[MEGAN CHING] Welcome, so happy to see all of you here today.
We're just happy to have you
for this celebration of the Monorail's 60th birthday.
And we want to welcome you to our new, newly designed,
Westlake Station.
Lots of improvements here.
It probably looks and feels a little different
than the last time you were here.
The visionaries who organized the World's Fair in 1962 knew
it would be critical to have the monorail to provide
that link between downtown and the fairgrounds.
During the fair,
this system, and I want to stress these
trains, these exact trains that you're going to ride today,
they carried over eight million passengers in six months.
That's 45,000 passengers a day at this station.
At Westlake Center, we've invested
to make improvements to help restore
the monorail's capacity to what it was back in 1962.
[MAYOR BRUCE HARRELL] I think what this represents
is what we're trying to do in Seattle.
We're trying to honor
some great infrastructure, some great people, some visionaries,
that in 1962,
envisioned a Seattle that we see now.
With a single rail beam,
the monorail sort of gave us a blueprint
for what we're trying to create in this city.
This is a sort of a simple route
to the Center campus, but it's a historical route.
So as we honor our past, we welcome new people
to Seattle: new thinkers, new leaders, new movements.
We celebrate this kind of work.
(off-screen) Have you guys already signed the card?
[MEGAN CHING] We're turning our attention next to Seattle Center Station.
That's where we really need
to do some more work to improve capacity, accessibility,
and ultimately modernize that station.
We believe it's absolutely possible that these trains
will be celebrating their 100th year of service in 40 years.