To help ease congestion across Lake Washington, this $3.6-billion project is the region’s first east-to-west high-capacity transit option, connecting Sound Transit’s Link light rail line from Seattle to Puget Sound’s east side.

The first portion of the Link 2 line is a 6.6-mile light rail route between South Bellevue and Redmond Technology Center, available every 10 minutes, 16 hours a day, seven days a week.

With construction crossing through multiple jurisdictions, Sound Transit chose to divide work across five packages with multiple delivery methods: design-bid-build, design-build and heavy civil general contractor/construction manager (GC/CM). The design team alone included 43 firms and more than 500 engineers, architects and other staff.

Collaboration was critical to this project’s success, as was extensive value engineering with the cities of Bellevue and Redmond, Washington State Dept. of Transportation (WSDOT) and Sound Transit to achieve quick buy-in and approvals. Several studies, such as structural optimization and tunnel method, helped the team identify time and cost savings solutions, many of which were integrated into the final design.

As the project approached completion, the team also balanced multiple design requests while keeping the project on schedule. The creation of additional construction packages, each with designated leads to manage every last detail, minimized Sound Transit’s need to bring in original contractors to see the project to completion.