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.
Service began about 11:45 a.m., following speeches at a jammed Downtown Bellevue Station. The party is to continue until 4 p.m. with food, souvenirs, and live music and dance performances in the eight stations.
Hundreds of people, some sporting ballcaps with a “2” on them for the new 2 Line, spilled onto the streets of Bellevue for the official ribbon-cutting at the downtown station. Food trucks, games, a band and balloons made the atmosphere carnival-esque. Saturday’s opening was an attraction expected to draw far more ridership than forecast for the coming 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. It 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 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 Saturday 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.”
An end-to-end ride on the Eastside line takes 20 minutes. Service will run seven days a week, 5:30 a.m. to 9:30 p.m.
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 huge 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 new station opening since moving to Seattle from New York City. “We can’t lose our streak,” said Kendall.
They’re unlikely to use the starter line on its own, but once it’s connected to Seattle, anticipate using it to visit their friends on the eastside and access bike trails they currently have trouble getting to.
“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 Olympic Games.
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 coming back.
In that context, this weekend’s Eastside startup represents one chapter of an epic comeback bid.
Sound Transit recalibrated its methods and data this spring, to reflect more leisure trips and personal errands, and a long-term drop in commuters. Even before the pandemic, almost exactly half the 80,000 daily 1 Line customers were commuters, and half were making other trips, according to its federally required ridership survey. The latest forecasts call for 120,000 to 143,000 average daily boardings for the 1 and 2 lines.
Bellevue and Redmond have attempted a running start, by allowing mid-rise apartments and building new roads, sidewalks and bike lanes around Spring District and Overlake Village stations, with plans to grow outside Wilburton and BelRed stations.