Speeches about light rail; prose about subways; and late nights at the U.S. Open.
I’m All Lost in…
the 3 things I’m obsessing over THIS week
#46
1) Sound Transit, the regional transportation agency where I work, opened the Lynnwood Link Extension on Friday. (Lynnwood is almost 20 miles north of Seattle, in another county.)
“Transit turns red districts blue,” former Seattle Mayor Ed Murray—a dyed-in-the-wool Catholic Democrat—used to quip when pressed about why Seattle would build transit out to the suburbs. It’s an incisive bit of strategic thinking, but there are certainly other reasons to expand mass transit beyond the city core. Most important, sharing density throughout the metro region matches growth with sustainability. According to “Sounds of the Suburbs,” chapter 13 from Ben Wilson’s outstanding 2020 survey of city development, Metropolis, building urban infrastructure beyond city limits wisely meets an inexorable demographic trend by bringing a regional approach to urbanism. Citing Los Angeles, a “contiguous urban region,” rather than a discrete city, as emblematic of a future defined by “cities across the globe…[that] have morphed into massive polycentric megalopolises,” Wilson makes the case for fighting the damaging effects of sprawl by expanding smart infrastructure, including mass transit.
Given that my 9-to-5 job is writing remarks for Sound Transit’s CEO and Board, my non-stop task this week was drafting the ribbon-cutting-day speeches for Lynnwood Link light rail, our suburban expansion. Accordingly, Lynnwood Link—an 8.5-mile, 4-station, county-crossing extension of Sound Transit’s current 1 Line—topped my list of this week’s personal obsessions.
Lynnwood Link is part of Sound Transit’s larger capital program over the next three years that will grow our now 43-station, 42.5-mile light rail system, into a 53-station, 62-mile regional system.
So, it was lots of this from me this week:
As of today, Link trains will arrive at Lynnwood City Center Station every 8 minutes during peak hours, and every 10 minutes during the rest of the day, giving 50,000 new riders reliable, traffic-free connections…
As we’ve said all along, investing in this kind of light rail expansion isn’t just an investment in trains, it’s an investment in our region’s economic resilience.
More light rail helps connect more people to more jobs.
More light rail helps spark new housing. As of today, more than 3,300 new homes have been built or are in development on Sound Transit property.
At least 2,500 of those homes are affordable housing.
More light rail helps spark environmental stewardship.
Sound Transit service helped offset more than 216,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions in 2023.
Or to quote the Seattle Times quoting Snohomish County Executive and Sound Transit Board Vice Chair (ahem) :
The service will help commuters “leave one of the most congested corridors in the country behind,” declared Snohomish County Executive Dave Somers, vice chair of the Sound Transit governing board.
Or the Urbanist quoting Somers:
“The story of the day is regionalism,” Somers said. “By connecting all of our separate communities, with safe, reliable rapid mass transit, we are building one sustainable Puget Sound.”
I get pretty anxious at these events; it’s stressful to listen to other people read and/or try to read and/or mangle your words—while the cameras are rolling.
So, after taking the 512 bus to the new station (light rail wouldn’t have taken me there just yet because the new train service didn’t start running until after the 12:30 ribbon cutting), I arrived at the Lynnwood City Center Station to the strains of a jazz band playing on the mobbed plaza, quickly bought a coffee from one of the food trucks, washed down some anxiety meds, and sat at the picnic tables in back with security staff—the periodic sound of applause whooshing past my body like a light rail train.
Opening Day, Lynnwood Link, 8/30/24
Opening Day, Lynnwood Link, 8/30/24
Me, chilling in back at a picnic table on Lynnwood Link Opening Day, 8/30/34, after the meds kicked in.
2) I woke up on (this big) opening day to an email from my friend Dallas. His subject line read “NYT…,”
and his email simply stated, “has your number on a Friday morning.”
