After a two-year streak of splashy grand openings where overflow crowds explored new light rail routes, Sound Transit this week will unveil its last train station until the 2030s.

North Seattle's new Pinehurst Station will welcome passengers at 5 a.m. Wednesday with less hype and lower expectations. It will be near-empty for a long time.

The aerial stop is surrounded by Interstate 5, a park, a golf course and single-family homes spread out among evergreen trees. Seattle had a full decade to plan for nearby blocks of apartments or condos to make the $240 million station more useful, but none of that construction is underway.

Sound Transit once hesitated to build here. Early data models said if housing and jobs didn't pour in, as few as 1,100 people a day would board a train at Pinehurst, far below industry standards.

But agency leaders acquiesced to the doggedness of one Seattle City Council member, Debora Juarez, who insisted her district deserved a second rail stop besides Northgate.

And they listened to a broader pitch, that Pinehurst would improve social equity because lower-income residents, including people of color in the Lake City and Bitter Lake neighborhoods, would find a way to the station, where the freeway meets Northeast 130th Street and divides the city's North End.

So the train stop at Pinehurst survived, even as Sound Transit, now burdened with a $35 billion long-term shortfall, pushed destinations like Ballard into an uncertain future.

The question now is what can be done to boost Pinehurst's performance?

CEO Dow Constantine acknowledges the station won't be heavily used at first. Sound Transit didn't require housing and jobs there, under his leadership as board chair in the mid-2010s and early 2020s, but he's confident those will show up later.

We're not in a position to order these jurisdictions to do any particular thing," said Constantine. Wherever light rail arrives, denser land use eventually appears, a great example being Marymoor Village in Redmond, he said.

"I think that the city of Seattle is seeing this as a real opportunity to deal with some of the housing shortages that have been plaguing us," he said.

After a decade of inertia, the City Council last fall passed a land-use plan that promotes more density across Seattle — featuring an "urban center" on two sides of Pinehurst Station with residential buildings five to eight stories high, plus retail and offices.

But rezoning is on hold. Residents — including a Ravenna-Cowen neighborhood group, a lawyer from Mount Baker and a symphony bassist — have sued, claiming the effects on trees and streams citywide must be examined first.

Councilmember Eddie Lin, who chairs the land use committee, thinks it might be 2028 before the council makes zoning final, because additional time-consuming environmental studies will be needed to resolve the case.

"Certainly within, you know, the next five years, I would hope to see significant sorts of permits and groundbreakings," Lin said.

Political pressure

Pinehurst is Sound Transit’s only "infill" station, meaning a new train stop shimmies into an existing corridor. In this case, it's between the Northgate and Shoreline South/148th stations.

Another infill is scheduled for 2031 at Graham Street in South Seattle’s Rainier Valley, then, money permitting, at Boeing Access Road in Tukwila.

Pinehurst is also unique as the only big Sound Transit project to open five years earlier than voters were told, when they passed the huge ST3 tax measure in 2016.

Earlier that year, then-CEO Peter Rogoff hesitated to add what was called “Northeast 130th Station” along the four-station, already mostly engineered Northgate-to- Lynnwood project. Ridership seemed thin and construction difficult, and he thought adding a fifth station would jeopardize a $1 billion federal grant request.

Juarez dismissed those misgivings as nonsense. She had some heated closed-door talks with Rogoff.

In a town where political boat-rocking can get you shunned overnight, Juarez threatened to publicly oppose the ST3 tax vote if it omitted Northeast 130th, a situation she called “North Seattle being ignored in citywide and regional matters,” writing in The Seattle Times. The cost estimate of $65 million looked cheap enough to not freak out her transit board colleagues, who hoisted it aboard the ST3 plan.

“The main thing that’s clear, there was political momentum led by Debora Juarez to make this happen,” Rogoff recalled. Seattle’s next mayor, Jenny Durkan, joined the board and called the project a "no-brainer" to do early.

Even as the price climbed to $144 million in 2020 and $240 million now, the board dug in. Dollars flowed, and contractors installed huge columns and platforms next to I-5 between 2020 and 2024 so that phase wouldn’t block the Lynnwood trains that debuted in August 2024. The final decision came easily to collect a trickle of passengers at first, instead of leaving a half-built station to be completed near 2031 and disrupting regional service more.

During a recent interview, Juarez and Renee Staton, a pro-station coalition organizer, sported T-shirts saying " Pinehurst Station — Built by Community." The council member hearkened to a 2018 headline in Crosscut: "Juarez plays chicken with transit leaders — and wins."

Using the station now

King County Metro Transit’s new Route 77 is meant to reduce the site's isolation, with buses running every 15 minutes from Bitter Lake to Pinehurst to Lake City, then the U District. The bus-train combo "is going to be fabulous for Ingraham High School students," said Staton.

