The Mederos

The Future of LINK Light Rail

By Shawn Medero

Published July 18, 2009

I woke the family up early in the morning, 5:18am to be exact, and shifted us into high gear to make the Link light rail inaugural train ride.

This one trip emphasized the need for light rail before we even made it to the ribbon cutting ceremony.

1. We walked over a bus top and arrived 10 minutes earlier to take the 6:26am south bound 358 bus. It never showed up. Instead we got on the 6:41am bus that, thankfully, did arrive on time.
2. Arriving at Union station at 7am (exactly when we SoundTransit asked us to be there), we rushed through to find the shuttle bus that would take us to the ribbon cutting ceremony at Mt. Baker station.
3. The shuttle bus got lost and nearly ended up stuck in a neighborhood with small streets when it tried to turn around.

Never-the-less we did make it in time to listen to some back-patting speeches and then board the first trains open to the public. We had an option of taking a north-bound (Downtown Seattle) or south-bound (Tukwila) train, and I had decided earlier in the week that I wanted to ride to the south terminus and then back to downtown. The entire trip was great: the stations, tracks, & trains appear to be well built.

One thing that dawned on my wife and I during the speeches was that our son would never know a Seattle without light rail. Additionally, as he reaches voting age a number of SoundTransit Link extensions to the existing system will be finished and Seattle will have to vote on when & where to continue this great project — so I hope today will instill a bit of excitement about mass transit for him. Hopefully when he mails in his future voting ballot, he’ll remember his cranky old father reminding him that “it wasn’t always this easy, you use to have to take 3 buses to get from there to here.”