How much longer will I-5 in Tacoma be under construction?
Feb 17, 2016, 11:09 PM | Updated: May 6, 2016, 11:10 pm
Does it seem like the I-5 corridor in Tacoma has been under construction for a decade? It actually has, but the latest projects are reaching about the half-way point, so there is some light at the end of the construction tunnel.
First it was the Highway 16 improvements around the I-5 interchange south of the Tacoma Dome. As that project finished, construction and demolition on the latest projects began.
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All of these projects have one goal: to add an HOV system into and through Pierce County. That’s why the Washington State Department of Transportation has been taking down overpasses, building new ones, and adding lanes.
WSDOT’s Claudia Bingham-Baker says the project to the north involves building new bridges over the Puyallup River so the HOV lane can be extended from Fife toward Joint Base Lewis-McChord.
Both of these projects are near the half-way point, but it could be 2019 before all of the new HOV lanes open up.
Michel Cross, the assistant project engineer, says it’s not easy building a new road while traffic is still moving on the old one.
“Keeping the traffic moving while we’re doing construction is the most difficult,” he said. “When you’re building a new alignment offline and there’s no traffic that needs to be on that alignment while you’re working, it’s a lot easier.”
But this weekend the southern project hits a milestone. Cross says traffic will finally be moved onto the new ramp from I-5 to downtown Tacoma this weekend.
“We’re going to be shifting traffic to some newly constructed ramps alongside a new wall that has been finished up,” Cross explained.
But Tacoma drivers have several more years of living and driving through an active construction zone. Bingham-Baker says drivers need to be careful because construction zone changes all the time.
“We are changing alignments on the highway,” she said. “We are moving traffic around because we need to create new construction zones as we move from one phase of construction to the next. So a lane a person is driving in today may be moved tomorrow.”
I asked if there have been more accidents through the construction zone (I like to say that if there’s a crash in Tacoma it’s on the Puyallup River Bridge). WSDOT says it hasn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary because of construction.
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