For the first time in history, a light rail vehicle has crossed a floating bridge under its own power. Just before midnight Monday evening, Link vehicle 219 traveled between Mercer Island station and Judkins Park station via the Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge. Unlike the tow test in May, the vehicle in yesterday’s test was powered by the overhead wire.

Link train crossing the I-90 floating bridge (Michael Smith)

This test marks a significant milestone for the very delayed full East Link Extension. If this test passed Sound Transit’s requirements, pre-revenue service between International District/Chinatown station and South Bellevue station should start later this year. The projected opening date for the full 2 Line is April 25, 2026.

Link train crossing the I-90 floating bridge (Michael Smith)
Link train transitioning from the floating bridge to the static bridge (Michael Smith)
Link train traveling under the I-90 westbound traffic lanes about to enter Mount Baker Tunnel (Michael Smith)

52 Replies to “Sound Transit Completes Live Wire Test on Floating Bridge”

  1. I wonder if the single out of service car I just saw pass SB at rainier beach was the bridge testing one. Dunno why it would be headed down south, but I don’t think I’ve seen a single car by itself for any other reason, either.

    1. @Dijibell,

      That single OOS LRV SB at RBS was probably related to FWLE testing and not 2-Link testing. They are using singles for that testing too.

      Eastside Transit has a video of more recent FWLE testing showing the use of singles:

      https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B-7bsrHNM2A

      But hey, testing on both FWLE and testing on Full ELE , and at the same time! It’s going to be busy at ST for the next 6 months.

      Finally.

      1. Ah! Thanks for the insight. Too many extensions to keep track of. Glad FWLE is proceeding so nicely at this point. It would suck to have to delay it until after the 1-2 connection opening.

      2. I’m anticipating March for opening.

        About Mariner, I feel it’s best to have Community Transit pick up the Paine Field portion with a streetcar, and run Link up I-5.

        Gets us there by 2032.

      2. Rest assured that Tim Eyman is going to terrestrial hell when my friend the grim does their visitation.

        It’s a wild ride to sync.

  3. And…. Currently the right 2 lanes on the floating bridge are closed due to an accident. Traffic is backed up in all lanes including the HOV lane. Buses are just crawling along WB I-90.

    Today would be an excellent day to have the 2-Link up and running. Congestion free baby!

    But alas, maybe in 6 months or so.

    2. The last time I was on I90 during a major accident, I sat in the left lane and observed the cars in the HOV lane. About 80% were actually single occupancy.

      1. @Delta,

        Ya, HOV lane cheating is huge. And it only gets worse during periods of peak congestion, like what happened on I-90 this morning.

        But Link won’t have to worry about that. Congestion free and not a single HOV lane cheater on the tracks. Perfect.

        Hopefully ST gets Full ELE done and in service soon, and certainly before the World Cup.

      2. We must not let traffic cameras infringe on the civil rights of lane cheaters to get a chance to talk a live cop out of a ticket.

    3. Yeah, Link never breaks down. [eye roll]

      Seriously, there are a lot of good reasons to be excited about a Link expansion. But assuming it will be more reliable is not one of them.

      1. In general though, Link will be pretty good. Unlike the 1 Line between SeaTac and Downtown Seattle, the 2 Line appears to be pretty fast based on projected travel times.

      2. A lot is going to depend on the bus restructure. It also illustrates why Link design in ST3 can lead to good or bad results.

        The restructure in the east side could be vastly better if there were a Link station that connected with the 520 buses. Obviously the decision was made, and adding a station there would have been expensive, but an awful lot of people are having to slog through local traffic on buses over a distance Link covers in less than a minute.

        Add too many problems like that, and you start to negatively impact Link ridership.

    4. and then something happens in the tunnel and the entire system is down… just like line 1

  4. The next few weeks will be revealing:

    How will faster trains do?
    How will longer trains do?
    How will trains passing each other do?
    How will longer, faster trains with the weight of passengers crammed into the train do?

    When can ST easily use East OMF for storage or maintenance?

    Surely by the November committee meetings the initial test results will be announced along with a more solid opening day timeframe for both full 2 Line simulation and the public opening. I’m really hoping for the best — yet I still would not be surprised if some unexpected problem gets identified.

