Traffic was going to be a little hinky at times anyway this weekend, thanks to Saturday Huskies (12:30 p.m.) and Sounders (7:30 p.m.) games, but WSDOT is also going to be working on the 520 bridge, which is slightly less old than its namesake, Albert Rosellini, who died this week at 101.
Well after the Huskies play, at 8 p.m., both directions of the SR 520 floating bridge and highway and all ramps between Montlake Boulevard and I-405 will be closed until 5 a.m. Monday. You will be able to get on 520 at Montlake and get to I-5; it’s just east to the bridge that’s closed for the weekend. If you normally drive I-90, expect to see a lot of new, somewhat harried faces, especially just before the Sounders game starts.
There’s also the Puget Sound Heart Walk (which has raised $1.2-ish million of its $1.6-million goal). That begins at 9 a.m. Saturday, with walkers taking off from Fisher Pavilion, walking around Seattle Center, and heading down Second Avenue to Seneca and back. King County Metro is publishing a list of reroutes, so don’t get smug, bus riders.
Think of all this as practice for the Alaskan Way Viaduct closure coming up on October 21. For this news, WSDOT grabs the boldface pixels: “At 7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 21, 2011, the State Route 99 Alaskan Way Viaduct will close for nine-days.” Nine-days is so long, it gets a hyphen!
The nine-day closure of the viaduct will be the longest ever for a Seattle area highway. With one of the major north-south highways through Seattle closed, drivers from across the Puget Sound region will be significantly affected by the closure. Even if you commute from Lynnwood and Bellevue, you will see increased congestion as the nearly 110,000 drivers that use the viaduct daily look for somewhere else to go.
Where’s your bus? Writes Metro’s Kevin Desmond: “Metro will move 11 routes from the viaduct to Fourth Avenue South. After the viaduct reopens, those routes will begin using the new viaduct bypass.”
This closure will be interesting to watch–if not experience–because nine days is long enough to force behavior patterns to change. If there’s no carpocalypse, people may ask themselves why the state and city chose the single most expensive Viaduct replacement option on the table.
On the other hand, if carmagedd0n does come, that’s a glimpse of life in the near future, as construction ramps up. Per Seattlepi.com: “The $30 million set aside to increase Seattle transit options during the construction of the tunnel replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct will run out by 2014 – two years before the project is finished, the City Council was told Tuesday.”
