WSDOT remedies for troublesome Highway 9 chokepoint

The daily chokepoint on Highway 9 between Woodinville and Snohomish is only getting worse as more and more families move into that corridor, but the state is about to make some short-term changes aimed at making traffic a little better.

Highway 9 has two lanes in each direction between Woodinville and Snohomish, with the exception of a three-mile stretch in the northbound direction between 180th and Lowell-Larimer Road. Every afternoon the road backs up from 180th where drivers lose the third lane. It’s going to cost $50 million to add a lane and complete the highway. It’s money the Legislature hasn’t approved, but the state has a little money use for the corridor.

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“We are trying to find some interim improvements that we can do to provide some limited congestion relief until we can get the full widening funded,” Kris Olsen with the Washington State Department of Transportation said.

Highway 9 congestion remedies

Three possible short-term fixes were unveiled to the public at a meeting earlier this week at Glacier Peak High School.

First option: add a northbound lane from 180th to 164th — about a mile of Highway 9 — but drivers would lose the center turn lane to make room.

“In order to make this work, we would have to remove the left-turn lane,” Olsen said. “So you would have drivers slowing or stopping on that inside lane on SR 9 to make left turns across two lanes of traffic. There are some inherent dangers in that.”

Second option: add an extra lane a little further north, between 168th and 156th. Drivers would go from two lanes to one after 180th and again at 156th. Not exactly a great fix, but Olsen said the further north you travel the more cars peel off the highway so the impact might not be too bad.

“You would have two lanes going through the 164th intersection, but you’d know have a second merge point,” Olsen said.

Third option: Tweaking signal timing at a traffic light. Actually, a little more than a tweak, but WSDOT engineers think it might actually make the biggest difference. It would change the light cycles at 164th and add left turn lanes from 164th to Highway 9. Right now, the eastbound and westbound lanes have their own green cycle. They don’t cross Highway 9 at the same time.

“You have 25 seconds for the westbound people and 25 seconds for the eastbound people,” Olsen said. “Instead, we could make them all go at the same time, give them 25 seconds to do it, and that extra 25 seconds that we just got back we give it to the folks on SR 9.”

Those 25 seconds don’t sound like a lot, but it could really add up.

The light signal option is the cheapest and can be done this year. The other two options cost more and would not be complete until 2018.

“We need to do something in this area, and we have some funding to do it,” Olsen said.

That money is currently sitting in the right-of-way fund for buying property for the larger widening project. It would have to be paid back.

“If we can do something to make it bearable until we get the full widening funded, we’re going to see what we can do,” she said.

And no matter which option the state chooses, it will be adding 185 more feet to the left turn lane from northbound 9 to Cathcart Way. That should keep the turn lane from blocking Highway 9, which it does daily in the afternoon. The state should decide on its option in the next month.

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