.jpg)
Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Seattle - Federal Way Link Extension Opens!
We unpack Seattle’s latest transit surge, from the Federal Way light rail extension to the cross‑lake Two Line testing across the Lake Washington Floating Bridge. We close with the express‑lane BRT buildout and how highway stitches, feeder routes, and frequent service can reshape daily trips.
• Federal Way extension scope, stations, and timeline
• Federal Way retail core and TOD potential toward Tacoma
• Pros and cons of building along I‑5
• Cross‑lake Two Line testing on the floating bridge
• Mercer Island median station and highway stitches
• Judkins Park station access and trail links
• Combined four‑minute headways on the shared trunk
• Reliability risks with limited bypasses
• Ridership growth and network effects
• BRT S1, S2, S3 using express lanes and median platforms
• Service spans and 10–15 minute headways
• Feeder buses and suburban connectivity
• Using highway ROW to accelerate delivery
If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to support us in any way that you can. The biggest and best way that you can do that is by liking and subscribing to the channel, sharing these videos with your friends, family, bus drivers, train drivers, whoever you think is going to enjoy them. We also have our merch store where you can buy t‑shirts and hats and a couple other things, as well as utilizing our Buy Me a Coffee link or joining our Patreon where we try to get episodes out early
We have exciting news out of Seattle with the opening of the Light Link Rail extension, which goes south of Seattle to Federal Way. And this is just one of a few major transit expansions that are happening in the city.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so today we're going to cover that recent grand opening that happened just this month in December. We're going to talk about the current testing on the two lines cross lake connection, which is the one going over the floating bridge connecting Bellevue into Seattle. And then we're also going to talk about a BRT network, which is going to work closely in conjunction with the light rail. We talked about this stuff a little bit about a year ago, and Seattle seemingly gets ignored online with transit stuff quite often. And the Seattle folks have let us know in the comments quite a few times. So we're going to go a little bit more in depth this time. Yes, yes, quite a few times. You're right. And to be fair, we have forgotten about them quite a few times. So today we're going to kind of dive into all of these different things and start off with the federal way extension. So this is an extension to the one line in Seattle, which is this massive north-south light rail line. This will be a 7.8 mile extension, which adds three stops to the existing line, which again, I said it's massive. It is literally 41 miles long.
SPEAKER_03:That is insane that it's 41 miles long. Yes. But you also think about the geography of Seattle. I mean, it's on that, you know, long uh I wasn't say peninsula, but I guess Isthmus is kind of the right, the right term. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So it just kind of follows this whole like long urban corridor of Seattle. Um, but yeah, 41 miles is is crazy. Yes.
SPEAKER_02:If you were to travel it from end to end right now, starting in the north in Linwood and going all the way to Federal Way, the schedule says it would take you roughly 90 minutes. Um again, the kind of interesting thing about this route is that in parts of it it's elevated above a highway. In parts of it, it is fully tunneled underground, uh, kind of through the downtown part of Seattle. There's a stretch of it that runs like in the median of a fairly busy road before approaching the airport. And then we're kind of in this new southern extension, mostly back to kind of like elevated running along the side of a highway, essentially. I just said extensually.