    1. This is similar to my comment below. The tests are simply to confirm the construction and to a lesser extent the engineering. These aren’t experiments in that sense. They hope (and I fully expect) that the results will be relatively boring. They will find that they finally built things the way should have in the first place and everything works as expected. If there are any surprises it will really suck because it means someone screwed up and they will have to do a lot of work over again.

  5. Awesome! It works. Great job ST. Can’t wait to ride :-)

    From a high school physics standpoint this will be an interesting set of tests. Maximum weight on the floating bridge occurs when (2) fully-loaded trains pass each other, one going east and the other going west. The downward force is the weight of the trains, the buoyancy of the pontoons is calculated from the size of the pontoons. I hope ST releases at least some information on the response of the pontoon to these tests. Then there are lateral movements and harmonic oscillations which I’m unsure how to estimate.

      2. @D M,

        Or, stated another way, less time than it takes to cross the bridge in a car or a bus stuck in congestion like this mornings.

        But hey, I’m just glad they are finally making progress. And supposedly more testing is imminent.

        Can’t wait for this to open.

    2. I hope ST releases at least some information on the response of the pontoon to these tests. Then there are lateral movements and harmonic oscillations which I’m unsure how to estimate.

      My guess is the engineers know what to expect and the trains respond as expected. Just to be clear. Engineers sometimes screw up. But that is rare. The delays are not caused by an engineering flaw, it was a construction flaw (due to a lack of engineering). I realize a lot of what they are doing is new and different but they are leveraging years of experience. It would be interesting to know the math but I have no doubt it will work out just fine.

      1. I guess putting a light rail line across a floating bridge is a bit new, but really doesn’t seem to me to be that novel.

        If they can master putting freight trains and streetcars on ferries, which have less to stabilize them than the floating bridge does, they should be able to do a floating bridge just fine.

  6. Wasn’t this video of a westbound train on eastbound tracks? I get how trains need to be able to run in both directions on each track, but I would think that ST would be eager to test the dominant direction for each track.

  7. From an electrical standpoint I wonder how they measure the effectiveness of electrically grounding of the tracks? From what I understand the stray current is the greatest threat to the bridge pontoons, which could cause corrosion and failure of the bridge itself due to the inability of the bridge to shed current to the earth.

    1. There’s gotta be grounding cables, right? I’m sure it’s not electrically insulated from the land. Probably a bunch of big thick cables strung across the whole thing, and have been since it was built, because you don’t want to deal with a static charge building up on even the car bridge.

      1. Yes, again my understanding is there are grounding cables, but I believe the trains use 480v and a lot of amps, so there is potentially a lot of stray current. It is bad if it causes the rebar in the pontoons to corrode.

      3. The major recent delay was entirely due to WSDOT refusing to let Sound Transit turn on the overhead power until it could ensure its stray current management system sufficiently protected the bridge, which apparently required a lot of tweaking and testing before Monday night’s test.

  8. “The projected opening date for the full 2 Line is April 25, 2026. ”

    The last date I remember seeing was January 2026, along with seeing a few comments here from people suspicious that wasn’t possible given they weren’t far enough along in the testing yet. Is that April date from some Sound Transit document? I’m not finding anything more precise than “early 2026”.

  9. The ST board voted for Link as the mode for the East corridor in 2006, three years before the initial south-first initial segment opened. That was 19 years ago. ST2 was in 2008. I expect we could have had a decade of service or more on a BRT service on both SR-520 and I-90 (if ST had not opted for too many bells and whistles). SR-520 was tolled in 2010; I-90 already had the center roadway and the R8A agreement. 20-20 hindsight. We will never know; Robert Frost and the road not taken.

    1. The BRT over rail arguments on the blog lately have reached asinine levels.

      That’s literally just the 550. No bells and whistles BRT is just STX. Anyone who’s taken a crowded 550 or 545 knows the capacity is necessary, especially with pre covid ridership it was 100% the right move to go with rail. Also, with the rate if growth in Bellevue and Redmond, it is necessary capacity for futureproofing.

      1. @D M,

        “The BRT over rail arguments on the blog lately have reached asinine levels.”

        You think?

