Sound Transit:

We’re laying the groundwork to open the Blue Line, a new Link line that will begin taking riders from Northgate to Redmond in 2023.

As part of that work, we need to reduce Link service for three weekends this fall. On the weekends of October 12-13, October 26-27, and November 9-10, there will be no Link service between SODO-Capitol Hill.

Trains will run from Angle Lake-SODO and UW-Capitol Hill, and free buses will connect the six stations in between. (We chose those particular weekends because there are no Seahawks or Husky games.)

This is prep work. The real Connect 2020 closures start next year. See our previous coverage here.

16 Replies to “First set of weekend Link closures announced”

  1. I hope they come up with a better bus plan for mid-line closures in the future. Putting people on 3-seat rides is a real pain, especially considering that the bus bridge goes one stop short of UW. And it’s much worse if you were taking Link-connecting buses on a regular basis, since U-Link could be 4-seats, and U-Link plus a south connection is 5 seats. It’s like ST plans this in isolation from all the buses that were restructured around Link.

    In this case, the downtown bus bridge should continue up to UW, and to U-District, and connect to NE 45th, allowing Metro to use the faster 45th routing on those weekends. This is where a bus bridge can be advantageous. I’d not even run the the 2-stop shuttle train from UW to CHS.

    1. Insider tip: you can ride the 70 as a bus bridge to the u district. During off peak hours, the 512 to 45th at. is another option.

      1. That’s a good point. The 48 is another good one. I guess my complaint is more about ST’s specific solution, and complete lack of coordination with Metro on these matters. Arranging a frequency boost for the 70 on affected weekends would have been nice, for example. The 48 already runs every 10 on Saturdays, but bumping it to 10 on Sunday as well during these closures would help people traveling further south.

      2. Extending the bus bridge would cost money and give more service than Link does, and the 70 has adequate travel time weekends. But ST should definitely advertise the 70 option rather than acting like Metro doesn’t exist. It’s easy to forget the 49 and 70 are still running and think the furthest-east one-seat ride to downtown is the 26.

      3. Given that this is a weekend, the 512 is usually much faster than the 70. Depending on the ultimate destination, the 70 may make up the time by reducing walking distance at the end. But, if you’re trying to get around or north of 45th St., just take the 512.

  3. In the meantime, readers who live in Seattle can immediately start groundwork for an emphasis campaign to impeach the Mayor and the whole Seattle City Council if they don’t institute emergency rush-hour transit lane and signal preemption on every single arterial for the duration. Commendation for the timely heads-up, which should assure there won’t be any problem.

    Mark Dublin

    1. You can’t simply have both preemption and pedestrian crosswalks with enough time to get across the street. It takes logic implemented in advance before buses arrive.

      1. Really meant emphatic agreement with AlexKven about urgency of the situation, and need for interagency cooperation. That’s all.

        Mark

    1. More specifically, it’s ridiculous that Issaquah is getting light rail when First Hill, Fremont, Greenwood, Lake City, Crossroads, and Renton aren’t.

      1. Well said. Add Belltown and the Central Area (AKA, the C. D.) to the list. It is as if Sound Transit is incapable of reading a census map.

    2. I’m more perturbed that these closure is as far north as Capitol Hill. I can understand the need to prepare the track split near ID but I would have thought the U-Link project would have been designed with adjustments for the Blue Line in mind. Even the need to build proper switches to move trains to the other track should have been done when U-Link was built.

      It makes me wonder if ST made an oversight mistake and is using the ID prep work to conveniently and quietly correct it.

  6. Wish the last closure was NOVEMBER 14-17 – something about an auto show makes it fitting…

    Yes folks in the heady days of November 2016 when we transit geeks thought we could do anything, wondering about automated transportation, I happily wondered around the Seattle show wearing a… Sound Transit cap. Which I’ve sadly lost.

  7. Its times like this when something like the CCC being around to absorb confused downtown riders might have been nice.

    And yeah, building a streetcar just for that is overkill, but given how Seattle behaves with even one part if the system malfunctions, having some kind of reliable alternative seems like an idea that should have already been implemented.

    Seattle can’t even get 24 hour bus lanes on 3rd though, so I guess no one with power really cares.

    :-\

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