SPEAKER_03:I heard that extension and from Ingle Lake. This now heads south along I-5 through mostly single-family neighborhoods before reaching the Kent Des Moines station. There's a large park and ride facility here, and what we're kind of seeing is that it seems like there's a lot of park and ride facilities uh on this line, which does make sense if you're trying to serve the airport or you know, get people uh back into sort of downtown Seattle. From here, it also uh accesses Highline College, which has about 15,000 students.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and I I do think that this station being here makes a lot of sense. Uh 15,000 students is quite a few. Then you also need to figure it, you know, in all the people who are working at the college. Uh so I think that this is a good stop placement. They specifically have the right-of-way kind of jut in off of the highway right-of-way for a bit here, just to make that access to the university or to the college a lot better, a lot shorter of a walk, essentially, to make it easier there. Potentially some room for more development here, too. But uh right now it's mostly going to be that park and ride facility, like you mentioned, as well as connection to buses. From Kent Des Moines Station, the route essentially jogs back towards I-5, heading further south until reaching the next station at Star Lake. This station has yet another park and ride facility uh with a garage and everything. Um, but otherwise, there's not a ton right in the station area, and there's not a ton of room to build anymore. Fortunately, though, on the same side of the highway as the station, there are some older apartment complexes that are definitely within the walkshed of the station. It's not the densest area ever, um, with the you know, the most amount of people living right there, but it is a fairly good use of you know the station being in that particular zone. So I'm happy to see that they included a station here, especially considering there are only a handful of stops along this new 7.8 mile extension.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, exactly. Uh, and then from here it's going to continue down through some more um sort of lower density single family neighborhoods until it arrives at Federal Way. And Federal Way is sort of what you would imagine as that very American shopping center area, huge surface parking lots, um, a lot of big box stores, uh, shopping, dining, all that kind of stuff around. And while there's not a ton of TOD happening right now at this area, I think the potential for this being uh a large TOD stop uh is definitely definitely there. Um and I think it also should be noted, you know, when we talk about you know there's not a lot of density um along this line, the ultimate goal is for this line to continue down to Tacoma. And so now this is gonna be uh a pretty heavily used corridor between Tacoma and Seattle once that way future line is uh is finished. So I definitely think there's um there's gonna be a lot more development happening here over the next uh next decade or so.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, for sure. And uh there was an interesting article in the Urbanist that I was reading when kind of putting together some of the information for this, and they were saying that you know they they were not seeing the same levels of transit-oriented development happening in this federal way extension as they had seen with the construction of, for example, the light rail in Bellevue. Um but you know, like you're saying, this isn't necessarily right now, it doesn't necessarily have the full vision all the way to Tacoma, although you would hope to see some of that development begin to be spurred as we are now like starting to approach the time period where that is kind of the next extension for this line. You want to see some of that development happening ahead of the light rail construction so that when the light rail opens, the apartments can be already there, ready, you know, with folks living there who are ready for the light rail to kind of come into their neighborhood. So worth the read if you're interested. We'll make sure there's a link for you to check it out down below. And then uh the other thing we've kind of talked about with this a few times is this whole section is running along I-5. Uh, in the north of the one line, it also runs along I-5. And you get some pros and cons with this. And this will be a theme kind of throughout this episode, talking about some of the different transit options in Seattle. But, you know, you you get the the pros are you've got the the right-of-way already there. You're building along these highways, the you know, the state or the city or whatever. I mean, in this case, it's very likely the state has the right-of-ways already. The state and the city are very likely working together friendly in in the state of Washington, Seattle. You've got transit-friendly politicians in in the mix, um, which helps things out. And the right-of-way is there. You don't need to, you know, worry about utility relocations as much. You don't need to worry about um you know buying the right-of-way, but it definitely comes with some drawbacks as well.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when you think about how highways were constructed, and we've talked about this a lot in the past, you've literally bulldozed neighborhoods to build highways. They're not they're not the most like hospitable places for people to be. And when you think about these mass transit options, you really want them to be in you know walkable neighborhoods and corridors that you see a lot of activity, um, a lot of sur surface street activity. And you're not really going to see that on the highways. Um, a lot of these, the entrances you have to either cross the highway or somehow get into the middle of the highway to be able to access these stations. Yeah, there's definitely some drawbacks for the pedestrian connectivity when it's running through this massive road. Right.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and you're just like cutting your your like walkshed in half, basically. You know what I mean? Like it's just it if it's like highways are just physically big, like you like you know, you'll spend three minutes crossing it if you're in dependent depending on the size of the area that you're in. So uh one last piece on on this before we move on to the cross lake extension progress. The cost for this extension was 2.5 billion. Construction began in 2020 and it opened again uh just a couple weeks ago this December in 2025. So not the worst timeline for construction.
SPEAKER_03:Also, those those numbers aren't uh and and maybe I'm I'm just so used to huge dollar projects, but those numbers don't seem too bad. I mean what 7.8 miles at 2.5 billion versus other cities where we've seen, you know, what was it, Chicago, five miles for five billion dollars. Uh yeah.
unknown:Yeah.
SPEAKER_03:It doesn't seem like the numbers are all that bad.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, no, I I agree. I agree. Um, so uh we'll keep an eye on this one though. Again, uh, this is not the end of extensions to the one line, although it is worth noting when this does extend all the way to Tacoma, the one will not run all the way from Tacoma all the way to Linwood, which would be a hilariously long route. There will be other extensions kind of having been done at that point, so there will be some rerouting of where the routes actually go. So we won't have uh 60 mile, it won't be 60, but we won't have some 60 mile uh light rail uh running in Seattle. Maybe it will be, I don't know.
