Sound Transit’s new light rail line ridership is going as predicted
(The Center Square) – Daily boardings of Sound Transit’s latest light rail route in East King County are as the agency predicted.
Sound Transit’s 2 Line opened on Saturday, April 27 with transport between the cities of Bellevue and Redmond.
Sound Transit Interim CEO Goran Sparrman revealed the statistics regarding Line 2 ridership last week, referring to the numbers as positive news.
The opening weekend of the 2 Line saw a total of 47,000 boardings.
Monthly ridership for May totaled 121,000 boardings with an average weekday ridership of just under 3,900. On a Saturday, Sound Transit recorded 4,300 boardings.
“So pretty much in line with the predictions we had,” Sparrman said in a Rider Experience and Operations Committee meeting on Thursday. “Once we finish Line 2 and it connects back over [Lake Washington] and connects back to Line 1, we expect that ridership to increase tenfold.”
Sound Transit told The Center Square in an email that the estimate before opening was approximately 4,000 boardings per day on the 2 Line.
The 3,900 daily boardings are much less than the nearly 80,000 daily weekday passengers that board Sound Transit’s 1 Line, which runs from the SeaTac area up to Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood.
It took nearly a decade of construction before Sound Transit’s new light rail line in Eastside King County opened in April. However, only an initial segment is open with transport between the cities of Bellevue and Redmond.
The full Link 2 Line is anticipated to open next year.
The $3.7 billion East Link Extension project was approved by voters in 2008, with construction on the project beginning in 2017. Approximately $2.2 billion in local funding is provided in Sound Transit 2 Bonds leveraging the voter-approved measure.
