Today light rail arrives in downtown Redmond, as Sound Transit opens a 3.4-mile two-station extension of the 2 Line on the Eastside. Officials and advocates will be on hand to celebrate the occasion, and many groups (The Urbanist included) will be tabling outside of Downtown Redmond Station from noon to 4pm. The formal grand opening ceremony will start at 10:30am, with trains officially rolling north of Redmond Technology Station around noon. If past Sound Transit ribbon-cuttings are any indication, prepare for speeches to run long.
The two stations opening today are quite different. The new station at Marymoor Village features a 1,400-car parking garage that dominates the station area, a building that also features a loop for Metro buses and ample bike parking.
But the elevated station in Downtown Redmond is much more integrated into the urban neighborhood. Visitors exiting trains there will find shops and restaurants within steps, with regional transit connections close by and a connection to the region’s trail network literally at the station’s front door. The downtown station is clearly built for the pedestrian experience, with ample public art at all entrances.
The span of service for the expanded 2 Line will match what was already operating, with two-car trains running every ten minutes from 5:30am to 9:30pm daily. When the full 2 Line stretches across Lake Washington up to Lynnwood, now expected by early 2026, Sound Transit will operate a longer span of service with more cars per train.
Beyond the expanded service area, Downtown Redmond Link represents a major milestone for Sound Transit: the first opening on an expansion funded by the 2016 Sound Transit 3 (ST3) ballot measure. Many ST3 projects have experienced major delays, but the extension to Downtown Redmond is relatively on time, with just a few months of delay beyond the timeline promised to voters.
“To have Downtown Redmond Link Extension opening at around the same time as the rest of East Link is a major accomplishment,” King County Councilmember Claudia Balducci, chair of the Sound Transit board’s system expansion committee, told The Urbanist. “It took a lot of smarts. I give John Marchione, former mayor of Redmond, former board member at Sound Transit, for very smartly making sure that ST3 stayed on track, and we caught up probably somewhere between six and eight years by doing it that way.”
Sound Transit projects that the Downtown Redmond Link extension (plus crossing the lake to Seattle) will help push the 2 Line to 43,000 to 52,000 daily riders by 2026.
How we got here
When voters approved the Sound Transit 2 ballot measure in 2008, many residents and elected officials on the Eastside hoped that it would allow the agency to get all the way to Downtown Redmond — but it wasn’t a done deal. The finance plan only included enough funds to get to Redmond Technology Station, and getting any additional segments of the line completed depended on project savings elsewhere — a dream that evaporated when Bellevue pushed for a pricey tunnel under its Downtown.
It wasn’t until 2016 that voters were able to fully fund getting to Downtown Redmond, and all of the ground work that had been laid dating back to 2008 — and before — was able to come to fruition.
“I think the two words I would use is being visionary about where you want to go, and also being extremely collaborative with all of our partners,” Redmond Mayor Angela Birney told The Urbanist. “So the city zoned for these trains to be able to be here, so there was no extra process other cities had. And then the staff on all ends, as well as the elected officials on all sides of it, were all really focused on making it happen.”
The I-90 segment of the 2 Line hasn’t been so lucky. Sound Transit has experienced significant delays stemming from track defects along the floating bridge, preventing the long-awaited connection between Bellevue and Seattle that had originally been pegged for completion in 2021 in the ST2 plan.
The entire line might be sitting dormant now, waiting for that final bridge connection to be ready. However, transit advocates rallied support for Balducci’s idea to segment the line to allow for a partial opening sooner. The abbreviated Eastside-only 2 Line opened on April 27, 2024.
“We wouldn’t be here today without the starter line,” Balducci said. “I am very gratified and appreciative of the Sound Transit staff for hearing the call to open the starter line. It wasn’t mission critical to do so, for them, but it was a win for the public who get to ride it. It’s a win for us, starting to get people on the Eastside regularly understanding that this is part of our commuting patterns, and making a shift, and it provides benefit to the public that otherwise we would be spending on securing closed down dark sites.”
Compared to full projections for the completed line, starter line ridership has been relatively modest (though largely in line with predictions). However, proponents point it that is has helped riders get comfortable and ready to use the network.
“It’s a big win. I’m really glad the agency heard the call to do it, and now we have two more stations that can run until we are finally ready to open the rest of the system,” Balducci said.
The Seattle and Mercer Island extension of the 2 Line is around the corner, but newly installed Sound Transit CEO Dow Constantine recently revealed that the hoped-for opening date of late 2025 is fading away, with the agency “trending toward” opening the extension in early 2026. Once that delayed segment opens, the 2 Line will run not just to Downtown Seattle, but also hook north and continue all the way to Lynnwood.
Crossing the lake will also give the agency full access to its new trainyard in Bellevue, which will offer some relief to the operational constraints that have been limiting service frequency. However, the agency projects that opening the Federal Way Link Extension will once again be pushing its operational capacity to the limit to deliver promised headways. Federal Way Link has faced construction delays that have pushed its opening from 2024 to 2026.
