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The true Link price tag was $3.6 billion, not $2.5 billion. Even worse, a subsequent internal review showed that Sound Transit had severely underestimated costs not just for the tunnel, but for the entire Link scheme. This was vastly more than Sound Transit could afford, and the board had to immediately put the tunnel project on hold and push the entire Link completion date back at least to 2009. When Sound Transit officials opened bids for construction of the University Link's twin tunnels, running beneath Capitol Hill northeast of downtown Seattle, the low bid was for $728 million, a whopping $171 million over the $557 million budget. In late 2000, the University Link route was responsible for the biggest crisis in Sound Transit's history. Yet construction was delayed by years of turmoil. It was originally scheduled for completion in 2006. The route from downtown to UW had been part of the original Sound Move light-rail plan approved by voters in 1996.

Riders had been awaiting this day for two decades. (Most of the 15-mile light-rail line running south from downtown to the airport is at ground level or elevated.) The University Link will initiate a boom in light-rail ridership. It is, in essence, Seattle's first subway route. The Seattle Times says the opening marks "a new era for transit for the congested Seattle area" (Beekman). Riders are impressed with the speed of the trains, which zip from downtown to the stadium in about eight minutes. Crowds at both stations listen to live music and take free rides on the new route, which tunnels from the Westlake Center station in downtown Seattle to UW's Husky Stadium. The opening is celebrated with a ribbon-cutting at the Capitol Hill Station while a countdown ceremony is held simultaneously at the University of Washington Station. On March 19, 2016, Sound Transit begins Link light-rail service to Capitol Hill and the University of Washington (UW), extending the Link line, which had opened in 2009 between downtown Seattle and Sea-Tac Airport in south King County, three miles north.