Sound Transit Lunch Bus

I went on the Sound Transit Lunch Bus, where we took a tour of the light rail project through SoDo and the South End. It was really fun and the people from Sound Transit were really nice.

Some cool things I learned on the bus tour:

• The "Rail" Sign on the maintenance facility has the old 'R' from the Rainer Beer factory, now the Tully's headquarters, which is across the street from the facility. The 'R' was donated by MOHAI.


• Beacon Hill is mostly glacial till and sand, so building the tunnel was not as bad as it could have been. Actually, since the machine can only bore 50 feet a day, and they need one tunnel for each direction, it takes almost two years to built one mile of tunnel. That's one reason the connection to the University will take until 2016. The other is that a mile of tunnel costs about $280 million.


• One disappointment was the lack of bike parking at the stations. Mount Baker will have about 6 bike lockers, but the other street-loading stations won't have any.


• There will be no parking at any of the South End stations, and they are all surrounded by dense-ish development. A lot of the development is pretty attractive! I haven't been to the South End in years (I've been living in San Francisco), and I was happy to see it hasn't all completely gentrified like the Central District seems to have. When I was in high school in the CD, it was at least half or a quarter black. Now it's a white neighborhood.


• I tried to get photos of the actual tunnel and the actual station at Mount Baker, but I was chased out by the contractors. I didn't realize they worked 24 hours a day, seven days a week!
  

A couple more things. I was a little bit surprised to see the rail has been laid on MLK instead of Rainier Ave., because "Columbia City" is on Rainier Ave, about half a mile east of where the station has been put. Also, the Mount Baker intersection is about a mile east of that neighborhood's traditional definition. So that was little bit of a surpise. The bus they took us on had "special" written on the top. I broke my foot in a soccer accident (don't ask) so I was limping pretty heavily when I got off the bus, and after me a grandma in a walker got off the bus. A teen-aged boy across the street saw us and said to his friend, "Oh, the special bus." I broke up laughing.