Tag Archives: sr 99

News, Transportation

Road News: Mercer Exit Closure, Cracked 520 Pontoons, Tunnel Tolls

Traffic on I-5 at Mercer Street may or may not be horrible this weekend, says Seattle’s Department of Transportation. Though there’s a full weekend closure of the I-5 on- and off-ramps at Mercer Street scheduled to start today, June 7, at 11 p.m. (and last until 5 a.m. Monday), the work is dependent on the weather. If you need to use the I-5 Mercer exit or onramp, pray for rain.

If you’re planning on attending the ballet tonight, expect delays as you leave the show. If the closure occurs, crews will install new drainage facilities, repair the offramp roadway base (then repave and stripe it), install guardrails on both ramps, and continue working on sign bridges across the ramps. To confirm what’s happening, check Seattle’s live traffic map. 10,000 people are expected at Key Arena for SPU’s graduation ceremonies Sunday afternoon — if they haven’t heard about the Mercer exit, I-5 could be nasty.

PS: If you work near the Federal Building downtown, you may want to clear out before the Protest for South Africa March arrives in time for today’s rush hour. If you negotiate that successfully, do not drive toward Fremont, where the Fremont 5K and Briefcase Relay begins at 6 p.m.

In 520 bridge news: “Two of the four cracked pontoons for the new Highway 520 bridge will be towed back out of Lake Washington and hoisted aboard dry docks — where engineers think they can be fixed faster than if they stay in the lake,” reports the Seattle Times‘ Mike Lindblom, who also says the cracks are due to design errors by state engineers. Repairs are said likely to run in the tens of millions of dollars, which may erase the project’s contingency budget. (More on the cracked pontoon saga here.) The bridge’s completion is being pushed back as well.

On the SR 99 tunnel front: PubliCola has been following the blowback from tunnel toll projections. Tolls were initially supposed to bring in $400 million, but that was revised to $200 million, and then to $165 million. But “King, Eide, and Clibborn informed OFM that they’re expecting the full $200 million from tolling, meaning they have no intention of authorizing $35 million to pick up the tab on extra costs for Seattle’s tunnel project,” says PubliCola, intimating as well that any bad news for tunnel funding is good news for Mayor McGinn’s re-election campaign.

News, Transportation

Forget Mercer Street! Mercer is Dead (Until Mid-2015)!

Mercer_Spring_2013_Flow
Mercer_Weekend_Closure
mercerw_underpassrenderingS

Map of the May 17-20 closure of Mercer and SR 99 (SDOT)

The planned 2-way Mercer Street (SDOT)

PlayPrev|Next

Last weekend’s closure of the I-5 on- and off-ramps at Mercer Street caught a good deal of Seattle Opera patrons, trying to head to McCaw Hall on Seattle Center campus, off-guard, even if they weren’t taking Mercer at all — the closure shifted traffic to the already heavily-used Denny Street, slowing it down as well. Riders on the perennially-late and packed 8 bus that runs cross-town on Denny were caught up in the congestion, too.

The Opera, which had alerted its patrons in advance, still held the curtain for a few minutes because of the traffic jam. With work on Mercer ongoing, they warn that at this summer’s performances of the Ring — where due to Wagnerian length they can’t afford a late start — it will be even more critical that opera-goers plan to arrive with plenty of time to spare.

The news from Seattle’s department of transportation is to expect these kind of delays, over the next two years; “a trip near Seattle Center will take five or 10 minutes longer,” is how Mike Lindblom puts it in the Seattle Times. That seems likely to be an average, with busy nights at the Center tying up traffic for longer.

If you need to travel Mercer, you likely want to subscribe to email alerts from here on out, as Mercer Corridor project construction brings new closures and lane restrictions.

As of today through Friday, May 17, Westbound Mercer Street (and Broad Street) will narrow to a single lane from Westlake Avenue North to Harrison Street. Tomorrow, Friday, eastbound Mercer will be a single lane from just west of Dexter and 9th from about 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. For the next three weeks, northbound 9th Avenue North, from just south of Aloha to 8th, will have a single northbound lane.

Then, the weekend of May 17 to 20, SR 99 will close between Valley Street and the southern end of the Battery Street Tunnel, while Mercer Street will be fully closed to traffic between Fifth Avenue North and Dexter Avenue North. SR 99 traffic will be directed to I-5 at the bottleneck, so expect slow going there, while Mercer traffic will detour over to Denny from 5th to Dexter, and back to Mercer.

The weekend closure is to help SDOT prepare for the demolition of  the eastern half of the SR 99 bridge over Mercer; once that’s out of the way, crews can work on widening Mercer between 5th and Dexter, to allow two-way traffic. That part of the Mercer Corridor project is expected to take until mid-2015. After the weekend closure, says SDOT:

  • Mercer Street will be reduced to two eastbound lanes between Fourth Avenue N and Ninth Avenue N.
  • SR 99 traffic will be shifted to the west side of the roadway between Valley and Harrison streets. Two lanes will remain open in each direction.
  • The northbound SR 99 off-ramp to Mercer Street will be permanently closed. A new signalized intersection at Republican Street and Dexter Avenue N will be available for northbound SR 99 traffic to reach South Lake Union.
  • Local access to Taylor Avenue N via Mercer Street will be maintained.
  • Sidewalks on Mercer Street will be impacted during this work. The sidewalk on the north side of Mercer Street will be closed between Fifth Avenue N and Dexter Avenue N. The sidewalk on the south side will remain open to pedestrian traffic.

To help with congestion, Broad Street will reopen to eastbound traffic, and traffic southbound on 5th will be able to turn left onto Harrison to get to eastbound Broad Street.

When finished, motorists will be able to take the Mercer Street exit from I-5 and drive directly to Seattle Center, which should be an improvement. (You could already drive eastbound from the Center to I-5 on Mercer, so that won’t change much.) Equally important, as South Lake Union develops, is the transformation of Mercer on behalf of pedestrians and bicyclists. Its earlier incarnation hadn’t much room for either, especially where Mercer ducked beneath SR 99.

News, Transportation

SR 99 to Narrow to Two Lanes Each Way at SoDo

2 Comments
Image courtesy WSDOT

On May 16, after a weekend closure of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, SR 99 will narrow from three lanes to two each way, northbound and southbound, between the West Seattle Bridge and the stadium district. For about a third of the distance northbound, from the bridge to where South Lander would be, there will also be a bus-only lane.

West Seattle Blog commenters smell impending disaster, but since the lane closure is supposed to last until 2013 (“and possibly longer,” adds WSDOT), there will be plenty of time for drivers to explore alternatives. The new speed limit for the section will be 35 mph, instead of 50.

Mike Lindblom reports in the Seattle Times on Metro’s gearing-up for construction-fed ridership, though rush-hour buses have already been filling up in advance of the lane closures:

Last year, King County Metro Transit added 31 trips to its 21 Express, 56 Express and 121 routes serving southwest neighborhoods via the viaduct, and ridership is up 11 percent, said spokeswoman Linda Thielke.

Metro is studying plans for more trips on the 54 and 120 routes this fall, she said. Quicker RapidRide service to West Seattle, Aurora Avenue North and Ballard remains a year or more away.

For its part, WSDOT notes that “$125 million in alternative routes, transit service and traveler information” has been invested to help mitigate the impact of the lane closures. This construction on the southern end of the Viaduct replacement project is not supposed to be contingent upon construction of the central part, which has yet to reach the final stage in the environmental review process.