SPEAKER_03:It's somebody's dream to spend two hours on a train between uh Seattle and or between Linwood and Tacoma. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, of course. The next major extension that we want to talk about is the cross lake extension. We did talk a bit a little bit about this on a previous episode, but I don't think we really did it um the the right amount of justice. So we're gonna try to do a little better here. But this is another eight-mile extension that will cross uh from Seattle over to Bellevue across Lake Washington, and this is also part of the Link Light Rail system. Uh, this is gonna connect to the two line, which already exists and serves that uh sort of Bellevue corridor on the other side of Lake Washington. And it's also notable because it's gonna be crossing, I believe, one of the largest, if not the largest, floating bridge in the world. It's the bridge is remarkable for being this engineering marvel of being a floating bridge. And I believe this is also the first time that a light rail system is crossing the floating bridge. So that was really big news and was very, very cool. They're currently doing testing on that now, so hopefully we we see that opening um very, very soon. But this line, when it connects from um Seattle to the Bellevue area, as it's crossing the bridge, uh, the light rail line is going to reach speeds up to 55 miles an hour, so uh it should be getting you uh across the the lake pretty quickly.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, definitely very exciting. And uh we've got a quick like 30 or 40 second clip from the team that's actually doing the testing on the bridge. So let's go ahead and take a look at that.
SPEAKER_01:Welcome aboard a live wire test train on the I-90 bridge. Today we're taking you behind the scenes from setup to removal of safety blocks to the training to our slow sweep speed across the bridge. Before Alright, let's do it at full speed. Safety sweeps and warm-up completed. It was time to hit track speed and see how our bridge is looking. Behind me, folks are monitoring the interaction between the OCS and the pantograph on the screen. And when they see those arcs and flashes, that tells us what we need to go back out and adjust. Blackwire testing is an iterative process. You do it over and over so the system gets smoother and smoother and more ready to operate in revenue service, which is what we're continuing to work towards. Thanks everybody.
SPEAKER_02:So starting from the Bellevue side, the southernmost station over there is South Bellevue Station, which is essentially just another park and ride. Um again, we've I don't we should have saved how many times we said park and ride in this episode. It's probably quite a few at this point. Um, so from from the park and ride, uh the extension will run along I-90 over to Mercer Island. There will be one station on Mercer Island, and it will be in the center of the highway, like a median station essentially. And the access to this one is actually fairly good for being in the center of a highway. Uh, what they've done is they've done two highway stitches. Uh, if you're not familiar with what a highway stitch is, we've done a couple episodes specifically about this in the past, but it's a wider crossing of the highway to make it a little bit more pleasurable to walk over. Uh, you've usually got trees and kind of park space. Some places we'll put buildings and whatnot on them. So from a fairly developed area that has quite a few apartments and some kind of you know, slightly more dense strip mall development, if you know what I'm talking about, I guess, uh, on Mercer Island, you can kind of walk down uh to this station. You also have a parking ride there, of course, uh, because it wouldn't be a new stop on this light rail system without a parking ride. Uh, before then kind of continuing to head further into Seattle.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and then after it leaves the Mercer Island station, it crosses the floating bridge, which is very, very cool. Uh, before getting back into uh the main area of Seattle, just past, I think it's 23rd Avenue, is where you have Judkins Park, which is going to be the new stop for this line. Uh Judkins Park is uh the station's notable because you can only enter from either end of the station platform, and again, it's in the middle of a highway, so you are having to uh cross this highway bridge to be able to access the station. Um, also the the density of this area. There are some fairly dense neighborhoods nearby, but not really adjacent to the line. So I'd be really curious to see um what the ridership and and the access looks like there. Just based on satellite view, it does look like they've done a really good job integrating some of the trails, like bike trails and everything, uh going across the bridge into the station. Uh, but again, very curious to see what that looks like when it's open. And then from Judkins Park, the line uh continues on into Seattle and then terminates at Union Station.