        The mode wars ended in the late 80’s. Rail is here, and here to stay. But some people still aren’t happy with that.

        Once FWLE and Full ELE open we will have a really successful system, and probably also the highest ridership Light Rail system in the US. Considering that the system isn’t even 20 years old yet, and that we started with exactly nothing, that is a real accomplishment.

        Kudos to ST.

        No going backwards now.

      2. That’s literally just the 550

        Not really. The 550 is relatively slow between Downtown Seattle and Downtown Bellevue. For whatever reason they decided to serve the south part of Bellevue Way with the same route. If the bus skipped that (but still stopped at Judkins Park and Mercer Island) it would be faster between Downtown Seattle and Downtown Bellevue than Link.

        That is the trade-off. East Link connects to a lot more places along the way. The same goes for serving areas to the east. East Link serves a lot of places on the same route. You would have to run a bunch of different buses to actually provide the same thing. In some cases the trip would be faster, in others it would be slower. But ST Express is not the same thing as investing a similar amount of bus money as East Link. It is very different.

        I think East Link was a worthy rail project because of the additional stops (before and after Downtown Bellevue). It is highly unlikely that East Link will carry as many people across the lake as all the express buses did. But we’ve already seen that a lot of people take East Link *within* the East Side. It is those riders that tip the edge in favor of rail.

        But ultimately we will never know. That is Jack’s point. East Link won’t replace a Brisbane-type BRT system. It will replace a bus network that lacked that kind of investment. When the dust settles we will have a good rail line across the water but unfortunately it is highly unlikely that we will actually increase overall transit ridership. To do that we would have to invest in the buses — something we’ve been reluctant to do for a while.

      3. It is perfectly reasonable to like some rail projects and not like others. But re-arguing ST3 as a package is a disappointing place for this blog to be in. It isn’t that anyone has changed their mind. It is just that different people are running the blog now.

        Second-most-disappointing is to see YIMBYOnly-ism as pertains to which rail lines merit building. I found this sentiment to be particularly common at ST events in Everett.

        I find myself in favor of completing the “spine” and less gung-ho about West Seattle and Ballard considering the billions that will be spent on mitigating “impacts” while reducing the rider experience.

      4. Brent:

        ST3 were lines on a map. Now that they’ve progressed with an actual plan, would that plan pass the ballot box now?

        I don’t think taking the existing popular route through downtown and breaking it into two pieces, one of which requires an 12 floor deep station at Westlake, and the associated transfer time, is something you would get past the ballot box.

        Or a Tacoma Link that only goes as far as Tacoma Dome and for all Tacoma-Seattle trips will be ≈ half hour longer than existing express bus service and require at least one transfer.

        Or a Ballard line that doesn’t really serve any destinations in Ballard.

      5. Ross,

        I don’t understand your reasoning behind the train carrying less than the express buses. Rail has been proven to be a higher preferred mode to bus in most contexts, and the light rail will serve all of the core areas that the 550 and 545 served, with a faster trip time compared to the 550 and comparable trip time to the 545. The difference will be that the train is objectively more comfortable than the bus, especially during peak travel times and crushloads.

        Even if the 550 didn’t serve south Bellevue, it would probably still get stuck in traffic on either 405 or bellevue way. If you’re building dedicated row brt, just build rail to connect it with the extant light rail system in Seattle. You also get way more service per dollar with rail, equivalent capacity on BRT costs far more per passenger on the operations side. A 4 car train can hold 8 buses worth of passengers. That’s 1 driver vs 8. Rail pencils out in the long term.

      6. I don’t understand your reasoning behind the train carrying less than the express buses.

        Sorry, I should have been more clear. Back in the day a lot of people took buses across the lake. Here are some ridership numbers:

        550 — 10,800
        545 — 9,727
        554 — 4,100
        111 — 900
        114 — 500
        212 — 2,800
        214 — 1,200
        216 — 1,000
        217 — 200
        218 — 1,400
        219 — 900

        Some of these were from right before the pandemic. Others were from a few years before. It adds up to over 33,000 riders. I don’t think there will be anywhere that many taking East Link once it opens.

