make those investments in your future.”

Allison’s advice to current SU students includes to, “always take an internship, definitely a paid one, it will give you a ton of exposure. And for me, it gave me a career.”

Allison remains close to her former professor, Noreen Elbert, EdD, who invites her back to campus to talk with current students and brings students to visit Allison in her office. Elbert’s classes rely heavily on teamwork, something at which Elbert says Allison excelled, crediting her balance of “the head and the heart,” not just for employees but the public who depend on Metro.

“She’s got that perfect combination of being a leader who is not just about the bottom line or outcomes, but also ensuring that people in systems are having their needs met,” says Elbert.

Transit gets a person from point A to point B, but Allison sees it as a force for social justice, giving people from all walks of life access to the world beyond their doorstep.

“You take a step back from transit as a bus with a timetable that’s moving people from one place to the next and you think about the outcome of those trips and what that mobility is,” she says. “It is absolutely a force multiplier when it comes to equity and the outcomes that we want for communities that are really vulnerable.”

Managing transit through the pandemic was incredibly challenging but the recovery has proven even more so.

“You have to do everything that you did before, plus you have to do it with a workforce that’s been depleted with a supply chain that’s been totally rocked, with a mobility network where people’s patterns of travel have totally changed with work from home and just what a downtown core recovery looks like, too,” she says. “And everyone wants that to happen at the same time.”

Allison sees the agency emerging from the lasting effects of the public health crisis. Earlier this year, Metro celebrated the highest one-day ridership in more than four years with 300,000+ passengers.

“I am super proud of us because we’re turning the corner and we’re definitely on the upside,” she says. “That’s the key reason why riders keep coming back because they can rely on you.”

Allison lives in West Seattle with her husband, Levi Hopkins, and their daughter, En-si.