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and that's where it will essentially meet the existing one line. And instead of actually terminating, what's kind of cool about this section is it will actually continue further north and it will go all the way to Linwood, and it will give some crazy good frequencies all the way through this section. So uh presently on the one line, the north-south line there, you've got at peak frequencies every eight minutes. With the addition of the two line, the two line will now run from Bellevue. It'll run over the lake, it will run into Seattle, and then it will run north all the way to Linwood as well, also at every eight minutes. So on that north section from Seattle all the way to the northern terminus of the line, you'll actually have four minute frequencies, which I mean you you can't beat that, basically. Like you yeah, you just can't beat it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, the the four-minute frequencies would be incredible if we could hit it. I mean, there's not really many places or any place in the US that's really hitting that. I mean, even in New York, a major complaint is that the frequencies aren't high enough, which New Yorkers, you you blow my mind that that's uh your complaint. But uh yeah, it would be really impressive if they could do it. I know there's some chatter online about um uh people being skeptical that they aren't gonna hit it, mostly because there's not a lot of bypasses and if there's any issues like maintenance or something breaks down, you may have a train that's that's stuck, you know, knock on wood, that doesn't happen very often. So yeah, hopefully they they can definitely hit these.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think it's like technically possible, but yeah, the concern starts to lie in like once you have one little thing go wrong, the amount of issues that build up, because there are several points where a single point of failure could be a major issue where you have to have trains routing, you know, single track through several stations before you can, you know, cross back over to another track. So definitely something to keep an eye on. They are starting these kind of uh double frequency tests in the next couple weeks in Seattle. So if you're on the one line in the northern section, you may see some trains that are just testing um in the four-minute intervals that won't be open to the public to ride, but you'll see that they're kind of starting to get ready and planning for uh this inevitable open, which is said to be a direct quote early 2026. So no set date, but early next year.
SPEAKER_03:Uh so if you are if you are watching from the link light rail system and you want to give us the inside scoop on a better date, let us know. Or you know, we'd love to come up and also ride it in 2026.
SPEAKER_02:So yes, that is a yeah, we gotta we gotta make it. We were just talking the other day about some sort of West Coast trip. So it's it's in the conversations at the least. I think this is gonna be really interesting when we start to talk about ridership.
SPEAKER_03:Overall, ridership in Seattle seems like it's been uh on the rise. Um Light Rail is moving upwards to 125,000 people per day, which is you know pretty impressive. Um, and then once the connection across the lake opens, that's just going to really increase that ridership uh for people getting between Seattle and Bellevue and uh everywhere else that they need need to go.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean it's it's fully gonna change like the the options for commuter habits across the whole city, uh going both directions and whatnot. And and even beyond that, when you start to look even further into the future, you know, we're not gonna cover the the additional light rail extensions right now that are kind of further out in timescale, but there are a few other projects that are currently under construction that I think are pretty exciting and you know probably don't get as much praise. And these are the the BRT lines that are currently under construction. Uh so there's three of them presently. You've got S1, S2, and S3. And uh they're scheduled to open in 2028 and 2029. Uh and these are S1 and S2 are the kind of the two main ones, and they essentially run in uh like center-tolled highway lanes. What's the official name for those, Chris? You what is Express lanes.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, there's open road tolling, which is if you're you know tolling all the lanes, or there's like express lanes, uh there's HOV, high occupancy vehicle lanes, just depends on what you call it in that region.
SPEAKER_02:Right. So these buses will be operating in those lanes. Uh they'll be essentially getting to the areas where there would be stops, and instead of having it be a bit clunky where the buses have to like navigate on and off the highways for the stops, what they're doing is building these really cool-looking access stations where the buses will essentially either go up or the road above will come down to make it so that riders will be able to board the bus, you know, kind of in these highway medians most of the time, unfortunately. But uh the buses will not need to navigate on and off the highway. They will have really smooth approaches to each stop for pulling in and pulling out to continue their journey back along the highway, which is pretty slick, and we don't get to see that very often.
SPEAKER_03:No, and I'm trying to think of other cities that have experienced that in the US, and the only one that comes to mind is Houston. There's a couple of spots where the buses uh exit the highway and they have their own stations and then they can jump back on the express lanes, but I don't really see it very often in other cities. And again, I don't drive a lot in the Northeast, so you know maybe they they do exist there.
SPEAKER_02:Um the the only other comparison I can think to make, and it is different, is uh we talked about uh like last spring the BRT that opened in Minneapolis that runs along the highway, but that one's not even in express lanes, that one's just kind of runs along the highway off to the side. Um, but but yeah, I think Houston is the best example, and like we've gotten to ride them on the show before in our Houston using only public transit episodes. So uh, if you're interested in seeing how they work out there, that's a good spot to check it out.
