Carolyn Adolph

Now that there’s an agreement in the West Coast ports dispute, ship containers are being processed at the ports of Seattle and Tacoma.

But the congestion on port lands won’t clear until truckers get in to move the containers. And that is the question now: How soon can the region’s truckers move them, and what will stand in their way.

Construction of the new state Route 520 bridge is about halfway along now. But just as our tunnel mega-project has a major complication, SR 520 has its own mega-snag: we lack the minimum $1.6 billion to complete it.

The state’s highway department is also not clear on the final design of the "Rest of the West," as this embattled section of the 520 bridge is called.

Seattle’s strong growth means full buses and congested roads. The City of Seattle says maybe it should also mean more help for commuters. It’s holding a hackathon, bringing people together to build new tools that can help everyone get around.

Aging vessels are frequently blamed for problems in Washington’s ferry system. But the latest performance report says new ferries are giving the state plenty of grief.

Washington State Ferries missed its goal of keeping vessel out-of-service time to an average of eight weeks a year in 2014, and young ferries were key players.

  Earlier this month at an economic conference, King County Executive Dow Constantine made a startling point: Less than 5 percent of the households added to King County since the year 2000 were middle income.

It was before dawn on Thursday, and the cold air off the Blair Waterway in Tacoma was damp and penetrating.

Karl Anderson, a mustachioed man in his 70s, stood on his company’s graving dock, waiting for the Kalakala.

Billionaire Elon Musk says he’s setting up an engineering center in Seattle that could have 1,000 workers within three or four years.

Musk is CEO of Space Exploration Technologies. He made his name as co-founder of PayPal and designer of the Tesla electric car. He made the announcement in a conference call with journalists at Bloomberg.

It should only take half an hour to drive between Everett and Seattle on Interstate 5, which was possible during the holidays.

But it’s back to reality now, and the regular commute can take longer than an hour.

It was a year of soaring profits for Boeing and Microsoft, rapid expansion for Amazon and anguish for Boeing machinists. KUOW's economy reporter Carolyn Adolph tells Bill Radke how the Puget Sound region's major employers fared in 2014.

Travelers to the San Juan Islands have always had to cope with uncertainty. Up to now there’s been no way to guarantee a spot on a particular ferry.

But Washington ferries are now taking reservations for the San Juan Islands. The first ferries to fill up under the new system leave Monday morning.

This year’s ski season is getting off to a slow start thanks to an old skiers’ nemesis: the pineapple express.

Unusually warm and wet weather has been washing away the snow on the region’s ski hills. Fresh snow finally started falling over the weekend.

But not before some innocent pineapples had to die.

Five years ago this Monday, Boeing's 787 flew for the first time. The Dreamliner, billed as Boeing's game-changing plane, roared into the sky above Everett at 10:27 a.m.

Now another milestone approaches: Boeing says 2015 is the year it makes its first profit per plane on the 787 line.

A report from the National Transportation Safety Board says Boeing, its contractors and the Federal Aviation Administration share the blame for a fire in a 787's lithium-ion battery at Boston's Logan Airport two years ago. That fire was one of two incidents that led to the grounding of the Dreamliner fleet in 2013.

The NTSB said the fire on the tarmac at Boston Logan was the result of a short-circuit in a single battery cell. It resulted in smoke, which Boeing said would be a one in 10 million event. But then it spread to other cells, causing a wave of extreme heat known as a thermal runaway and fire.

The Washington Traffic Safety Commission is taking another run at an expanded distracted driving law. A proposed bill is sitting at the governor’s office now. The legislation would expand the current ban on texting or holding a handset to the ear to include touching a mobile device while driving.

Though the proposal addresses more of the ways people are interacting with their devices, it leaves out one major distraction:  Siri.