BELLEVUE — The arrival of the East Link Starter Line, a 6-mile light rail route from South Bellevue to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, will change how Eastsiders think about getting around.
A revolution in regional travel isn’t here yet. Sound Transit’s promise to unite east and west, with a line across Lake Washington into Seattle, won’t be fulfilled for nearly two years. Still, the local eight-station segment, which opens Saturday, provides a test run for rail’s appeal on the Eastside, where communities are rebuilding themselves to fit new trains.
Since voters approved Eastside rail more than 15 years ago, the population has increased 35% in Redmond and Bellevue, reaching 231,000 residents. Both cities welcomed taller downtowns and converted outlying lands to “transit-oriented development” at stations where apartments, cafes, pubs, parks and a new arts district await people. Three bridges stand ready to help people overcome dangerous traffic when they walk or bike to light rail.
“Everything that you have seen happen in Bellevue over the last 10 years, has been because of the promise of light rail,” asserts Bellevue Mayor Lynne Robinson.
Someday, train riders will glide along the Interstate 90 bridge, watching traffic jams out the window on their way to the office, to enjoy a night of dinner and music on either side of the lake, or to catch a connecting train to the airport. World-class health centers and software hubs will be connected more closely than ever.
Until the full route that includes Mercer Island and Seattle is ready, Sound Transit will reward neighbors for their patience and 27 years of taxpaying with the Bellevue-Redmond starter line, at the insistence of transit board member Claudia Balducci of Bellevue.
Train trips Saturday begin around 11 a.m., after a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Bellevue Downtown Station.
Three decades ago, many business and political luminaries opposed transit taxes, thinking Seattle would hoard the regional money or that trains are inferior to highways in solving congestion. These days, Eastside leaders largely support rail, while voters in Bellevue and Redmond favored the tax increases. But in outer communities like Renton or Sammamish, prospective service is minuscule and majorities voted no.
East Link was originally promised by 2020 but delayed from the start by political disputes over Bellevue alignments, chiefly the city’s demand for a tunnel instead of elevated or surface tracks downtown. The I-90 segment to Seattle isn’t ready this spring because contractors had to rebuild 5,400 defective track ties.
A new landscape
Sound Transit hypes light rail as an Eastside boon, while also dampening expectations; its value won’t be realized before the entire $3.7 billion, 14-mile project, labeled the 2 Line, crosses Lake Washington to reach Seattle.
The initial eight-station local line is expected to serve 4,000 to 5,700 daily passengers, comparable to an above-average bus or streetcar.
As in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and Vancouver, B.C., you can spot the train line by scanning the horizon. Station-area skylines here are shorter and just beginning to form, except for the skyscrapers of downtown Bellevue. That trend suggests trains can become more popular over time.
“The thing that’s different about Bellevue now is we have a whole lot more people living around light rail and transit,” said Robinson, who lives downtown.
The east endpoint of the route is Redmond Technology Station, adjacent to 47,000 Microsoft employees. White canopies mark its walk-bike bridge over Highway 520.
Trains continue through postindustrial lands to Bellevue’s 16-block Spring District, where apartments surround the Global Innovation Exchange high-tech institute. Bike connections are available to Kirkland and Woodinville on the 42-mile Eastrail. Tracks pass Bellevue hospitals, rounding a curve into a scenic (from the trains) Interstate 405 bridge, then the downtown station where Amazon, Pokémon and big engineering firms inhabit towers. A short tunnel leads to Main Street, where trains emerge toward South Bellevue Station, a giant park-and-ride terminus overlooking Mercer Slough.
With so many people headed to so many places around the Eastside, the big question is: Can the 2 Line catch ’em all?
That’s unclear. Workers’ homes are scattered across King County and beyond, while some station neighborhoods haven’t taken off yet.
After dark, the new sidewalks are deserted at BelRed Station, plopped between parking lots, daytime strip malls and warehouses. Even if tracks reached Seattle, only a scant 1,000 daily riders here were predicted by original forecasts.
