Everything You Need to Know About the 2 Line Crosslake Connection

The day has finally arrived: Sound Transit's light rail system becomes a real network today. The 2 Line, which has been operating in Bellevue and Redmond since early 2024, will finally connect riders across Lake Washington, bringing Seattle and the Eastside together with 10-minute train service throughout most of the day.

Connecting with the 1 Line at the Chinatown-International District station, the two lines will complement each other by bringing extra trains to the system's busiest stations north to Lynnwood and giving Eastside riders a direct connection to destinations like Westlake and the University of Washington.

The celebrations kick off at 9am at Sam Smith Park, the highway lid park directly adjacent to Seattle's new 2 Line station at Judkins Park. After elected officials from all over the region tout the new connection and highlight the long, hard road to get to this point, transit fans and dignitaries alike will pack onto the first train to cross the lake in revenue service around 10am – the first light rail line to operate on a floating bridge anywhere in the world.

It's a sight to see, the seventh wonder of the Seattle metropolitan region. A photo of Mount Rainier from a 2 Line train is sure to become one of the region's most treasured views, right behind a Kerry Park vista.

After trains start running, the party continues until 2pm at South Bellevue, Mercer Island, Judkins Park and Chinatown International District, among another stations. Riders collecting a stamp at all four stations will be entered into a lottery to win prizes that include Alaska Airlines tickets, tickets for the Victoria Clipper, Seattle Symphony tickets, and other swag.

At 11:30am, The Urbanist is hosting a meetup at Jack Sprat Cafe, a short walk from the 2 Line stop at Overlake Village. Your favorite transit nerds will be there, including some Urbanist contributors. We're also hosting a group transit ride from Judkins Park Station at 10:30am, though crowd size may ultimately push that timeline back slightly. The trains can only hold so many people!

While just two new stations open Saturday, including Mercer Island and Judkins Park, the impact is much more seismic. Downtown Redmond becomes a one-seat ride away from places like Shoreline, Roosevelt, Capitol Hill, and Pioneer Square. Thousands of daily commutes and errand runs will be elevated out of the drudgery of traffic, and the sleepy Eastside will take a step toward being more of a 24/7 place with train service running until midnight.

Today is truly decades in the making.

The idea of putting light rail on the Homer M. Hadley bridge – the newer of the two floating bridges between Seattle and Mercer Island – dates to the 1980s when the bridge was being designed. The plan was always for the high-occupancy vehicle (HOV) lanes in the center of the bridge to be converted to high-capacity transit at some point in the future.

In 2001, Sound Transit – just eight years old at that point – started working with the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) to assess whether that plan was still feasible, with initial analysis showing that it was. Four years later, Sound Transit turned a model into reality by running fully loaded large trucks across the HOV lanes to stress test the bridge, with those real-world results coming incredibly close to what the models predicted would happen.

In 2007, Governor Christine Gregoire reaffirmed the state's commitment to utilizing the HOV lanes for light rail and one year later, voters across King, Pierce, and Snohomish Counties signed off on the Sound Transit 2 (ST2) plan that funded the 2 Line and its route across the Homer M. Hadley Bridge.

Enter Kemper Freeman.

As one of Bellevue's biggest property owners (and head of an empire with a sordid history), Freeman was not a fan of ST2 and the idea of bringing light rail through Downtown Bellevue. He poured more than $100,000 into defeating the measure at the ballot box. When that didn't work, he turned his attention to electing Bellevue city councilmembers who would oppose surface rail, Sound Transit's original plan for the 2 Line.

In 2009, Freeman took direct aim at the state's vision for I-90 by filing a lawsuit along with a cadre of Eastside transit opponents, alleging that HOV lanes paid for with gas taxes couldn't be converted to transit use.

Freeman took his suit all the way to the state Supreme Court, and lost. Following that defeat, he turned his attention to the route the 2 Line would take through Bellevue, with the final alignment ultimately ending up nowhere near Bellevue Square Mall, his flagship property.

That wasn't the end of the lawsuits over I-90, however. In 2017, the City of Mercer Island sued Sound Transit over a loss of city residents' direct access to the I-90 express lanes, with Sound Transit suing Mercer Island right back. That dispute was resolved relatively quickly, with a settlement reached the same year that saw Sound Transit putting nearly $10 million into roadway improvements and parking intended to mitigate the impact of the 2 Line's construction.

In 2020, Mercer Island did sue Sound Transit again, but by that point, the City just looked desperate. It was resolved less than two years later. These days, Mercer Island's main foe is the State of Washington, in a battle over who gets to live near the light rail station.

"It’s time to get this project built and give riders a congestion-free transit option across Lake Washington,” Claudia Balducci, at the time a Bellevue Councilmember, told the Seattle Times in the wake of the 2013 Supreme Court decision.

It was Balducci who stuck by the 2 Line during a very dicey time to be a light rail supporter in Bellevue and who, a decade later, would propose to run an Eastside-only "starter line" before the full "Crosslake Connection" could open. That move brought light rail to Bellevue and Redmond two years early and smashed ridership projections.

"This is the culmination of decades of work moving the region towards a more multimodal transportation system," WSDOT Secretary Julie Meredith told The Urbanist this week. "It is an exciting event that I think will give the public more opportunity in this region to get around, and avoid congestion."

Only a fraction of the thousands of riders who jump on trains today will be aware of all of the work that came before to overcome construction challenges, lawsuits, and political logjams. But soon that will not matter. When trains begin crossing the lake, the 2 Line will quickly become ubiquitous and taken for granted, and soon riders will wonder how it was possible to get around without it.

Savor this day, transit lovers. Today's a very big deal.

Crosslake Light Rail Set to Transform Puget Sound Region

The Seattle region will take arguably its biggest leap forward in transit connectivity ever on Saturday, with Sound Transit inaugurating crosslake 2 Line service. Here’s how we got here.

The UrbanistDoug Trumm