Dori: SDOT, if you don’t fix this I-5 off-ramp, someone is going to die

Every day of my working life at KIRO Radio, I get on I-5 southbound and get off at Boylston Avenue/Roanoke Street to come to the station. For 24 years, I’ve been exiting at the same exit.

About a month ago, it started backing up so far that the right lane gets completely jammed up by of cars exiting the freeway. Sometimes this jam stretches back halfway to the Ship Canal Bridge. You see this happen often with other exits, like Union Street, but those are exit-only lanes.

I’m guessing this is an SDOT issue, so I’m putting Sam Zimbabwe on notice. Since it involves an I-5 exit, WSDOT might have some responsibility to fix this too.

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The fact is, somebody is going to die — and I almost saw it happen Wednesday morning. All of the cars were bumper-to-bumper at a dead stop. People may think that they’re just in slow-traffic while in the far-right lane. As they get close to an exit they realize they’re in long line of cars trying to exit, and they need to get out of it.

So I saw two cars in front of me, who had been stopped suddenly, swerve into the next lane, where cars were going 60 miles per hour. If the left-hand car hadn’t had a bailout to its left, there would have been a horrible crash on I-5.

I’m telling you right now, I could fix that off-ramp with a DOT crew in about 45 seconds. I would take out the concrete barrier that’s stopping the drivers who want to turn right on Roanoke from doing so, trapping them in with all the people making left turns. I may also make the shoulder a second lane for those 100 feet.

We spend all this money on transportation and bike lanes, and here’s something that’s going to kill or horribly injure somebody. So why are we not paying any attention to it? It wouldn’t cost them very much to fix this, or at least to greatly mitigate it. I’m putting SDOT and WSDOT (if they control freeway off-ramps) on notice to fix this before someone is badly hurt.

In just living our daily lives, you and I have seen how horrible the street bums have gotten, we’ve seen these terrible traffic areas that could be fixed at almost no cost. Yet the problems persist because of a tone-deaf, blind government concerned with collecting as much of our money as possible, but not delivering safety, reliability, and efficiency in return. We certainly have seen that with SDOT and its great bike lane rip-offs.

You probably have similar issues that you encounter on a regular basis. We need a clearinghouse where people can contact DOT and tell them about the streets that need to be fixed. We need a government that is more responsive.

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