A few attractions are bringing night visitors. Electric guitar riffs spill out the windows of Evolution Rehearsal Studios, where Heart and Fleet Foxes have practiced. Music echoes off the concrete walls of a busy indoor tennis center and two apartment blocks under construction.
Eden Helstein, the studio owner, said he grew up hauling drumsticks and cymbals onto New York subways, and wants his customers to have that choice.
“Just like these guys are unloading their cars, they could be walking up the street with their guitars and cymbals on their backs and they all travel very lightly,” he said.
Helstein understands the risk that his building, owned by relatives of saxophone legend Kenny G, might be displaced someday if rail brings a real estate boom.
“For me it’s not a freakout moment or try to figure it out before it comes,” he said. As president of the BelRed Arts District nonprofit, his mission includes helping others adapt to change. That might mean organizing local festivals, shared marketing, helping tenants find new space, or even relief donations.
Arts in Bellevue generate $54 million and 600 jobs per year, providing more reasons to ride trains, he said. “You look at other successful arts districts around the country, property values go up 8%, the crime rate goes down.”
Transit culture
Supporters are counting on so-called rail bias, where car travelers who would never consider a bus will try the trains.
“It’s really the beginning of the transformation … when we see transit becoming a critical part of the identify of the Eastside,” said Kelli Refer, executive director of the nonprofit Move Redmond. “There is actually a lot of demand to go between Bellevue and Redmond, and there are a lot of trips not taken.”
In a survey of 300 Bellevue voters, 12% said they’d ride the starter line at least weekly, while 28% guessed monthly, and 58% replied never. Joe Fain, president of the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce, said there’s “just not the muscle memory for using transit” yet, but people will soon notice they can ride downtown without parking stress.
Redmond Mayor Angela Birney, a transit board member, was impressed by the smoothness on her preview ride, no screeching or grinding, though the train slowed under downtown Bellevue. “I felt like a small child,” she said.
The 2 Line could be nicknamed the “Cricket Express,” said Balducci, reflecting a potential transit niche and the corridor’s immigrant communities who enjoy the sport. (About 18% of Bellevue-Redmond residents are of South Asian descent, census data indicates.) Train stations are near an indoor cricket training center and cricket-gear store, matches are played on Microsoft’s campus, and in 2025 trains will reach Marymoor Park, a favorite site for cricket leagues and a proposed cricket arena.
Eastside cities are determined to deter the drug use and occasional violence witnessed on the west side’s 1 Line. Bellevue police formed a seven-officer light rail unit to patrol inside trains and stations, besides Sound Transit’s countywide police. Redmond will deploy two transit police and call upon its Thrive health-response team.
“I don’t think we’re going to have an intimidating presence,” said Robinson. “I just want my daughter to be able to go to a concert in Seattle, and come back on light rail at 1 a.m. and feel safe.”
Measuring success
A basic measure of success is how many people ride. Otherwise, why spend about $900 per resident annually in urban King, Snohomish and Pierce counties to develop high-capacity transit?
Official targets like 4,000 to 5,700 daily trips are “setting the bar pretty low,” said Charles Prestrud, a longtime transportation agency analyst, now with the conservative Washington Policy Center.
“The Eastside has a population of about 750,000 and those people take several million trips per day,” he said. “So if East Link carries 5,000 riders per day, that’s a small fraction of 1% of trips.” Even after it reaches Seattle, he foresees nowhere near the 50,000 East Link passengers forecast years ago in the heyday of cross-lake commuting.
There’s no evidence Sound Transit will lower congestion regionally, and Prestrud notes the dominant commute trip is I-405 north-south, not across Bellevue.
What the 2 Line will do is add trip options and resilience for some.
One cautionary fact is King County Metro’s RapidRide B Line bus, near Link stations, only carries 4,200 daily riders.
“That’s a meandering 25-minute ride, depending on traffic,” replied Redmond Mayor Birney. “The train will cut that in half.”