This was followed by a link to a wonderful NYT photo essay of mostly old, black & white subway pics (with the occasional late 1960s or early 1970s Kodak color photo.) Even better, or at least what Dallas meant was this: There was an accompanying survey of quotes from New York City novels where authors rhapsodize about the subway.
Titled 120 Years of New York’s Subterranean Literary Muse: The subway isn’t just buried in the bedrock of New York City— it’s embedded within its fiction, too, there are quotes from 20-plus novels in this mesmerizing feature, including: a quote from Another Country by James Baldwin, a formative novel for me (I read it on the sly in my spare time in high school); a quote from the famous first paragraph of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, who is one of my favorite poets (I actually didn’t remember the subway reference, just the startling opening line about the Rosenberg execution); and a 1913 line from The Custom of the Country by my new, recent interest, Edith Wharton.
This old photo is accompanied in the NYT feature by a quote from Harlem Renaissance novelist Jessie Redmon Fauset's 1928 novel, Plum Bun: "The girls were bright birds of paradise, the men, her artist's eye noted, were gay vital fauns. In the subway beside the laughing, happy groups, white faces showed pale and bloodless, other coloured faces loomed dull and hopeless."
My favorite quote, though, comes from a novelist I’ve never heard of, Daphne Palasi Andreades.
Quoting her 2022 debut, Brown Girls, the NYT went with a brief excerpt that reads like a couplet of poetry:
We are 15, and are learning to memorize the subway lines as
if they are the very veins that run through our bodies
Palasi Andreades’ near verse, included in a section of the feature labeled “People-Watching,” is matched with one of the few color pictures. It’s a close-up shot of a subway map displayed on board a train, its colorful snaking lines melding into a reflection from the seats opposite: two children in winter coats and snow caps gazing out their window at rail yard track and buildings.
Some of the other subway subsets in this collection are: “Crowds & Delays;” “Speed;” and “The Subway at Night.”
3) Speaking of night time: My favorite part about opening my laptop and watching the U.S. Open every evening this week (Pacific Time) is seeing those last fans of the day staying up late (East Coast Time) in the glowing stadium for the daily schedule’s final match, as the tennis goes far past Midnight. The long shots of the fans streaming out afterward along the lit grounds, heading to the nearby 7 train is particularly sweet.
Announcer Patrick McEnroe even did an impromptu PSA for the MTA during the Carlos Alcaraz vs. Botic van de Zandschulp match (whoa, by the way.) Cutting away from the match as ESPN put up a live shot of commuters on the train McEnroe said, "As you know John, the 7 train comes right here."
And then this: "Jessica Pegula [USA, No. 6 woman in the world] takes the subway to the tournament every day. She said she doesn't like being stuck in traffic." This was all very comforting as I got a vicarious NYC thrill imagining the deep 70-degree summer evenings in Queens, NYC well past bedtime.
I’ll be in New York next week; I have tickets to the women’s semifinal and final.
If you were to survey my weekly reports, you’d see that my obsession with women’s pro tennis rates as one of the top recurring categories here, ranking just after “Cities” with 11 post as I close in on a year of doing these regular write ups.
World No. 2, Aryna Sabalenka is my favorite player on the Women’s Tennis Association tour, and perfectly, given my weakness for the wee hours, her Round-3 match, scheduled for the Friday night session, actually started at 12:08 a.m on the Arthur Ashe Stadium main stage, making it the latest match start in U.S. Open history.
After losing the first set badly, 2-6, Sabalenka turned into Godzilla and overpowered her opponent, No. 31 Ekaterina Alexandrova, 6-1, 6-2. Sabalenka won 10 straight games at one point for a 5-0 lead in the third and final set. The match ended at 1:48 a.m., tying the record for the second-latest ending ever for a U.S. women’s match.
Afterward, Sabalenka told reporters she hoped to get to sleep by 4 a.m.
Daffy Saby heads to her post-Midnight match at the U.S. Open, 12/30-31/24