Seven Things We Learned While Riding Light Rail for the First Time

W e are weeks away from living in a real city. On July 18,
Sound Transit will begin light-rail service from the downtown Seattle
bus tunnel to Tukwila. It’s the first part of an honest-to-god regional
mass-transit system that can get you from the city to the airport as
quickly as a $40 cab ride can—or faster when the freeway’s
clogged with traffic—for the price of a cup of coffee. A gaggle
of elected glad-handers and reporters piled onboard a train for a
preview ride (from Westlake Center to Tukwila and back) last week. Here
are a few things we noticed.

And it’s a smooth ride, at least in tunnels, on elevated tracks, and
on the street. However, the train jerked slightly as it accelerated out
of stations and wobbled a bit as the car hit 55 miles per hour. After
the blue-and-white train moved out of the bus tunnel, past the
stadiums—Mayor Greg Nickels gave a shout-out to the Mariners and
the Seahawks (but not the Sounders)—and through the center of
Beacon Hill, it joined the automobiles on Martin Luther King Jr. Way
South. Brilliantly, the train communicates with traffic lights. “Not
100 percent of the time,” says county council member Larry Phillips.
“But most of the time, the train gets the right of way.” That said, the
train bolting down Martin Luther King Jr. Way, not stopping, could be a
mixed blessing: “People aren’t used to trains in Seattle,” says
Nickels. “This is a very quiet train. If kids don’t look both ways,
things will not be good.”

With campaigns under way for this fall, prepare to see the Sound
Transit board members running for office pulling muscles from incessant
backslapping. During the ride, Mayor Nickels (seeking reelection) and
county council members Dow Constantine and Larry Phillips (both running
for county executive and doing a subtle
let’s-politely-avoid-each-other-while-we’re-on-this-train-together
dance) waxed nostalgic about how long it’s taken to get to this point
and how thrilled they are to be here. They will undoubtedly try to
one-up each other, each vaunting that he fought longest and
hardest for this day to come. You know—Nickels will be saying he
advocated for light rail since he was in utero, Phillips will boast he
was around for the first failed ballot measure in the autumn of 1812 or
whenever, and so on. Phillips, with his mind obviously on trying to
capture more votes in the county, said on the train that Sound Transit
should build future extensions in Seattle’s suburbs. “That is appealing
to voters on the Eastside,” he says. (Light rail is scheduled to reach
Bellevue by 2020 and Redmond’s Overlake neighborhood by 2021. The train
will cross the lake in the center of I-90.)

It is a monolithic glass-and-steel structure that sits on the edge
of nothingness—next to a highway, two huge grass fields, and a
parking lot—right under the Sea-Tac flight path. The constant
roar of planes and cars coming to and from the airport makes the
location less than optimal for housing, schools, movie theaters, coffee
shops, or any other sort of transit-oriented development. Inside,
there’s a large sculpture of a splashing water drop, but that’s about
it. This station is nothing but a connection to the airport; a station
at Southcenter Mall, which is farther away and was deemed too
expensive, would have made more sense.

As the light rail rumbles through Seattle’s deep south, the brightly
painted homes and recently opened storefronts along the line in New
Holly give way to long stretches of sidewalkless strip malls and houses
with peeling paint and bars on their windows. As the train rolls along
toward Tukwila, the ride becomes like a safari. Overgrown yards are the
jungle, and the carcass of a rusted-out Mercedes with a busted back
windshield is the wildlife. Most people haven’t seen this part of town
before, and for good reason: There isn’t much here. Unless Sound
Transit builds more stops along the way, there won’t be much here for a
while.

The Bay Area has the BART, Maryland has the MARC, London has the
tube. What will we call ours? Technically, it’s called the Sound
Transit: Link Light Rail—which is a mouthful, but makes a fun
acronym: STLLR. But “I’m going to catch the Stellar!” is a little gay,
and “I’m going to catch the light rail” sounds too official. Where does
that leave us? Nickels proposes calling it “the Link” (maybe he is a
secret Legend of Zelda nerd?). Someone suggested calling it “the
White Snake”—”How cool would that be? ‘I’m riding the White Snake
down to Qwest Field to see a Whitesnake concert! YEAAAH!'”—which
is a ridiculous idea. Maybe we should just take the plain route, like
New York’s subway riders do, and call it “the train.”

On opening weekend, July 18 and 19, the train will be free, though
it will only be running from 10:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. on Saturday and
10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. on Sunday. (Sound Transit is expecting 100,000
riders on opening day. It’ll have double the number of trains out than
it normally will.) Plus, once you get to the end, you’ll have to wait
in line (again) to take the train back home or get on a damn bus. After
opening weekend, the fare will range from $1.75 to $2.50 for adults,
depending on how far you’re traveling. (Kids, seniors, and disabled
people will pay less.) Metro bus transfers and Sound Transit light-rail
transfers are interchangeable. The train will run from 5:00 a.m. to
1:00 a.m. Mondays though Saturdays and from 6:00 a.m. to midnight on
Sundays. Trains will arrive every 7.5 minutes during rush hour, every
10 minutes in nonpeak hours, and every 15 minutes after 10:00 p.m. The
13.9-mile run from Westlake Station (in the downtown bus tunnel) to
Tukwila Station (in the middle of nowhere) takes about 30 minutes and
stops at 10 stations along the way. By December, the tracks will reach
the airport (in the meantime, a shuttle bus will finish the connection
from Tukwila Station).

Between the absence of a link to Southcenter and the fact that the
UW station won’t be online for another seven years, we need to prevent
delays in station construction whenever they might come up. While
construction is incredibly disruptive and the sound of jackhammers will
keep many neighbors awake, this thing needs to get built. Having a
truly connected, transit-oriented city will change the way we live,
work, drink, and travel in Seattle. (Plus there’s the added bonus of
shutting up all of those dicks from Portland who think they’re better
than us because they’ve already got a full light-rail line.) Capitol
Hill and University District stations are scheduled to open in 2016,
and Northgate is supposed to open in 2020, although Sound Transit is
already working on a plan to get to Northgate sooner. Part of it is
money, but most of it is logistics. Sound Transit spokesman Bruce Gray
says that a lot of design work still needs to be done on the North End
stations and, unfortunately, “No amount of money is going to make your
designs come together more quickly.” Gray says if the North End plan
works out, the line could be finished by 2018. If all goes according to
plan, Lynnwood (the northernmost stop) and Federal Way (the
southernmost stop) will have service by 2023.