The Federal Way extension will complete the build out of the Sound Transit 2 light rail network, which was approved in a 2008 ballot measure. The ST3 expansions, meanwhile, will push the network to 116 miles of light rail by the 2040s, if all goes to plan.
A growth strategy with light rail at its center
While this new extension is only two stations, Redmond has been strategic at focusing growth around light rail, making the station-adjacent neighborhood major focal points for the city. Meanwhile, Redmond has been more timid in planning for growth away from its transit nodes, where single family homes continue to be the norm. In their rhetoric, Birney and other Redmond leaders have heralded an urban transformation from suburb to city, which the promise of light rail greatly aided.
Builders have taken advantage of more generous zoning to add more than 6,000 homes in downtown Redmond over the last few decades. Marymoor Village hasn’t grown quite so fast, with around 1,400 homes added, but more is the pipeline. Plus, the recent once-per-decade Redmond Comprehensive Plan update has granted additional zoning capacity in Marymoor Village, including permitting 12-story towers in some areas. Overlake Village, which already has light rail, is also a major growth center in the plan.
“[Light rail] is the backbone. We developed a Comprehensive Plan that puts growth in these dense urban centers, where we can deliver on the type of neighborhood that folks want to move to now, which is walkable, it’s vibrant, it’s got stuff going on,” Redmond Councilmember Melissa Stuart told The Urbanist. “This is going to be a place where people who want to live an active lifestyle want to come and live, so the light rail is going to produce some of the most coveted neighborhoods in Redmond.”
Relatedly, Redmond’s population has been booming and crossed the 80,000 mark in 2024, according to state estimates. That’s up from 73,256 in the 2020 census and from just over 54,000 in the 2010 census (the population jump from 2010 was aided by annexations).
Added multimodal connections come with light rail
Downtown Redmond is incredibly well-positioned for regional bike travel, sitting at the crossroads of the 520 trail, the Sammamish River Trail, and the East Lake Sammamish Trail. And several new connections around Marymoor Park are set to make it easier to hop between modes.
King County Parks just completed a direct connection between the Marymoor Village light rail station and Marymoor Park itself, allowing riders to avoid a circuitous detour to get directly into the park. Accessing the Marymoor Connector trail inside King County’s largest park is a direct connection to the Sammamish River Trail, which will connect directly with Eastrail later this year, after Redmond completes its third phase of the Redmond Central Connector.
An even bigger deal for travel within Redmond is a new extension of the East Lake Sammamish Trail underneath SR 520 between Marymoor Village and Downtown Redmond. Previously anyone trying to get between those two neighborhoods had to choose between navigating busy Redmond Way or going all the way around Marymoor Park to use a fully separated trail, but now the connection is direct and easy.
“I think this connection will really improve the cohesion of the community and the feel, as well as make it a lot safer,” Kelli Refer, Executive Director of Move Redmond, told The Urbanist. “The trail connections are going to be really huge.”
Redmond is also slowly but surely building out its on-street bike network, adding more protected bike lanes than likely any other city in the region outside Seattle.
“Redmond has got a great foundation, with the trails that are already probably one of the gems of Redmond in general,” Refer said. “The thing about the trails is that we don’t really have a lot of trail-oriented development. So if you’re trying to go to shops and locations or run errands, you’re going to have to bike off the trail network. And so we’re starting to see Redmond move forward on building more on-street protected bike lanes, and this is something that they’ve done a good job at building in Overlake with the 152nd and 156th bike lanes that they put in. And there are plans to do more in downtown Redmond.”
While many transit riders across the region are clamoring for the full connection across Lake Washington, Saturday’s grand opening of Downtown Redmond Link is a big step forward for Redmond, and for multimodal connections across the Eastside. The celebrations happening Saturday are well-deserved, and the entire region should savor the moment.
“This was the catalyst for everything,” Birney said. “Downtown has been developed and waiting for this moment. When people come down here on Saturday and after, they will see all of the new housing opportunities for people, both market-rate and affordable. They will see new stores, new pedestrian and bike opportunities. They’ll really see the shift that we are making in Redmond to change from that car-centric to a people-centric community. And I think it will be very easily visible, and you’ll be able to feel it from all the work we put into this.”
Ryan Packer has been writing for The Urbanist since 2015, and currently reports full-time as Contributing Editor. Their beats are transportation, land use, public space, traffic safety, and obscure community meetings. Packer has also reported for other regional outlets including Capitol Hill Seattle, BikePortland, Seattle Met, and PubliCola. They live in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle.
Doug Trumm is publisher of The Urbanist. An Urbanist writer since 2015, he dreams of pedestrian streets, bus lanes, and a mass-timber building spree to end our housing crisis. He graduated from the Evans School of Public Policy and Governance at the University of Washington in 2019. He lives in Seattle's Fremont neighborhood and loves to explore the city by foot and by bike.
