Interning on the Eastside: Living in Seattle Since the 2 Line Opened

Until recently, interning on the Eastside and living in Seattle meant a bus across a floating bridge and a daily dependence on I-90 or the 520 not being broken. Most people took the employer shuttle, moved to Bellevue, or bought a car they did not want.

That changed in March 2026, when the 2 Line’s cross-lake segment opened and light rail began running between Seattle and the Eastside. If you are interning at a Bellevue or Redmond employer in 2026 or 2027, a lot of the advice you will find online predates this and is quietly out of date.

Room requirements, booking timeline and lease mechanics all sit on the intern housing in Seattle page. Everything below is the one question that page deliberately leaves open: which side of the lake you sleep on.

What the connection actually is

The Eastside stretch of the 2 Line had been running on its own since 2024, between Redmond Technology Center and South Bellevue — useful if you were already over there, useless if you were not. The missing piece was the crossing.

That piece opened on 28 March 2026, linking the Eastside segment through to the Seattle network, with new stations at Mercer Island and Judkins Park. The line now runs from Redmond through to Lynnwood, which means it passes through the downtown Seattle transit tunnel.

The practical upshot for someone living downtown: Symphony Station is about a 7-minute walk from 901 6th Avenue, and it is in that tunnel. A Redmond or Bellevue commute from downtown is now a train you walk to and sit on, rather than a bus plus a bridge plus a hope.

Because the line is still new, confirm current service patterns and journey times with Sound Transit rather than trusting any figure on a page like this one — including this one. Schedules on a recently-opened line move.

Why this is specifically good for an intern

A twelve-week stay weights the decision differently from a two-year one, in three ways.

You cannot predict your commute in February. When you accept housing you often do not yet know which building your team sits in, whether you will be hybrid, or whether you will be pulled to another site. A rail connection that serves a whole corridor absorbs being wrong about all of that. A room chosen to be a nine-minute walk from one specific Bellevue office does not.

Your evenings and weekends are not on the Eastside. This is the part that decides whether twelve weeks is good or grim. The Eastside is pleasant and largely residential and suburban in its rhythm; downtown Seattle is where the things an intern actually wants to do in a new city are. Reverse-commuting means your working day costs you a train ride and your free time costs you nothing.

Interns are the cohort least likely to have a car, and the Eastside is the geography where that matters most. Previously the gap was filled by shuttles with fixed routes and fixed hours. A public rail line does not care what time you leave the office.

What it costs you honestly

It is a real commute. Door to desk, downtown to the Eastside, will land somewhere in the range of 45 minutes to an hour depending on which station you are heading for and how far your building sits from it — Redmond Technology Center is further out than downtown Bellevue.

Across twelve weeks, that is a meaningful number of hours. Two things make it a better trade than the raw figure suggests:

It is seated, predictable rail time. A bus stuck on a bridge and a train on a schedule are not the same forty minutes. You can read, work or sleep on one of them.

It replaces a car. Not just the cost — the parking, the insurance for a short term, the business of acquiring and disposing of a vehicle inside twelve weeks. Downtown Seattle is one of the few US neighbourhoods where going without is genuinely comfortable, and living without a car in downtown Seattle works through what fills the gap.

When living on the Eastside is the better answer

To be fair to the other side, because this is a real choice rather than a foregone one.

Move over there if your placement is genuinely fixed at one Eastside site, five days a week, and your social life will be the other interns in your programme — many of whom will be housed nearby. In that case you are converting an hour a day into an extra hour of sleep, and the neighbourhood argument matters much less because your cohort is your neighbourhood.

The catch is inventory rather than preference. Short, furnished, individually-leased terms are not what the Eastside’s newer apartment stock is built for, so the realistic option is often a sublet from a private individual. For a twelve-week stay with no local safety net, a building that leases to you directly is usually worth a commute.

Two things to check before you commit

Which station your building is actually near. “Bellevue” and “Redmond” are both large, and employers occupy many buildings. The last leg from station to desk is where the surprises live, and the number you want is station-to-door on foot, not city-to-city.

What your employer provides. Shuttles, transit passes and housing stipends all exist and vary enormously between programmes. A free shuttle from a specific Seattle pickup point can beat the train outright, and a transit pass makes the rail option free rather than cheap. Ask before you choose, because it is the kind of thing nobody volunteers.

The short answer

If your Eastside placement is fixed and your programme houses its interns together over there, go. Otherwise live downtown and take the train — the connection that makes that work has only existed since March, and it is now the better default for most Eastside interns rather than the compromise it used to be.