SPEAKER_03:As far as frequency goes for these lines, we're looking at the bus lines being open about 17 hours a day, and then the frequency or headway is going to be about every 10 to 15 minutes, and this is true for all three of these BRT lines.
SPEAKER_02:Um I think that's that's impressive considering, you know, these are not dense downtown areas. These are these are we're I mean, we're rolling through the suburbs on the highway essentially, and I love to see that they're gonna be able to keep these frequencies up as long as they are, and that they're running them for a long portion of the day. So I yeah, I'm happy to To see that and with the infrastructure going in the way that it is, it seems like they're they're not half-assing it either. I mean, like you don't you're not building uh these these ramps for the buses to have special stops throughout unless you're intending on making that service as good as possible. So, you know, when you have that infrastructure in place, it will be easy to you know increase the duration throughout further in the day if you wanted to increase the frequencies. It's just they're really setting themselves up for potential growth in the future with this.
SPEAKER_03:Well, we say that until you have a mayor like uh Whitmer in Houston. Oh god. The infrastructure's there and you get to rift it all out. So now you're being a good idea. The idea is that you can improve it over time, yes.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, yes, exactly.
SPEAKER_03:Um it's it's really good utilization of the toll lanes. Um that's a really cool feature. Uh, and I know we've already we've already touched on it, but uh generally less traffic in the toll lanes, generally. Um but it it it's very cool. And you're not adding, I mean you've already added a lane for the toll lane, but you're not adding an additional bus lane and just expanding the highway further. Um so it's it is cool to see that utilization.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'm imagining too that like they they probably received less pushback because they were utilizing the the paid toll lanes as well. And the vast majority of the time the paid toll lanes do stay traffic free as well. I mean, uh in places that I've experienced them. I don't have a lot of experience using I've used I've actually used them in Seattle uh once. It was not on I think it was on I5 though, it was in an HOV lane because we had enough people in the car, so I wasn't like paying for it, but we had hit the HOV limit, and it was nice. We were cruising through while everyone else was sitting in traffic. But um, so uh yeah, I'll be I I I bet that they receive less pushback. I mean, you're not gonna have people being like, oh, no to bus lanes, whatever, some ridiculous campaign that a bunch of NIMBY's throw together. Um I would imagine that this would be harder to fight.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah. Definitely. Yes. So that's that's a defining feature of Seattle. It's the highways that are are kind of crisscrossing this region, and they are probably using these highway ride-of-ways more than any other place that we've really seen. Um, so as we said, there's definitely some some pros and cons to it, but it does seem like a really viable way to at least get these transit projects moving.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and I think like it's it's great to get the the bones going, and then in the future, like as you win more and more people over, you can then start to have routes that maybe finger off a little further out of the highways. And they're already starting to do this with it seems like there are quite a few good feeder routes of buses into the light rail system, even beyond the BRT ones we mentioned, more local buses. Um, so I like to see the connectivity happening. And it's you know, even with these bus routes too, it's great to see the connectivity into the light rail. It's almost acting as kind of a big ring route around the greater Seattle area. So lots of exciting things. And today was the most time I had spent just like scrolling through the maps, looking at the plans, and there's still so much more to learn about it. So if you're from Seattle uh and there are specific little projects we should be looking into, additional extensions we should be looking into, um, definitely let us know. And I don't know when it would be, but we would like to get to Seattle in the future. So uh if you know of any advocacy groups there, you've got you know certain things we should check out, uh definitely reach out to us either via social media, our email account, anything like that. Um, we would really appreciate the feedback from you guys.
SPEAKER_03:If you enjoyed this episode, please feel free to support us in any way that you can. The biggest and best way that you can do that is by liking and subscribing to the channel, sharing these videos with your friends, family, bus drivers, train drivers, whoever you think is going to enjoy them. Uh, we also have our merch store where you can buy t-shirts and uh hats and a couple other things, uh, as well as uh utilizing our uh Buy Me a Coffee link or joining our Patreon where we try to get episodes out early. We're trying to get better, uh be better about it.
SPEAKER_02:Last week's was a little early. Yeah. But uh with all that being said, though, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your transit engines Tuesday.