Yesterday, Seattle Transit Blog writers had the opportunity to join local media outlets to tour the highly anticipated 2 Line cross-lake connection, which is the final piece that will fully unify both the 1 and 2 Lines as it was envisioned in ST2. The connection will fully open to the public this Saturday, March 28th with ribbon-cutting at 9am and revenue service starting around 10am.
The media preview started at South Bellevue Station, which has already been open for Eastside-only revenue service since Spring of 2024. Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine opened his welcoming remarks with a lofty prediction: Saturday’s opening is expected to be the “biggest” in Sound Transit history. Longtime board member and King County councilmember Claudia Balducci followed up by highlighting East Link’s long history, both as a “political project” in Bellevue as well as its technical challenges.
According to Craig Delalla, director of engineering and operations at Sound Transit, the agency is well prepared for the opening given the many learnings from simulated 2 Line service. Delalla also noted that revenue service will see a mix of 2 and 3-car consists, with 3-car sets more reliably going out during peak periods.
Mercer Island Station
The tour departed South Bellevue Station westbound with stops at Mercer Island and Judkins Park. From South Bellevue, we flew over the I-90 & Bellevue Way interchange before crossing the East Channel Bridge. Although the floating span on the Homer Hadley bridge has received the most attention for its engineering marvels, the flyover views leaving South Bellevue arguably boast better scenery.
After a few minutes’ ride, we arrived at Mercer Island, where we alighted for a 20 minute tour of the station, which sits between 77th Ave SE on the west end and 80th Ave SE on the east end. Michael noted an inconspicuous discrepancy on the station maps: “Exit A” is marked at 77th Ave SE on the Sound Transit station area map, but at 80th Ave SE on Metro’s bus bay map.
Mercer Island station is sandwiched in the I-90 median, so tall noise barrier walls help dampen the highway noise. Each entrance connects to the platform via stairs, an up escalator, and an elevator. Seattle artist Beliz Brother created a sculpture for each headhouse. The full details of the station were discussed in a recent article.
Interestingly, the station’s final conceptual design in 2016 included two escalators at the east entrance but only one escalator was installed there. Brian Holloway, Sound Transit’s Director of Infrastructure Engineering, explained that the second escalator was removed from the design as part of construction cost savings efforts in the late 2010s. However, the east entrance structure was built with space to install a second escalator as a potential future upgrade to the station.
Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge
After exploring Mercer Island station, we boarded another train heading to Lynnwood. The train traveled under Mercer Island’s I-90 lid and onto the Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge across Lake Washington. The ride across the bridge was smooth with stunning views of the water. Sound Transit staff challenged tour participants with detecting when the train passed over the unique “track bridges” spanning the stationary and floating sections of the route as it is difficult to tell when the train transitions from water to land. It was incredible to experience the result from decades of technical, political, and legal effort. On the west side of the bridge, the tracks tuck under I-90’s westbound lanes and travel through the Mount Baker Tunnel.
Judkins Park Station
Judkins Park station is the only new 2 Line station in Seattle. The center platform is aligned closer to the 23rd Ave headhouse. The Rainier Ave entrances are accessible via an at-grade rail crossing and a short path. The 23rd Ave and northbound Rainier Ave entrances have stairs, an up escalator, and an elevator. The southbound Rainier Ave entrance has stairs and an elevator. At each entrance, murals of Jimi Hendrix by Hank Willis Thomas welcome passengers. On the platform, the windscreens feature art by Barbara Earl Thomas, Director of the Northwest African American Museum from 2008 to 2013.
Grand Opening Saturday, March 28
The full album of pictures and videos from the preview ride is available here. Everyone is invited to explore the Crosslake Connection on Saturday. Numerous stations along the 2 Line will host community events. See you there!
Hopefully they’re thinking about the No Kings march planned also for tomorrow!
Dow’s prediction is, I believe, overdetermined. The opening day coincides with the No Kings protest – likely to be the biggest protest in American history.
Has any light rail ever crossed a body of water? Is this world first?
Worlds first crossing on a floating bridge. Link already crosses water in a tunnel (under the Montlake Cut) and on an elevated bridge (over the Duwamish).
What do you mean by “light rail” in this context?
In the rest of the world, light rail would just be a local railway (the Siemens light rail cars used by Link meet the standards to allow them on UIC main line railroads), or a modern tram line.