        But at the same time, I definitely expect more riders than the current 550. That is because the 550 carries less than 5,000 people a day now. East Link is definitely an improvement for those riders. The 545 carries more but it still carries less than 6,000. Some riders would be better off with the 545. Other riders from Issaquah would prefer their one-seat ride. In general Link doesn’t carry a lot more riders than the buses did (along the same corridor). There are exceptions, but usually those are when you are replacing surface buses (e. g. Northgate to the UW) not express buses (Northgate to downtown). A lot of what makes East Link worthy as a rail project has already been built (e. g. it is much faster to get from Downtown Redmond to Downtown Bellevue right now). Obviously it makes sense to run across the water (the project would just be too expensive otherwise) but I don’t think we should assume that East Link will get over 35,000 riders when it opens (which is what you would expect given the historical numbers).

        But this gets back to the main problem with transit in the area. I think East Link is a good project. I think it will definitely improve transit in the region. But transit in the area will still be crappy. We are spending a fortune improving the subway system and not spending diddly on the buses (even though the buses carry more riders). As a result, overall ridership is still way down from what it was a few years ago. That is striking. The region has grown. Seattle itself has grown quite a bit. This means that the areas that are dense have gotten a lot more dense. Way more people live in the city without a car. And yet overall transit ridership is about what it was twenty years ago. Obviously the pandemic is a big reason why. But the other reason is that we haven’t invested in the buses.

      7. It is perfectly reasonable to like some rail projects and not like others. But re-arguing ST3 as a package is a disappointing place for this blog to be in. It isn’t that anyone has changed their mind. It is just that different people are running the blog now.

        I think a fair number of people have changed their mind. I think a lot of the support for ST3 was just a knee-jerk reaction in support of transit. Sure, it had warts, but it is still a major improvement. I think a lot of people are now taking a hard look at what is being proposed and realizing that the warts now dominate the projects. As has been pointed out, this was *NOT* the case with ST2. The sentiment expressed by Jack is an outlier. It is, as he put it, a consideration of the road not taken. But you just won’t find many people (Jack included) that think East Link is a bad project. Nor is Lynnwood Link. Sure, the numbers are disappointing but if we had to do it over again we would probably do exactly the same thing. Same with Federal Way Link. Lazarus may be a Pollyanna when it comes to Link but he is right to recognize the value of those extensions.

        But with ST3 we have come to doubt even the strongest projects. That is how bad ST3 is. What seemed like minor issues now dominate. Things like:

        1) It will be faster to get from Downtown Everett to Lynnwood by bus.
        2) Everett Link won’t serve Boeing (or the airport) well.
        3) There won’t be that many stations with Everett Link and none of them will get a lot of riders.
        4) Yet Everett Link will cost a fortune compared to what the county spends on buses or bus improvement projects.
        5) Tacoma Dome Link won’t serve downtown Tacoma.
        6) Riders going from Tacoma to most of Seattle would be better off with either Sounder or an express buses (depending on what time of day it is).
        7) Tacoma Dome Link won’t benefit that many people and most would be just as well off with express service to Federal Way.
        8) Pierce County could make transit a lot better with even a tiny bit of extra money. Yet they are spending it on projects that will benefit very few (and marginally).
        9) A lot of West Seattle riders will find that their trip (to Downtown Seattle, First Hill, Bellevue, South Lake Union, Beacon Hill, Rainier Valley, SeaTac) takes longer with East Link than it would if they connected the Spokane Street Viaduct with the SoDo Busway and ran buses more often.
        10) Riders from the UW will have to transfer to get to SeaTac.
        11) Riders from Rainier Valley will have worse stations downtown.
        12) Riders from Renton and Kent — probably oblivious to the billions being spent on the trains from West Seattle — will suddenly find that their trip to downtown is a lot slower.
        13) West Seattle Link really doesn’t add any value until it gets to downtown and that isn’t scheduled to be complete until 2039. It is quite likely that date gets pushed out further.
        14) The “South Lake Union” station will not really serve South Lake Union. It will be placed at the most desolate possible location in the area. It is meant as a connection to Aurora buses, traveling the same direction. But many riders on those buses will ignore the station and just transfer further south. That’s because…
        15) A lot of the stations in Ballard Link will be extremely deep. Riders will not get to the surface with a bunch of high speed elevators. They will instead be expected to go back and forth on escalators.
        15) The Denny Station will be too far west.
        16) Serving the heart of Ballard (roughly 20th & Market) is apparently too hard for Sound Transit. Serving 15th & Market has now become really hard as well. So instead they will serve the industrial district quite a ways to the east (at 14th). Don’t be fooled by the numbers — it is not one city block away (more like two and a half). This will be the one and only station in all of Ballard. Thus the vast majority of people in Ballard will have to either walk a long ways to catch the bus, take a bus and transfer, or just ride the 40.
        17) The 40 will have to be altered — in a negative fashion — to serve the Ballard station.
        18) Issaquah Link is a stupid project. It would be better to connect the HOV lanes of I-90 and 405 and just run express buses.

