Capitol Hill likes to think it has a pedestrian and bicycle-centered culture. But plenty of people who live on the Hill will be on a bus or in a car Monday morning riding across the 520 bridge when it reopens after being closed for the weekend for its summer inspection and media tour. In addition to the traffic, the road ahead for the floating bridge is filled with changes. And some of those changes — tolls, closed onramps and offramps — are coming sooner than you might think.
Here’s an update released by the state:
Countdown to construction: major changes for SR 520
Smarter Highways, construction and tolls coming for drivers
Smarter Highways
Upcoming milestones on SR 520
High-tech Smarter Highways signs are scheduled to be activated in the SR 520 corridor this fall. The electronic signs will provide real-time traffic information, variable speed limits and lane status indicators to alert drivers of approaching congestion, collisions and blocked lanes.
Construction
Construction is just around the corner for three projects to improve SR 520:
- Pontoon Construction Project: 33 floating bridge pontoons are planned to be built in Grays Harbor as part of a $367 million contract.
- Eastside Transit and HOV Project: WSDOT plans to hire a team of designers and contractors by the end of the year to build the transit and HOV project that will improve trips for carpools and bus riders from Medina to Bellevue. The Eastside project is estimated to be valued at $325 million to $425 million.
- Floating bridge project: WSDOT has launched its search for a team of designers and contractors to design and build the new SR 520 floating bridge, a project estimated to be valued at $700 million to $900 million.
Toll collections
Automatic tolling starts on the SR 520 floating bridge in spring 2011, and now is the time for drivers to sign up to receive information online at www.wsdot.wa.gov/goodtogo.
The Legislature set the SR 520 program budget at $4.65 billion for improvements from I-5 in Seattle to SR 202 in Redmond. Toll revenue and state and federal funds provide about $2.37 billion for the SR 520 improvements. WSDOT will continue working with the stateLegislature to identify additional funding for other improvements in the corridor. For more information about the SR 520 Bridge Replacement and HOV Program, visit the program website at www.wsdot.wa.gov/projects/SR520Bridge.
SEATTLE – Drivers who use the State Route 520 floating bridge will see major changes this fall as the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) takes key steps to make the highway safer and more reliable.
This fall, new high-tech Smarter Highways signs will alert drivers when collisions occur and congestion starts to build in the SR 520 corridor. Next year, WSDOT starts highway construction on the Eastside and toll collections on the floating bridge. Electronic tolling will further smooth out traffic and help fund a replacement for the aging bridge.
WSDOT leaders and state legislators today discussed the coming changes as they toured the SR 520 floating bridge. The bridge is closed until 5 a.m. Monday, Aug. 23, for annual maintenance and inspections to make sure it is ready for winter weather.
“Our maintenance crews work to continue to keep this bridge safe for traffic until the new SR 520 floating bridge opens in 2014,” Washington Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond said. “We are making great strides to meet that goal, and construction is just around the corner.”
Next year, WSDOT is scheduled to begin building pontoons in Grays Harbor for the new bridge, start construction on Eastside highway, interchange and HOV improvements, and hire a contractor to build a new floating bridge across Lake Washington.
Another upcoming change is the closing of the Arboretum offramp and onramp to the highway. When the ramps do close, they will be closed for good under the current preferred plan. Eastern Capitol Hill residents will have only one option for directly accessing 520 and exiting without traveling all the way to 10th Ave E — Montlake Ave.
Washington Department of Transportation spokesperson Jeff Switzer says the Arboretum ramps will remain open until 2012, at least.
“The caveat is that it’s all depending on funding,” Switzer told CHS.
For more on the changes to Arboretum access to 520, check out the Madison Park Blogger’s coverage as the changes will have an even greater impact in areas of the city east of Capitol Hill and farther from I-90.
The Seattle Times, meanwhile, said basically the same thing the state talked about this weekend — but the Time said it weeks ago:
More than three years ago, the state Department of Transportation (DOT) acknowledged a $2 billion shortfall for the $4.65 billion crossing from Bellevue to Seattle. It’s a problem that has yet to be fixed.
Pontoons to support the new bridge are about to be built in Grays Harbor, but only about two-thirds of the new six-lane crossing can be completed with money approved so far. The state can build the floating section but cannot yet afford to complete the Seattle landings from Foster Island to Interstate 5, the most politically and economically tricky segment.
The money already allocated for replacing the 1963 bridge will come from a variety of sources including federal grants, 520 tolls and gas taxes.
However, “it’ll take some kind of legislative decision to fully fund the $4.6 billion project,” said Amy Arnis, DOT’s chief financial officer.
That means more taxes and tolls, and it means that while the floating segment of the bridge can be done by 2014, the now-clunky west-side approaches won’t be. Finishing the project would likely take a couple more years in ideal political conditions.
