 A gloomy Sunday in Seattle, perfect for a ride on Seattle's new Central Link light rail system, which opened to great fanfare on July 18 this year. After thirteen years of fits and starts and voters approving and then junking (three times) and then okaying and then resenting the $4.7 billion it took to open the 14-mile, 12-station train line, my husband and I wanted to experience it.
The route goes from downtown Seattle to Tukwila, a town near SeaTac airport. A station close to the terminal is slated to open in December. Projected ridership is 21,000 per week by the end of the year--the figures so far, though, have declined a bit from their August high of about 12,000 per week. Given the extent of debt for its creation, Seattle might have dug itself into more than one kind of hole.
While it's a subway through downtown, Link rides above-ground through the lowest-income parts of town and industrial areas. Built with no parking whatsoever, riders are expected to walk, bicycle or bus to a station, with suitcases in tow, walk down three flights to tracks, and juggle luggage during the ride (cars have no racks). At the last stop, airport-bound passengers must disembark, then find the bus that stops at the far end of the airport.
My husband and I boarded at the downtown terminus, Westlake, purchasing tickets ($5 per person) from a machine tucked at the top of a steep stairway.
We descended (there's no escalator down, only up) to find that buses and Link share the same two transit lanes. It wasn't clear where along the curb Link would stop, but after watching five busses pass, the sleek new trains noisily pulled up about 25 feet from where we stood. We jumped on, settled into two seats in the nearly-vacant cars (which each hold 200), noticing an empty liquor bottle on the floor. A young man at the end of our car proceeded to eat a sandwich, change his clothes and shoes, drink wine from a bottle, and then peruse his laptop computer before alighting.
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