2025 Opening for Full East Link Sits on a Razor's Edge

In order for Sound Transit to meet its highly-publicized pledge to open the full East Link light rail extension between Seattle and Redmond sometime in 2025, everything needs to go right from this moment forward. That was the update given to the Sound Transit board’s system expansion committee on Thursday, just days after the agency began passenger service on an abbreviated segment of the line between Redmond and South Bellevue on April 27.

The current estimated start date for service for the full 2 Line between Lynnwood City Center and Redmond Technology stations across the I-90 floating bridge is currently late November of 2025. Sound Transit has lost one month since the last project timeline update, with no “float” — additional time baked in for contingency — remaining whatsoever. Any additional delays to construction will likely punt that date into 2026, a symbolic setback that puts an opening precariously close to Seattle’s tenure as host of the 2026 FIFA World Cup events.

“We don’t have a day to waste,” Ron Lewis, the agency’s executive director of design, engineering, and construction management, told the committee. “And this summer is critical.”



Sound Transit’s contractors are now 80% complete with reconstructing the “plinths” that hold up tracks along the I-90 segments of East Link, the ones that were found to be defective in 2022. But the projected date for contractors to complete that work has already slipped from this July to August. Next month, Sound Transit will close the Downtown Seattle transit tunnel for a weekend so that crews can work to tie in 2 Line tracks with current 1 Line tracks at International District/Chinatown Station, work that will have sequels this fall.

https://www.theurbanist.org/2024/05/10/east-link-sits-on-a-razors-edge/