More I-5 lanes and years of construction coming to JBLM

Now that the state has $16 billion from the Legislature to fix major chokepoints around the state, it is finally tackling one of the worst spots on the map: I-5 through Joint Base Lewis-McChord.

Widening I-5 through JBLM was one of the key priorities in the last legislative session. The Olympian reports that the expansion will bring at least eight lanes of traffic to nearly the entire highway along the base, though it has not been decided if the new lanes will be restricted to carpools.

Tell us about a chokepoint

The six year project will affect drivers between Olympia and Tacoma. The extra lanes are being funded with $494 million from a gas-tax increase approved by the Legislature in July. Supporters of the new gas tax used the mega-project to explain why a higher tax was necessary.

Explosive population growth in Pierce and Thurston counties have made the current configuration obsolete.

“What we had was a highway that was built 50 years ago that was slowly reaching its capacity and in about 2010, we began to see that those factors all came together to make the traffic demands higher than the capacity of the highway,” explained Claudia Bingham-Baker with the Washington State Department of Transportation.

WSDOT was working on a design last year for a major construction project that could last years.

“Once you figure out what you’re going to build, you need to find the funding, you need to go through the design process,” she said. “The last stage of this whole long process is turning dirt out in the field and actually building it.”

Construction on the widening project isn’t scheduled to start until 2017 and won’t be completed until at least 2023. That’s nearly seven years of delays, construction closures, and headaches as overpasses are demolished and rebuilt, and lanes are added in both directions.

Drivers will have to get used to new overpass configurations. The current plans show the use of roundabouts to handle on- and off-ramp traffic. A lot of the design work is still to be decided, as the WSDOT works with land owners along the freeway.

The state is also considering the acquisition of properties along the free, and business owners are not happy. The Olympian reports long-time JBLM haunt Galloping Gertie’s could lose its prime location off the Berkeley off-ramp.