        I find myself in favor of completing the “spine” and less gung-ho about West Seattle and Ballard considering the billions that will be spent on mitigating “impacts” while reducing the rider experience.

        Except “the spine” was stupid and was always stupid. No transit expert in the world would have recommended that. It violates obvious transit fundamentals: Don’t run your metro out to the boonies. Seriously, even mega-cities don’t do that. Look at the New York City Subway or the Paris Metro or the London Underground (or even the Overground). Do they run trains out that far? No, of course not. At best they leverage old railways (like we leverage Sounder). But treating Ash Way like it is Capitol Hill is just silly. The Spine is silly (and always was).

        Keep in mind, this is in cities where building massive infrastructure is actually a lot cheaper. The cities are much bigger, they can build things much cheaper and yet they don’t build anything like “the spine”.

      9. I do agree with you Ross, however we should still build rail.

        The issue is HOW we are doing it. The key mistakes are

        1. Not engineering for speed. 55 mph max is not acceptable. A train should compete with cars. 70-80 mph peak is better along freeway segments (and faster if possible, why not?). Choosing to use better forms of rail rather than just Light Rail is key.

        2. Keeping the lines too short. I understand operators need breaks, but we need one seat rides to the airport from all major destinations at minimum.

        3. Deleting the buses. Light rail is not an excuse to remove express buses and peak hour service, unless the bus ride is almost exactly equivalent to the light rail in terms of stops, speed, and coverage. Unfortunately this is exactly what we’re doing, even if light rail does not fully cover the trip. See route 162, old 255/257/311, ST545, 556 deletions for example

        The point is the “one seat ride” (or at least a two seat ride) should be prioritized for most people. At worst they should take a single Metro bus and light rail to get into Seattle, Bellevue. From there maybe a streetcar or walk.

      10. > I expect we could have had a decade of service or more on a BRT service on both SR-520 and I-90

        The 520 will start having the 542 on it

        > The mode wars ended in the late 80’s. Rail is here, and here to stay. But some people still aren’t happy with that.

        It’s a bit more complicated than that. For 405 freeway brt was chosen instead for example. Same for sr 522 as avenue brt.

        the renton to bellevue corridor was close to being light rail and for sr522 originally there were some ideas for it to be a streetcar/tram akin to sf muni or portland.

        Anyways more importantly for aurora avenue and pacific highway the light rail elevated was not ran there. and instead we have the light rail along the freeway corridor.

      11. @WL
        “It’s a bit more complicated than that. For 405 freeway brt was chosen instead for example.”

        It’s actually no more complicated than simply – NIMBY politics .

        I have the documents from the City of Renton and the Kennedale Neighborhood Association asking the I-405 Corridor Program’s Executive Committee to not study the one rail option in the ERC any further (after the preliminary ridership numbers were developed) for any purpose .

        By the way, the ridership analysis that chose I-5 over the SR99 Corridor is rooted in the same issue. Instead, the decision was ‘flavored’ by the cost benefit analysis report’s choice of Horizon year.

