Why and when the 520 bridge will close before it opens to drivers
Apr 5, 2016, 9:56 PM | Updated: May 6, 2016, 9:58 pm
Now that the ribbons have been cut and all the food trucks, walkers and bicyclists are off the bridge, what needs to happen to get the SR 520 Bridge truly ready for cars?
Related: SR 520 bridges close for opening celebration
In short, workers need to tie-in the old bridge with the new one. To do that, they will need two weekends of full closures to connect the new bridge at both ends to the existing roadway. That will involve alternating closures for westbound and eastbound traffic.
“It will be kind of a unique period of time, in history, because people will be driving one direction on the world’s longest floating bridge, and the other direction on the second longest floating bridge in the world,” said Steve Peer with the SR 520 Project.
Westbound lanes will be tied-in first, after a full weekend closure of both bridges — that will be this weekend starting on April 8.
“Most of the work is on the eastside, transitioning, because it’s kind of a different alignment and it’s underneath a lid so there’s lots of barrier moving a lot of concrete and some asphalt work. That’s the bulk of the work,” Peer said.
Peer said the eastbound lanes will be tied-in over the final weekend of the month.
“There’s too much work to do to be able to do both directions at the same time. Plus there’s the staging — as you do the westbound you need to use the eastbound lanes to stage,” he said. “It’s sort of like when you paint the floor of a room. You can paint yourself into a corner and we don’t want to do that.”
So why the two weeks between the opening of the lanes?
“While we tried to put the finishing touches as much as we could before we open to the public, there’s a lot of little construction loose ends that need to happen,” Peer said. “We will use every day of that two weeks.”
So what can drivers expect on that first drive in the westbound lanes next Monday? There will be quite a jog on the road on the Medina side. There will also be a smaller jog on the Montlake side.
The bridge will be higher, giving drivers different sight lines.
And the big chokepoint will be going from three lanes down to two lanes in Montlake. That’s going to be with us for years until the Montlake project is done and the connection to I-5 is complete.
But, we have a new bridge and drivers are about to get a taste.
“We were able to show it off to 50,000 people over the weekend and now we get to tackle the commuters.
And some of this work is weather-dependent, so there could be delays. That’s just how construction works in a Northwest spring.
