This week on the GeekWire Podcast: we take the present on the street — or quite, on the rails — recording on Sound Transit’s 2 Line as we experience the world’s first mild rail on a floating bridge from Seattle’s Northgate neighborhood to Microsoft’s campus in Redmond.
It’s an engineering marvel a long time within the making — the bridge, that’s, not the podcast. That mentioned, juggling a few handheld mics and transportable recorder on a crowded prepare, we did have to beat some logistical challenges to make it occur.
Alongside the way in which, we chat with fellow passengers and speak in regards to the week’s headlines, together with Anduril’s autonomous warship facility on Seattle’s ship canal, and golf star Bryson DeChambeau’s acquisition of Bellevue-based Sportsbox AI forward of the Masters.
Then we get a behind-the-scenes take a look at the engineering from Sound Transit’s Henry Bendon. He explains how engineers solved the unprecedented problem of working 55 mph trains on a bridge that continuously strikes with wind, waves, and altering lake ranges.
Bendon describes the surge in ridership for the reason that Crosslake Connection opened on March 28, and what the road means for connecting the tech hubs on either side of the lake.
After arriving in Redmond, we sit down with Microsoft President Brad Smith to speak in regards to the firm’s two-decade position in making the Crosslake Connection a actuality.
Smith says the road offers folks “a alternative they didn’t have a month in the past.”
We ask what it says about how we construct large issues on this area that it took practically 60 years to get from thought to actuality. “What actually issues is folks caught with it,” he says.
We talk about the unlikely duo of Microsoft and Amazon — fierce rivals in cloud computing and AI — collaborating on regional transit and civic points. “In terms of native points, we’re not competing with Amazon, we’re working collectively,” Smith says.
And eventually, we problem him with a trivia query that hits near residence.
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