    2. At its core, I think that the light rail problem is that too many people don’t understand the nuances of the mode. They see dots on a map and not stations deep underground. They see lines on a map but don’t understand the slower rail speeds. They especially see two lines that cross at a station on a map but don’t see the horrific 3D effort to transfer between trains. They don’t see the operational risks that lead to way too many service disruptions. They don’t see the difficulty of not having crossovers or the challenges of reversing trains at the end of lines. They don’t see the effect of not having enough escalators and elevators at a station. They don’t want to hire senior management that gets the actual mechanics of light rail operations because they want to selling the fantasy rather than face reality. And finally they don’t see how the ST3 project budgets were low-balled with inadequate contingencies even though there was plenty of examples around the country that were already under construction at much higher costs even back in 2015.

      So everyone involved has mostly been fantasizing and no one wants to face the approaching reality. Reality is arriving and it’s never as good or sexy as a fantasy.

  10. Re South King Resident’s issues:

    “1. Not engineering for speed. 55 mph max is not acceptable. A train should compete with cars. 70-80 mph peak is better along freeway segments (and faster if possible, why not?).”

    Link trains can go 65 mph, and light rail can reach 80 or 85 mph. Link’s 55 mph constraint is the track specs: faster speeds would require gentler curves and slopes. ST chose light rail mode in the 1990s because it’s street-compatible: ST originally envisioned a mostly-surface network like Portland, San Jose, and San Diego to keep capital costs low to attract tax-skeptical voters. But after Rainier Valley, all the cities/neighborhoods put demands leading to grade-separation (Rainier Valley had done that too but it didn’t have an autonomous city council with permitting power or enough affluent residents to have clout).

    ST never put two and two together about how a 55 mph limit and 35 mph arterial segments would lead to an hour+ travel time in a long 35-mile corridor like Westlake-Tacoma Dome. Or how that would affect passengers and the dream of a Spine that everybody would use and love.

    In the run-up to ST3 boardmembers mused about retrofits to speed up the Tukwila segment, but that went nowhere, just like boardmembers’ similar musings then about considering automated trains for Ballard and future lines, and retrofitting CID1 station to a center-platform design. It dangled all these good ideas in front of us but followed up on none of them.

    2. “we need one seat rides to the airport from all major destinations at minimum.”

    The biggest issue is frequency. Frequency can help make up for transfers. No cities’ metro/S-bahn system has one-seat rides from everywhere to the airport. There’s a trunk line to the primary downtown (SFO, JFK, Dusseldorf), and/or a premium express line to downtown (Newark, Gatwick).

    Link’s 10-minute frequency on each branch is better than most American light rails (15-minute MAX) or BART (15 minutes), but is mediocre worldwide. So ST should prioritize frequency more, and then many of people’s trip inefficiencies would be mitigated.

    “3. Deleting the buses. Light rail is not an excuse to remove express buses and peak hour service, unless the bus ride is almost exactly equivalent to the light rail in terms of stops, speed, and coverage. Unfortunately this is exactly what we’re doing, even if light rail does not fully cover the trip. See route 162, old 255/257/311, ST545, 556 deletions for example”

    The 255 was a victim of unforeseen covid reductions, 520 construction, and Metro/SDOT’s refusal to plan Husky Stadium events better (i.e., prioritizing buses more vs cars). With the other routes, you have to look at the high cost of long express runs, especially unidirectional ones. That’s what’s preventing us from having more frequency for the same total service hours. You’re prioritizing a few long-distance express riders over two or three times more local riders in another corridor.

  11. How effective train system would actually look like.
    (1) Tacoma to Everett should be a N-S line along I-5, with capacity to run at higher speeds between major points except in the Seattle downtown tunnel. Skip Rainier Beach and give it a new line. I suggest the ideas seen in the latest Seattle Subway.
    (2) Bothell/Woodinville via Bellevue to Airport.
    (3) Issaquah to UW via South Kirkland
    (4) Redmond to Seattle via Bellevue
    (5) Local light rail lines to Ballard and West Seattle. These should not be long like the current proposal.

    No local stops except in downtown where they are high capacity. Buses connect low/medium ridership areas to a station such that the ride duration is as fast as possible and requires fewer transfers. That does not mean the *nearest station*, but one that is along the most efficient route.

    About your point about peak buses, I’d support eliminating them if Link was faster. But it’s not. The bus will often times be more efficient in it’s routing and (sometimes) highway speeds. So why force people to transfer and take a slow alternative? Service hours is an issue but it’s far cheaper than Link has been…

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