The Times also documents a concern that a bottlenecked 520 won’t just be bad for the environment, commute times and driver patience:
Project critic Fran Conley, whose Roanoke Park home overlooks the Portage Bay segment of Highway 520, fears westbound drivers could have to squeeze from three bridge lanes into two on the west side for far longer — in effect moving today’s Medina bottleneck west until the 2020s, when money might be found and the project finished.
Should Capitol Hill be concerned about a half-baked 520? The back and forth over the roadway is getting pretty easy to dismiss from up here as much as Roanoke Park might become a noisier place to live. But we also have plenty of commuters with skin in the game and, sigh, everybody will pay the taxes.
From WSDOT, artist rendition of future Montlake overpass and transit hub
Instead of fixing up the 520, which has got to be a quarter of the cost or waiting 10 years when the economy has turned around and money is in the bank to pay for the cost.
We are going to plow ahead and start work on a multi -billion dollar project that we only have half the money for. At a time when every 6 moneys the State declares that we are several billion dollars in the red more that 6 months earlier when they declared we were billions more in the red.
So are we starting another Monorail type project? We are going to jump in with both feet, while still planning and designing; we only have half the money to build the project. We are going to spend millions and collect millions on a project that is very likely to never be completed because of funding. The Monorail project collected taxes and foreclosed land, stealing it from people that did not want to sell, then we got nothing!
We are going into debt and paying interest on the parts of a bridge we do not know where the money is coming from.
The only thing we know is that 6 months from now the state is going to announce that they are several billion dollars short from being able to run state government, on top of the billions they do not know where the money is coming from to pay for the 520 bridge.
One of the main reasons we are replacing the 520 bridge in the first place is that the columns at each end of the bridge are hollow and will likely not stand up to an earthquake.
But no one has been able to explain why we can’t just core a hole in the top of the columns and pump concrete inside. Plus add a steel jacket around the outside of the columns to hold it together, in an earthquake. In fact if we made the columns solid, I bet we only have to fill every other one or less, letting the others just stand, because the bridge, likely could have been build with fewer columns in the first place if they were built solid.
If they can pump concrete into a well head 5 miles down under the Gulf to plug up an oil spill, why can’t they pump concrete into bridge columns that is easier to get to, too make the column safer and be cheaper in cost than replacing the whole 520 bridge.
And if there is a fear that the existing floating pontoons will sink in a storm, why not build fewer smaller pontoons, that are u-shaped to add to the existing pontoons. Flood them until they can float under the existing bridge and then pump the water out until they nest around the existing bridge pontoons to give added support and more floating compartments. That has got to be cheaper than replace the whole bridge.
I bet we can do this kind of repair work for hundreds of millions instead of billions.
We do not have the money to replace the bridge; I think that the whole point of replacing the bridge is more about starting a statewide tolling program, than it is about safety.
We were able to find 18 billion dollars to fund a white elephant, light rail train from sales taxes, that will cost me only a few dollars a year because the cost is spread out to many pockets.
But we can’t find a few billion for a 520 bridge project that moves more people into town now, than the light rail will ever move 10 years from now on a good day. And the bridge will cost users thousands in tolls each year. People will end up helping to pay for this community bridge through gas taxes and property tax then be denied the use of the bridge because the can’t afford the $1500 to $2500 dollars a year in toll cost for daily commutes. That is not right
The point of the bridge is to move people and products to market where their goods and services can be taxed. This bridge has turned into a choke point for tolling money and to try to limit bridge use, which will limit tax revenue made by getting products and services to market to be taxed.
That is the wrong use for a bridge.
I am totally stoked about the new bridge and interchanges! I love the design decisions they have made and wish we could have started this sooner.
I’ll be happy to pay the tolls.
Everyone I know I thinks this is a pretty good deal for such a huge project and is excited about the benefits this will have for everyone.
TOLL!TOLL!TOLL!TOLL!TOLL!TOLL! I love it. Let’s do something I don’t care who has to pay for it or how long it takes. Seattle is getting famous for doing nothing so at least something is happening. Plus all the right people are getting TOLL!TOLL!TOLL!TOLL! on this one!!
my brain tells me that at some point during construction/replacement, the entire bridge will need to be closed for a period of time. But i’ve never seen any detail on when, duration, and mitigation plan. Anyone have insight?
“Repair the bridge instead of replacing it when we do not have the money to replace it.”
Uh, no. There’s no way to repair it without blowing just as much money in as replacing it.
I’m not a fan of the 520 bridge, but given that it will continue to be there, can WSDOT make just a little more effort to design the new HOV lanes to connect better with UW Station?
Every bus going north on Montlake will presumably drop off at the station. This is more easily accomplished by moving the northbound HOV lane to the east side of Montlake than by running it down the middle. As it stands now, the buses exiting 520 will have to swerve across two general-purpose lanes of Montlake Mess traffic.
WSDOT isn’t thinking things through. The city council is asleep at the wheel. If it is up to Mayor McGinn to raise a stink about this important detail, so be it. I guess we’re lucky to have even one politician listening to us.