Barbara Mueller, catching a 9:10 a.m. bus near Bitter Lake, said she’ll frequent Pinehurst Station and save several minutes, compared with reaching Northgate Station on a slower bus.

"We don't have a car, so the more options we have for getting around, the better," Mueller said.

The next Route 77 bus along 130th took five people from Bitter Lake past Pinehurst to Lake City, and a return trip west carried one passenger. This is a transit vision starting from scratch.

Pinehurst might take pressure off the full parking structure at Shoreline South/148th Station if some of those drivers walk from their homes to Pinehurst instead, hopes César García, co-director of Lake City Collective, an advocacy nonprofit. Working-class people he knows around Lake City rely on cars because their clients or jobsites tend to be in many locations, he said.

There’s no garage at Pinehurst, only 10 passenger loading spaces, known as kiss-and-ride, reachable on a one-lane northbound road. Drop-offs by friends and for-hire cars can be crowded in Lynnwood, so it’s worth watching whether Sound Transit designed Pinehurst’s loop large enough.

Former transit board member David Baker, who served as Kenmore mayor, once called the station useless, and still thinks so.

“I ride light rail, and for the most part it’s good, but again, what the hell did they build that station for?” he said, between trips driving a ride-hail car.

Remaking the neighborhood

The surest way to fill trains is an active neighborhood. If the citywide growth plan ever prevails, the Pinehurst urban center would potentially be as dense as Roosevelt or Alaska Junction.

Sound Transit won't guess now at near-term ridership, but this month offered a squishy long-term range of 2,600 to 4,200 riders at Pinehurst far in the future, whenever its neighborhood gets denser, and when lines reach Tacoma, West Seattle, Ballard, Everett, South Kirkland and Issaquah.

"I'm certain that this station is going to be well-patronized," Constantine said. "It will not reach its full potential until the system is built out."

Some residents urge the city to put housing on at least part of the Jackson Park Golf Course. Mayor Katie Wilson has not taken a position on that, but is open to considering other recreational uses, said spokesperson Alex Hudson.

Juarez favors development next to Pinehurst Station but has also argued the whole North End will benefit from the outset.

“Pinehurst is right in between two powerhouses, Aurora and Lake City Way — both state highways — bridges, transit spines, a lot of traffic and commerce and people,” she said.

Unlike the city of Seattle and Sound Transit, the law in British Columbia mandates high-rise zoning of 20 stories for SkyTrain stops, and eight to 12 stories within a short walk. Even in Shoreline, council members voted to establish midrise housing outside its two Sound Transit stations. It's being built now, along with a Shoreline South walk-bike bridge across I-5. The station has 3,000 daily boardings, bolstered by commuters fleeing traffic snarls from the freeway's Ship Canal Bridge repave.

Across the freeway from Pinehurst Station, real estate agent Frank Chaviano is trying to unite 58 residential lot owners, or a large cohort, to sell an assemblage of property together to a large developer.

"The city's been delayed, and it's really sad because the mayor and the City Council are aligned with creating more housing," he said. Some 400 to 800 units could fit there, he said, across from woods and playgrounds at Northacres Park.

"This is New York, Central Park, 100 years later," Chaviano says. "This particular area is beautiful because you've got the park, you've got the station and you're not far from downtown" by rail.

This station lacks the kind of leftover construction land Sound Transit often hands over to nonprofit developers for subsidized housing (3,869 units, mostly subsidized, are built or approved at 14 other stations). But the agency, through its new planning group, is "developing the muscle" to help others forge deals for both market and subsidized-rate housing, Constantine said.

A rising tide

Optimists like to remind people Link light rail is a "100-year investment," so the vision matters, not the cost-benefit numbers.

On the other hand, some 17 years after the first line opened, with some midrise zoning, activity is nil around Rainier Beach Station, while Othello Station is seeing its first wave of new housing and childcare, and 3,600 daily boardings. Even though Bellevue meticulously created the midrise Spring District for tech firms and workers, a meager 1,128 average passengers per day caught trains there in August.

"I want to pull out the lens a little bit," Juarez said.

The Northgate and Pinehurst stations, the John Lewis Memorial Bridge over I-5, North Seattle College, UW Medical Center-Northwest and safer walk-bike streets are interconnected, she said, as are schools and the shops in Lake City and Bitter Lake, in a North End urban ecosystem you won't need a car to explore.

"It's how communities are built, and how people stay connected," said Juarez. "Then they care about each other, they care that their kids, other people's kids get to school safe. They care that their neighbors have a job.

Even if Pinehurst never becomes Central Park, light rail is gaining clientele because of its longer reach, trains replacing bus routes, crowded events like World Cup soccer and a rising population.

The trains in August carried 166,000 average daily passengers, a third more than just last year.

If a rising tide lifts all boats, even Pinehurst Station might float.

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