1) Last Friday afternoon's light rail ride, the final test run before service kicked off at 10:00 Saturday morning, started with a press conference inside what used to be known as the bus tunnel. (Notably absent: Gov. Christine Gregoire, who sent her chief of staff because of a prior commitment, and mayoral candidate Mike McGinn, who played a major role in the campaign for light rail last year.)

Hundreds of press and elected officials—including seven members of the Seattle city council, Mayor Greg Nickels, all the members of the Sound Transit board, former US senator Slade Gorton, current Sen. Patty Murray, and a half-dozen state elected officials— crowded inside Westlake Station to hear congratulatory speeches from Murray, Mayor Greg Nickels, a surprisingly funny FTA administrator Peter Rogoff, and several more.

Many more, in fact—the speeches went on so long that even Nickels, perhaps the person in the room with the most reason to celebrate (the primary election is exactly one month after light rail's Day One), was starting to look a little wilted, and deputy mayor Tim Ceis was openly talking to folks around him.

Still, there were some touching moments. Rogoff noted that "it's often said that women have to work twice as hard to get half the credit. I think that means that Senator Murray and Joni Earl worked four times as hard." Lakewood county council member and Sound Transit board vice-chair Claudia Thomas encouraged everyone to "extend your right hand, put it behind you, and pat yourselves on the back." And Earl, who was sitting in the second row, couldn't help pulling a Kleenex out of her purse and wiping away tears.

A lot of folks were pretty misty-eyed, understandably—this weekend has been a long time in the making. (I've been covering light rail since 2001, and folks like Seattle Times reporter Mike Lindblom, a poker-faced guy who reluctantly allowed that the opening of light rail was "exciting," have been doing so for much, much longer.) Murray reminisced about camping out in then-Transportation secretary Rodney Slater's office one day before George W. Bush took office, seeking Slater's signature on a last-minute funding agreement for Sound Transit. "I knew if we didn’t get a $500 million agreement signed by the end of the Clinton Administration, we never would." That was nearly a decade ago.

Finally—finally—after King County Council member Julia Patterson took the stage for the briefest speech of the afternoon (concluding, "Let's get on board"), everybody hightailed downstairs to wait for the train to Tukwila. I didn't talk to a single reporter who wasn't thrilled to be on board.

2) A first impression from this first ride on Link: Light rail is fast—really fast. People like state Sen. Fred Jarrett may still complain about the decision to run trains at grade along Martin Luther King Jr. Way—a decision that slows the trains' top speed from 55 mph to 35—but seeing the cars stopped along the road as we whizzed past was confirmation enough that this system is going to work, and it's going to be better than driving. However, it's at 55 mph, the speed the train reaches on the elevated portions along the freeway, that light rail really starts to feel like rapid transit.

The length of the ride between the Columbia City station and the Othello station, two miles south, feels like a lifetime. Major streets like Graham and Orcas go whizzing past, unserved, and the inevitable question is: Why? The answer is that the Sound Transit board eliminated the Graham light rail station for financial reasons in 2000—a decision that feels, now as then, monumentally short-sighted.

On board the train, I talked with Dan Bertolet of the urbanist blog Hugeasscity and Sara Nicolic of the urbanist organization FutureWise; Bertolet kvetched about the elimination of the Graham stop, and Nicolic explained that it was extremely unlikely that either that stop or the similarly "deferred" Boeing Access Road station would ever be built. Neither project was included in last year's "Mass Transit Now" measure, she explained—therefore, without funding from the city (Graham) or Boeing (Boeing Access Road), neither station is going to happen. Given the number of residents and workers those two stops would've been able to serve, that's a shameful oversight.



3) Back at Sound Transit's Union Station, the Transportation Choices Coalition (which initially fought for the highway-heavy "Roads and Transit" ballot measure in 2007, then threw its weight behind last year's light-rail expansion measure), threw a $100-a-head black-tie, sold-out "Tuxes and Trains" light rail celebration at King Street Station, one of three downtown Seattle light-rail stops. Among the celebrants: A jubilant Nickels; a bored Ed Murray; Seattle City Council member (and onetime light-rail opponent) Nick Licata; former monorail spokesman Ed Stone [!!]; Washington State Democratic chair Dwight Pelz; and 500 more tux-or-gown-clad folks who support light rail or helped make it happen. Speeches ensued, but no one could hear them; nonetheless, it was a lovely (and well-deserved) bash.

4) But the real party happened the following morning, and there was no ticket required. Sound Transit threw open the doors of Link Light rail to the public at 10:00. In the early afternoon, we walked down through Columbia City, where every store and bar was offering a light-rail related special—from free iced coffee at the new Empire coffee shop on South Ferdinand St. to dollar-off "streetcar cocktails" at gritty, open-at-8-am Angie's, maybe the one spot in Columbia City that hasn't gentrified. A gaggle of Nickels supporters were milling around outside Tutta Bella, eating $2 scoops of "light rail lime" gelato.

What struck me most about Saturday's opening, though, was how few of the usual suspects (politicians, light rail boosters, Sound Transit employees) I ran into. In contrast to that white-bread crew, the group that crowded onto the light-rail trains were as diverse as you'd find on any South End bus, and everybody—from little kids to old ladies to tired-looking moms and dads—seemed thrilled to wait in interminable lines, thrilled to crowd onto standing-room-only trains, thrilled to be on board. (Not so thrilling: The ten-minute walk across the massive park-and-ride at the Tukwila station, followed by a truly unpleasant hike across a spanking-new eight-lane "boulevard." Clearly, Sound Transit expects no one to walk to this station).



And everyone, it seemed, was a newly minted light-rail expert. Ordinary folks were reciting things like schedules for light-rail extensions and the depth of the Beacon Hill tunnel and timetables (every seven and a half minutes!)—music to the ears of a transit wonk like me. If people feel invested in their transit system, maybe they'll want to build more; and if they want to build more, maybe light rail cars will stay in better condition than our crappy buses. A girl can hope.



5) For me, the real opening day came this morning, when I rode light rail to work for the first time. For ages, I've been riding the 7—the worst, slowest, dirtiest bus in the city. If you're lucky, you might get downtown in 30 minutes; if someone has a seizure or gets in a fight or gets busted selling drugs at 8 in the morning, it could take an hour. No more. Light rail, door to door, got me to my office in less than 40 minutes, and that's with an added 12-minute walk on one end and a 5-minute walk on the other. Seventeen minutes to downtown, on an air-conditioned train with no crowds, no loud music, no unpleasant smells! That's worth an extra quarter to me. Bye-bye, 7—it's not me, it's you.