Eastside light rail line opens as huge crowds try out the ride

Traffic Lab is a Seattle Times project that digs into the region’s transportation issues to explore the policies and politics that determine how we get around and how billions of dollars in public money are spent.

BELLEVUE — Jubilant travelers treated themselves to a staycation Saturday by crowding into Sound Transit’s new East Link Starter Line trains, the community’s first fruits of public planning and paying for rail since the 1990s.

Hundreds of people, some sporting ball caps with a “2” on them for the new 2 Line, arrived early, spilling onto the streets for a ribbon-cutting at the Downtown Bellevue Station. Food trucks, games, a band and balloons made the atmosphere carnivalesque. Indeed, the opening of the eight-station line was an hours-long attraction for thousands, with far more riders boarding the trains than are expected to show for this week’s commute.

“We will no longer have to wait years for light rail to come to Bellevue, it will be every 10 minutes,” said U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, who has championed light rail for decades, ushering much federal money to the effort.

The 6-mile corridor extends from the South Bellevue Station next to Interstate 90 to the Redmond Technology Station, sandwiched among three Microsoft campuses. The line was supposed to reach Seattle by now, but that isn’t expected until late 2025, because contractors are rebuilding deficient concrete track ties in the former express lanes of I-90.

Before the trains started rolling at about 11:45 a.m. Saturday, Claudia Balducci, a Bellevue member of the Metropolitan King County Council and Sound Transit Board, recalled her push to start Eastside-only service to bring taxpayers at least some reward until the connection across Lake Washington is ready.

“When I proposed the idea of a starter line … I wasn’t sure it would be possible, I really wasn’t,” Balducci told the crowd. “But I wanted to bring the benefits of light rail to the Eastside as soon as possible.”

Jackie Kim came from her home in Redmond. She can imagine using the new line to go to downtown Bellevue, but the real payoff will come when light rail finally crosses Lake Washington.

“What I’m excited for is when we have visitors, we can take them to Seattle or Chinatown without having to deal with the traffic,” she said. “We’ve been waiting a long time.”

Service on the Eastside line will run seven days a week, 5:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m. An end-to-end ride takes 20 minutes.

The full $3.7 billion, 14-mile East Link route eventually will add Mercer Island and Judkins Park stations on the way to the International District/Chinatown Station. At that point, 2 Line trains will turn north past the University of Washington, where they’ll share tracks with the existing 1 Line, and bring combined service every five minutes.

Before that, the next grand opening is set for the Northgate-to-Lynnwood 1 Line extension, with four stations opening Aug. 30. Then more 2 Line stations at Marymoor Village and downtown Redmond are aimed at early 2025. The Lake Washington crossing would then arrive in late 2025, and a three-station Federal Way extension in South King County during 2026.

Crowds are always big on the first day of a light rail expansion. For some, it is an event not to be missed.

Chris Kendall and Romeo Giron live in Columbia City and have attended every opening since moving to Seattle from New York City. “We can’t lose our streak,” said Kendall.

“We do come over here occasionally to visit friends or bike on some of the trails over here,” said Kendall. “It’d be nice to be able to get to those without biking all the way.”

Voters approved a dozen other Sound Transit train and bus megaprojects eight years ago, highlighted by light rail in Everett, Tacoma, West Seattle, Ballard, Everett, Issaquah and South Kirkland in the 2030s and 2040s. Among U.S. cities, only metro Los Angeles is building and spending at similar scale, with added urgency before the 2028 Olympics.

The Seattle region is distinctive not only for its unsurpassed public transit spending, but also in being the only large U.S. metro with robust transit growth in the ’10s, when ridership increased by half, totaling 750,000 boardings daily for buses, trains, ferries and a monorail. Transit use imploded during the pandemic, but riders are gradually returning.

In that context, this weekend’s Eastside startup represents one chapter of an epic comeback bid.

To be sure, the starter line’s expected ridership, 4,000 to 5,700 daily passengers, or even the full Seattle connection will not relieve regional traffic congestion. By comparison, daily traffic is roughly 1.1 million trips along I-405 the Eastside’s dominant corridor, and people make more than 15 million trips of all transportation modes including pedestrians, in central Puget Sound. Cars also tend to fill any freed-up highway space.

What light rail does accomplish is to give people options. For instance, the 2 Line will eventually help Eastsiders attend stadium events like the 2026 soccer World Cup, apart from traffic snarls and $200 parking fees in Sodo. Going the other way, concerts and amateur sports in Marymoor Park will be easier to attend from Seattle. Once the Eastside’s 2 Line trains reach Seattle, and turn north to UW and Lynnwood, the north end service every five minutes will give commuters a life raft, while two I-5 lanes close for years of pavement replacement.

The latest forecasts call for 120,000 to 143,000 average daily boardings for the 1 and 2 lines, about two stadiums full of people, but lower than anticipated years ago.

Sound Transit recalibrated its methods for estimating ridership, and now issues figures for an entire 48-mile, two-line network instead of individual extensions (such as 50,000 daily boardings for a 14-mile Seattle-to-Microsoft segment). The agency has noticed more leisure trips and personal errands, and a long-term loss of commuters. Even before the pandemic, half the 80,000 daily 1 Line customers were commuters, and half were making other trips, according to its federally required ridership survey.

Rohit Ammanamanchi, who works for the city of Bellevue, snapped pictures on his first ride as the train swooped by wetlands, greenery and office buildings on its way to South Bellevue Station. He called the opening of the starter line “a part of something that’s going to be so much bigger.”

Given the delays in building light rail across Lake Washington, Ammanamanchi was skeptical that a starter line would actually happen. “And then they said we’re gonna do it and then they did it,” he said.

Ammanamanchi lives in Belltown and travels to the Eastside for work on the 550 bus. When the full line is complete, it’ll shave his commute down to just over 20 minutes. In the meantime, he expects to use the isolated Eastside train on his lunch breaks to expand his options for places to eat beyond downtown Bellevue.

Bellevue and Redmond have attempted a running start to make the most of their new line, by attracting mid-rise apartments and building new roads, sidewalks and bike lanes around Spring District and Overlake Village stations, and a transformation of downtown Redmond. The cities are promoting future growth outside Wilburton and BelRed stations.