Eastside light rail opens but storm clouds loom for Sound Transit

This story was originally published on MyNorthwest.com.

It’s six years late, but light rail service across Lake Washington is set to begin on Saturday, creating a truly regional public transportation system.

I couldn’t have asked for a better day to take my first trip across the lake on Thursday. The views from the center of I-90 were amazing. The top of the Seattle skyline. Mount Rainier. The Bellevue skyline and incredible views of the lake.

I hadn’t been on those tracks in eight years, and that felt like a lifetime ago.

There was so much anticipation in 2018 as I toured the construction zone as the tracks were being laid. Light rail to the Eastside was just a few years away.

Then came the news that the concrete plinths, the supports for the tracks, were bad. Not just some of them, but all of them. All that track had to come out. That was a bad day for King County Council Member and Sound Transit Board Member Claudia Balducci.

“There were many days on this project when I wondered whether we were going to get to the end, and that was one of them,” Balducci told me from the soon-to-be-open Judkins Station. “The trick was to just never quit. The construction team never quit. The contractors never quit. We worked through everything, and now we have a system that I feel very confident about.”

The tracks are down Thursday, and service starts Saturday. Opening light rail to the Eastside will be a game-changer. Better late than never.

“This is the most challenging project we have ever built or that we will ever have to build,” Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine said on the ride from south Bellevue to Mercer Island. “There were some challenges. The contractor really struggled with some of the infrastructure on the bridge and had to redo some of it, and that slowed us down a little bit.”

For perspective, this is the first time in human history that someone has put train tracks on a floating bridge.

And through all the problems, service is now here.

“The fact is we got it done,” Constantine said. “We’re delivering it, and it is going to be a remarkable asset for the people here for generations to come.”

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little nervous as the train transitioned from Mercer Island to the floating bridge. A little jostle was all there was. Cheers to the engineers who pulled this off.

Sound Transit vows to deliver on promises despite $34 billion shortfall

But Sound Transit continues to face challenges as it looks to finish the projects it promised voters in ST-3 in 2016. That $54 billion ask was in exchange for light rail to Everett, Tacoma, West Seattle, and Ballard.

Those projects face a $34 billion budget hole going forward. The choices are not easy. Trim the lines. Remove stations. Not get to West Seattle or Ballard.

I asked Constantine if there is a world he can think of where Sound Transit doesn’t deliver on what it promised.

“No,” he said. “There is no world in which we don’t end up with Ballard or West Seattle or Tacoma or Everett. We are committed to getting those things done. That doesn’t mean they’re easy. It means you have more work to do to figure out how to get to each stage of that construction, but we are going to get it done.”

Board member Balducci agreed that Sound Transit has to deliver what it pitched to voters.

“You can’t give up, and you must push through,” she said. “There are going to be problems that we know about and problems that we don’t predict today. There’s something ahead of us that we don’t know yet that’s coming. We do know that if we are committed, and we keep going and we work together and we’re smart, we will prevail.”

Sound Transit has made it through the storm to deliver light rail service to the Eastside. Now is the time to celebrate that. This is a big deal.

But we cannot forget that the next storm is coming, and Sound Transit has a promise to keep.

Chris Sullivan is a traffic reporter for KIRO Newsradio. Read more of his stories here. Follow KIRO Newsradio traffic on X.

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