NWTransport: Northgate Link opening, 10/2/2021

 

Yesterday, the long-awaited Northgate Link Extension opened! While I didn't make it for the official first trip (since that was at 4 in the morning, probably to avoid have a lot of people crowd on to the first train during COVID times), I certainly had to get out there on day one.

 We're starting off at Capitol Hill Station, one of the two that opened in 2016. Sound Transit is really pushing the new 1 Line branding, since the 2 Line is going to open in just a few years. (A few years back, they started pushing Red Line branding for the only existing line for the same reason, but in a stupid controversy that feels like it would only happen in Seattle, people freaked out because "Red Line" sounds like redlining, and apparently that's a problem for some reason so Sound Transit had to abandon the whole color name system in favor of a hodgepodge of numbers, letters, and letter+number names.)

And here's the train!

That ad there is almost the same as the lyrics to a new Imagine Dragons song! 🙂 The Northgate text just looks weird because LED signs like this tend not to photograph properly, though I have seen similar faults on these signs in real life too.

The new line connects to the existing tunnels at UW Station, then proceeds underground through U District and Roosevelt before popping aboveground just before Northgate. Here's a picture from the train over to the new Northgate Pedestrian Bridge, which connects the neighborhood west of I-5 (which has dense housing and a major community college) directly to the station.

The platform gives an overhead view of part of the mall, though it's not tall enough to see over to the new Seattle Kraken hockey practice facility, which I was surprised to see specifically mentioned on station signage.

There's quite a crowd here!

The stations were peppered with various historical and other explanatory signage like this.

Here's the train I took in heading back out, as I head up to the new bridge.

The bridge has one decorative span over the southbound lanes. Originally the whole thing was intended to have a more elaborate decorative design, but I guess budget cuts had to be made.

The biggest benefit of the new Link extension may actually be the transit network changes it enabled, more than the actual new facility itself. I-5 between Northgate and downtown has some of the worst traffic in the region (and in particular, the reversable express lanes mean that traffic going in the opposite direction to them is pretty much always horrible, even off-peak and on the weekends), so the freeway buses that used to go south of Northgate (and in the case of the longer-distance ones, bypass it completely -- that was always frustrating when I lived in the Northgate area but often ended up going all the way downtown just to turn around and head north again) now end at Northgate to allow riders to transfer to faster train service downtown -- and as an added bonus, the remaining portion of the bus routes got a frequency boost too.

This is a total transit geek thing, but I love the new real time bus signs installed at the three new stations. They're a new model, which uses E-ink (like in e-book readers, but with a backlight for at night), and they look way nicer than any of the other models that Metro has used. Hopefully they will prove to be more reliable, too, since that's a major problem with the ones they've used in the past.

And this is a silly little detail, but I thought it was cool how this map here had all sorts of embossed and braile details to help blind people navigate the transit center!

One thing I'm a little sad about is the closure of the cool old Northgate Transit Center, with its stretched-fabric roof (like Denver's airport is famous for) and other neat 90s detailing, in favor of new, much more utilitarian bus bays at the station itself. For now, at least, the old transit center is staying in place to provide bus layover (parking between routes) and a connection between the park-and-ride and the new station, but I'm not sure how long that's going to last.

The Northgate Mall parking garage provides a nice overhead view of the new station!

The branding for the opening events was a combination of the "Welc①me" signs we saw earlier and these "hello🚇o" signs, both of which I found rather clever.

Heading out of Northgate, my ride was one of the new second-generation Link trains, which are an improvement in almost every way over the old ones -- especially when it comes to the electronic signage, which uses a fancy new graphical design.

Our next stop is Roosevelt Station. Have I ever mentioned how much I love escalators? 😉 It's hard to see in pictures, but the escalators in the new stations all have illuminated green up arrow/red X lights to tell you which escalator to use (which seems obvious, but whatever...), something I've seen all the time in Europe, but not locally until now.

The moose is a reference to Teddy Roosevelt's "Bull Moose Party" and/or the Roosevelt elk.

Even on day one, Sound Transit has the same issues they always do -- broken escalators, and broken real-time arrival information (that's why there's so much blank space on the readerboards). This is a perennial problem for them, but it's especially embarrassing on day one of their fancy new stations...

This is the best part of Roosevelt Station -- the sign in the picture below explains it, but it's super neat to see the restored neon signage!

And now it's time to head to U District Station. Pay attention to the blue and orange colors -- they were designed to guide passengers to the two entrances, which are also color coded. (This was designed before Sound Transit came up with the lettered entrance system that they used in the three new stations, so this subliminal wayfinding is now somewhat redundant to explicit wayfinding, but it's still cool.)

Between the colors and the zig-zagging light bars, this area has a real retro feel to it!

U District Station had a display with these neat tear-off map posters. (I think the other stations had them too, but they were gone by the time I got there.) Obviously, I took one, and it's hanging on the wall behind my head right now!

U District Station had the largest event, since there's a very active business group there along with the UW itself. The giant inflatable husky's name is Airy, apparently, which I found amusing!

And at this point, I could tell this set was going to get way too long (I took over 200 photos, so even this super long post that I imagine a lot of you didn't even make it through is cut down quite a bit), so I stopped taking pictures at this point. This is the end of the new part of the line, anyway. These new second generation trains look super cool from the outside, with the colorful door lighting and the giant frameless windows! 

Anyway, I hope I haven't bored you all too much with this! Back to normal content tomorrow, and something seasonally-appropriate will be starting next week.