A Google Maps tour of Central Link, part 2

Hey there! It’s been a few days, and I thought I’d finish showing off the recent satellite photos of Central Link construction.

The next station is Columbia City, the first surface level station on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. You’ll notice that I didn’t center the image here on the station – I want to bring attention to the east-west street at the south end of the platform, Edmunds Street. Sound Transit replaced the sidewalk and curb ramps between MLK and Rainier Avenue to make pedestrian access between Columbia City’s downtown and the light rail station more pleasant.

There are two more surface level stations, Othello and Rainier Beach. Othello is the more exciting of the two – built across from the only continuous block of street-fronted businesses on MLK, it’s extremely pedestrian friendly, and with 1500 housing units in planning around the intersection, it should become even more so. Rainier Beach isn’t particularly interesting right now, aside from the new Chief Sealth bicycle trail built in the adjacent Seattle City Light right-of-way (that’s the green part), and it does offer great access to the p-patch just to the north. Look for changes here over the next decade.

Here it gets interesting again. The light rail crosses both I-5 and the BNSF tracks. This BNSF crossing could be the site of a future station, as Sounder runs here and there’s plenty of space – maybe we’ll see a combined Sounder/Link/bus facility if Sounder eventually runs all day. These crossings used an interesting construction technique called a ‘balanced cantilever’ – central columns were built on each side of I-5 and the tracks, and from each column, aerial concrete segments were added one at a time to each side, keeping the weight to each side of the columns balanced. Eventually the segments met in the middle of the space they span.

Most of the aerial guideway was not built this way, though – it was built with this amazing big yellow gantry. This gantry, now gone (this part of the construction is complete), would pick up a dozen sections of trackway at a time, lift them into place, and hold them there while they were tensioned from the ends. Once the columns were in place, it could build about two spans a week, “walking” to the next empty span after building trackway across each.

This elevated trackway continues, unbroken, until Tukwila International Boulevard Station (why wasn’t it just Link Tukwila Station?) – where even this new imagery shows its age. The adjacent holes in the elevated trackway have long since been filled. This station is basically complete, with only the park and ride really left to finish paving. This is the only parking lot in Central Link, and I hope it’s later converted to transit oriented development!

The final leg of our tour is Airport Link. While Central Link is scheduled to open in July of next year, the last mile or so to the airport itself was dependent on the Port of Seattle’s airport expressway realignment, and opens at the end of the year. See this loop? That’s now paved and open, the new ‘return loop’ for drivers who have arrived at the airport before the people they’ve come to pick up are ready. Cars aren’t allowed to simply park in front of the arrivals hall, but congestion was getting bad, so the Port (as I understand it) wanted to extend the amount of pavement available for circulating traffic. A side benefit of this was to provide Sound Transit with the site for Sea-Tac Airport Station.

This station will have a pedestrian bridge over to the parking garage, so the walk will be similar to parking a bit away from the terminal. Sometime in the future, when all this construction is complete and the roadway has been moved to its new location, the Port would like to extend Concourse D (the short one just west of the light rail station) much as they have Concourse A (the southernmost concourse). This will likely present an opportunity to build a new, much shorter route for Link riders in the future.

One more note – when Central Link opens, shuttle buses will meet the trains at Tukwila Station to get you that last mile until Airport Link is done – so don’t worry, you won’t be stranded with your bags hailing a cab!