Link light rail continues to build ridership momentum ahead of further expansion.

Sound Transit recently updated their ridership report with numbers from the starter 2 Line, and ridership surpassed agency expectations, with daily boardings hovering around 6,000 between May and July. The 1 Line also posted strong ridership numbers this summer, showing robust momentum across the Link light rail network.

The 2 Line news got buried by excitement from Sound Transit’s Lynnwood Link Extension opening last weekend. Within the next 18 months, Lynnwood Link, Federal Way Link, and “Rest of the 2 Line” extensions will undoubtedly show explosive growth for Link ridership. Now is an interesting time to get a snapshot of interim ridership trends, especially the 2 Line’s current iteration as an Eastside-only service.

Starter 2 Line’s ridership exceeds expectations

Sound Transit initially expected between 4,000 and 5,700 daily riders on the 2 Starter Line, translating to roughly 120,000 to 171,000 passengers a month. Despite the low expectations for the starter line, ridership has been on the higher side, as the first three months of service averaged a strong 6,030 daily riders. The 2 Line’s strongest month was June, with 180,949 boardings, equating to 6,664 people a day. Once the full line opens with the Lake Washington crossing into Seattle and the Downtown Redmond Link Extension, together adding four more stations and a valuable connection to existing infrastructure, numbers are expected to rise quickly. Sound Transit expects 50,000 daily boardings on the 2 Line by 2030. 

Most interesting for 2 Line data are the station boarding numbers. Taking July’s numbers as representative, Redmond Technology Center was the most popular station with 49,292 boardings, 27% of total 2 Line boardings. Located in the heart of Microsoft’s campus, with a large bus station for transfers to other parts of the Eastside plus park and ride, this station was the only 2 Line station to beat a 1 Line station (SoDo, 48,000). Bellevue Downtown and South Bellevue stations were also high performers with roughly 32,000 boardings each in June.

Boardings for the other stations were much lower, likely as a consequence of slow rezoning and development efforts for most station catchment areas. Surprisingly, Overlake Village was a distant fourth at 12,803 boardings in July, despite having a fair amount of completed apartment complexes and being within walking distance of the southern portion of Microsoft’s campus. As covered previously on The Urbanist, stations with little-to-no development were unsurprisingly the lowest performers, namely East Main, BelRed, and Wilburton.

The present starter 2 Line provides an interesting, almost “alternate world” of transit in the Eastside, if it were a region set apart from other population centers, embarking on its own transit network. In July, the 2 Line had as many boardings with its eight stations as 1 Line’s U District Station alone, reflecting the power of 1 Line’s broader network connectivity to drive demand.

1 Line powers Seattle summers

In July 2024, Link 1 Line saw its second-highest monthly boardings with a total of 2,469,319 people. This is still a quarter million short of July 2023’s record of 2,712,313, but strong enough to eke out over other high-performing months to clinch second place. In daily numbers, that’s 82,083 people a day for July. For a fun (albeit imperfect) comparison, if every person who rode Link 1 Line drove alone, according to the Transportation Research Board’s Highway Capacity Manual it would take at least a six-lane freeway to replace the number of trips made. Seafair, Capitol Hill Block Party, and some major concerts buoyed ridership as is typical for Link’s busiest month of the year.

Drilling into July’s boardings by station, Westlake and SeaTac/Airport led the pack for most popular. The University of Washington and Northgate Extensions continue to bring in hundreds of thousands of riders each, with Capitol Hill and Northgate stations rounding out the top four. As a segment, Rainier Valley showed some of the lowest boarding numbers, a reflection of the still slow-to-develop station areas and general auto-oriented urban fabric along much of that part of the route. SoDo was the least boarded station, with 1/7th the number of boardings as Westlake.

With the recent Lynnwood Link Extension completed a week ago, it will be exciting to see how Northgate’s boarding numbers change, especially with the Sound Transit, King County Metro, and Community Transit service changes slated for September 14th. Many of the changes are aimed at shuttling riders from north of Lynnwood to the new terminus of the 1 Line to save bus service hours from duplicating 1 Line service towards downtown Seattle, a strategic position previously occupied by Northgate.

The present is temporary

Travel around Puget Sound is changing rapidly; Lynnwood Link (Aug 2024), Redmond Link (spring 2025), the Lake Washington crossing (late 2025), and Federal Way Link (2026) extensions will transform regional rail mobility. With those extensions online, Sound Transit’s projects the entire Link system will carry between 156,000 and 203,000 daily passengers by 2028. Right on the heels of these projects are the three Stride bus rapid transit (BRT) projects (2027 – 2028). These ridership numbers are a stepping-stone snapshot of a region rapidly being knit together with high-quality rapid transit.

The ends of both the 1 and 2 Lines are persistent high-performers, showing how those stations operate as transit hubs for intersecting bus lines and (to a lesser extent) park and ride trips. It’s exciting to see how station boarding numbers will change as station areas develop and extensions complete. With so much in the works, it’s an electrifying time to be a rail fan in Seattle. 

Data was collected from Sound Transit’s ridership and collated into a free to use spreadsheet.

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