Another caution sign is South Bellevue Station’s new 1,500-stall garage currently attracts fewer than 50 commuter cars per day — a reversal of past habits when the former 500-stall lot overflowed with express bus customers. It’s reason to doubt people will transfer much from starter-line trains to I-90 buses.
Post-pandemic, Sound Transit’s leisure trips, personal errands, event crowds and student travel are thriving in Seattle, while downtown commutes lag. The 1 Line surpassed 130,000 trips a few days last July until prolonged track-repair closures sapped its momentum.
Birney hopes South Bellevue Station will become an appealing place for families to park for Eastside trips to sports or concerts at Redmond’s Marymoor Park next year.
Starter lines can be underwhelming.
Runaway costs forced Honolulu to devise an isolated starter line near Pearl Harbor, which carries a dismal 3,200 daily riders. U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg reassured locals the whole point is getting to the next stage, reaching the airport next year and downtown around 2031.
“Each time you add access to even one station, the whole line becomes more valuable all up and down the line,” Buttigieg said.
Yonah Freemark, author of the Transport Politic newsletter, says it’s unfair to obsess about numbers on a starter line.
“We’re not going to see that [total] benefit until the line goes over Lake Washington,” he said. Unlike most systems, Seattle-area light rail use peaks in summer, aided by Sodo events. “That’s one more reason we can’t judge the Link 2 Line yet … it doesn’t reach there,” Freemark said.
Sound Transit’s initial 1 Line segment, which started out serving only 21,000 passengers a day, has increased to near 80,000, after seven more stations and 15 years experience. That would be near 110,000 if downtown Seattle were booming now.
The future one-train ride from Bellevue to the University of Washington should build new clientele, said Sound Transit planner Matt Sheldon. Others will find a Highway 520 bus more direct.
Conrad Lee, a 30-year Bellevue council member, welcomes the 2 Line despite his belief cars and trucks run by artificial intelligence “will improve efficiency more than light rail can do.” He questioned billions for Sound Transit when other societal needs abound.
On the other hand, it shows business executives that Bellevue has arrived, he said. “It does have a global impact, as far as proving the city of Bellevue is worth the investment.” City staff count 90 international companies that maintain their U.S. headquarters in Bellevue.
Where to go next
Next up is the Northgate-Lynnwood corridor, where four stations are scheduled to open Aug. 30 on the 1 Line.
After that comes a 2 Line extension to Marymoor Village and Downtown Redmond early next year, which will greatly increase trips at Redmond Technology Station, a couple of miles uphill.
Then the overdue East Link I-90 connection in late 2025, though CEO Goran Sparrman has warned the job risks further delays.
To the south, three-station Federal Way Link is trending toward 2026, two years late, after contractors needed to unexpectedly build a long-span bridge over wetlands.
Once the I-90 tracks open, more riders will pour in at new Mercer Island and Judkins Park stations. After that, the 2 Line will share tracks with the 1 Line to Lynnwood. The overlapping routes will serve 120,000 to 143,000 daily passengers across all 48 miles, new forecasts say.
That’s two stadium loads of people.
Train access might help new destinations develop, said Patrick Bannon, president of the Bellevue Downtown Association. A Bellevue nonprofit is organizing to create a performing arts center, “1,500 to 2,000 seats, on par with the 5th Avenue or the Paramount,” he said.
Ultimately the Eastside competes for commuters —
“My goal is just to make the experience in Bellevue such that people prefer to be in Bellevue,” she said. “They’d rather get out of their house and have a beautiful place to walk around, support some small businesses, get coffee.” More child care would help, she said.
So would a landscaped walk-bike bridge over I-405, fulfilling the Grand Connection that Bellevue envisioned since the early 2010s. It would expand the walkable territory to the downtown light rail hub, like the John Lewis Memorial Bridge over Interstate 5 at Seattle’s Northgate Station. The mayor wants the I-405 bridge within four years.
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