The North American predecessor to light rail might be the interurban lines, and they crossed bodies of water all the time. That includes Puget Sound Electric Railway crossing the Puyallup
River and Bellingham & Skagit going around Chuckanut Hill by building several miles of line over Bellingham Bay on trestle. Portland Traction had a line to Vancouver over the Columbia River (though originally built as a lightly built steam powered streetcar line that was later converted to electric power).
The issue is a floating bridge. MAX goes to east Portland so it has to cross the Willamette. There are only a few floating bridges in the world. Most of them are in Washington state or British Columbia. All the ones besides Link probably don’t have light rail. Most pontoon bridges are temporary military installations for active wars.
The reason Lake Washington has floating bridges is it’s too deep for other kinds of bridges and it has no hard bottom: it’s just mud that gets gradually denser as you go down. Other lakes and rivers don’t have these problems or are narrow enough to span. The lake doesn’t go gradually down and up again. Several feet out, it just suddenly goes straight down like a pot below ground level between Seattle and the Eastside.
No, the interurbans weren’t light rail, even if the technology descends from them. Light rail per se didn’t exist until the 1970s when a new generation of tram standards emerged and were branded, as a modern solution to a perennial problem. When you compare Link to other light rails, that’s the set of light rails. That’s why Link ranks as the best American light rail by far, because it’s so light metro like. But if you compare it to all American metros/subways, it falls to the bottom two-thirds.
So the first light rail on a floating bridge isn’t a very important issue: the first metro/subway of any kind on a floating bridge is. And that I don’t know. The floating bridge in BC is in Kelowna, which is the size Bellevue and Kirkland would be if the rest of Pugetopolis didn’t exist. The one in Norway and the group in Egypt probably don’t have metros on them.
There was no “light rail technology” that was developed. The term was developed by the UMTA (predecessor to the Federal Transit Administration) to describe for administrative purposes the few remaining streetcar and interurban remnants left in the USA in the 1970s. This included everything from Philadelphia’s mostly streetcar operation to Boston’s heavily built Green Line.
Everything that Link and other light rail lines do, no matter if operation in tunnel or median street running or private right of way, had been in use on interurbans and streetcars prior to 1900. There were even a few experiments with partial low floor cars.
But it was based on the model of an updated tram vision in Germany at that time, where it spread to many cities to upgrade the legacy transit they had. I’m taking American light rail to be equivalent to that. At least in the idea and the technology, if not the part about going right to neighborhood centers and having downtown tunnels.
Boston built its DSTT for streetcars in 1897, for the same reasons Europe started doing so.
Refresh my memory please. Were 2- and 3-car consists always the plan for the full 2-line? Is ST still waiting for cars to be delivered? Thanks in advance.
ST is saying it’s because of the “Federal Way Link Extension”… BUT HOW WOULD OMF EAST TRAINS (where the 2 Line trains are stored) GET TO FEDERAL WAY WHEN IT OPENED ALONG THE I-90 BRIDGE!?
Yes, ST is still waiting for the extra 10 cars it ordered from Siemens to arrive between now and 2027. It has, to my knowledge, accepted all of the original ST2 LRV order. I think they exercised the option because of the federal way and redmond extensions necessitating more capacity, as these were ST3 projects, and were not calculated into the final fleet needs for the ST2 order.
Additional 10 LRVs were meant to address the challenge of running all 2 Line trips in 4-car capacity. The presentation led to the conclusion of additional order of 10 LRVs implies that they have enough LRVs (already ordered) to run 4-car 2 Line between Northgate and Redmond or mixed 3/4 car 2 Line between Lynnwood and Redmond. They ultimately chose the latter service pattern, which all indicated that 2 Line will operate with 3/4 car capacity if needed.
Current operation of 2/3 cars is probably a result inadequate LRV that is clear for operation since delivery. Frankly, I don’t really see a need to run 3/4 cars for the first few months given it has already provided more capacity than current cross-lake buses do and those service will keep running until Fall.
Scooby,
There’s a reversing pocket at CIDS for out-of-service trains to move between Line 2 east and Line 1 south.
But what I’m wondering is how they even run on the bridge to get to Federal Way.
They leave ESMF via its throat tracks, travel south on the Line 2 main line to International District Station where they enter the pocket track. The driver walks to the other end of the train and requests entrance to the southbound Line 1 tracks. When granted the train moves as far south along the Line 1 tracks as is necessary for the train to enter revenue service.
Oh, that pocket. That’s what forced buses out of DSTT. I heard it was because it displaced the bus layover area in the tunnel.
Losing Convention Place station and its street entrances was also an issue, but that could have been done later.
Interesting tidbit about the second escalator upgradability in the future. I hope that ST does this for more stations as it seeks to lower costs on ST3 stations. Locking out options to add more is never great, so having knock out panels or other provisions for future projects is a small extra amount that can save big in the future.
But many riders get frustrated with no down escalators too at stations.
Ok? Those cost money and may need to be cut to get a project into budget. Keeping the ability to add them in the future is a good way to not lock them out of having them when they are affordable.
I don’t understand why down escalators are always the first thing to go. They surely can’t save that much compared to how much the overall extension costs. It has to be one of the worst cost to rider experience tradeoffs possible.
“Those cost money and may need to be cut to get a project into budget. ”
Two-way escalators are a basic minimum requirement for a good transit station. Passengers need to get from the street to the train and vice-versa. They’re as core as platforms and ticket vending machines. No department store or office building has just up escalators: customers would say it’s substandard and take their money elsewhere. Yet they think transit riders should tolerate it? Why? Because transit riders are losers? Because it’s government-run so we can’t fund it properly?
“I don’t understand why down escalators are always the first thing to go. “
It’s a mystery to me too. I agree that they’re more important than people think.
There are plenty of riders with arthritis (1 in 2 seniors; 1 in 4 adult women). Going down stairs for sufferers is usually more painful than going up. People carry things with them too.
Missing down escalators also means much heavier elevator use. Elevators are going out of service often — and heavier use contributes to that. Without a down escalator, there should be at least two elevators.
The best “why” explanation that I can come up with is that DSTT has no escalators down to the platforms, so no one locally expects them to be needed. Had someone ridden daily in places with down escalators like with BART or DC Metrorail, their absence is immediately noticeable and aggravating.
“It’s a mystery to me too.”
It’s because of thinking about what looks good on paper instead of what meets passengers’ needs. And one theory about when down escalators are justified. And not understanding what role escalators play in cities with comprehensive transit (several subway lines and ubiquidous buses).
In the 1980s when DSTT was built, there was less public willingness to pay higher taxes for first-rate transit improvements. So we built a downtown bus tunnel instead of a full Forward Thrust-like subway network. The entire tunnel cost $200 million then, and that was considered high and the most the public would support.
There was a debate about down escalators. One side said there should be two-way escalators everywhere. The other side said the cost of escalators was justified only if it goes a minimum of “one level up, or two levels down”. Areas that were one level down, people were expected to use stairs. This was the view that won out because “People don’t want to pay more taxes for down escalators”. Most of DSTT’s surface-to-mezzanine, mezzanine-to-platform, or surface-to-platform are one level. The few that go down multiple levels to the mezzanine have two-way escalators (University Street entrance, James Street entrance, Westlake’s weird two-level short entrances).
Disabled people can’t use stairs, but there were ADA elevators for them, and it was assumed that there were so few of them and who cares if it takes them a long time, so the elevators are ultra-slow ones. (I’ve heard they’re hydraulic elevators, because those are less expensive than cable-pulled elevators, but they’re slower.) They were thinking wheelchairs, not arthritis or recovering from surgery, and it was the aftermath of the baby boom so the young:elderly ratio was still higher than it is now.
ST took a different approach. It starts with two-way escalators, but when it has to economize to stay within budget, down escalators are the first thing to go. The reason goes back to ST’s entire outlook. The whole Link network is based on what politicians think looks good on paper and gives interest groups what they want, even if it contradicts transit best practices and what makes transit so phenomenally successful in cities that do it right. Down escalators aren’t on the list of politicians’/stakeholders’ demands, so they’re not prioritized.
Yes. I’m glad a second down escalator can be added in the future!
It’s too bad that in many cases at other stations, the removal of a down escalator included a narrowing of the platform so they couldn’t be added back in the future. I remember that this was the case with Lynnwood Link when they were summarily removed down escalators with no opportunity for comment or for cities to reserve the space or backfill the cost.
Some have suggested that the narrowing was required elsewhere because grants wouldn’t allow for reserving space to add escalators back later. But if that’s reserved at one of these stations , it blows up that argument completely.
And if anyone is paying attention, they’ll know that ST is more aggressively removing down escalators from ST3 stations more aggressively than they have been with ST2 stations. It’s on the initial cost-cutting list from the outset.
“I’m glad a second down escalator can be added in the future! ”
There’s no down escalator anywhere in the station if I’m reading it correctly, so it would be a first down escalator.
Thanks for the post, pics, and videos. That must have been a cool experience.
It really is slower than I thought, watching the video.