SEATTLE — Drivers beware! Over the weekend, Seattle will be without one and a half of its freeways due to ongoing construction.
The State Route 520 bridge will be shut down entirely and so will pieces of southbound Interstate 5. The Washington State Department of Transportation anticipates the closures will result in some gridlock on Interstate 90.
“People can still get where they want to go, they’re just gonna have to plan ahead,” said WSDOT communications consultant Tom Pearce.
Here’s what drivers will have to plan for: At 11 p.m. Friday, cars will not able to cross the 520 bridge, forcing people to find an alternate route.
“It’s fine, there are other ways to get to the Eastside or the mountains if you are going there,” one driver told KIRO 7.
The road will be closed until 5 a.m. Monday so that construction crews can put in girders.
“The bridge girders are the foundation for a new lid that we’re building. Those go across the freeway, so we can’t have live traffic while those are being placed,” said Steve Peer with WSDOT.
When the $455 million project wraps up in 2023, the 3-acre lid above the Montlake exit is expected to have a lush green space with public transit stops and a pedestrian bridge.
Shifting to what will happen on southbound I-5, lanes will be reduced.
“This weekend we’re going to reduce I-5 down to two lanes (and) we’re going shift all the traffic into the collector-distributor,” Pearce said.
WSDOT is asking drivers to avoid roughly 2 miles between I-90 and Spokane Street, which will be shut down for expansion joint replacement.
“if people use cars and just their regular travel patterns, we’re going to see bigger backups,” said Pearce.
WSDOT said that carpooling, using the light rail or the bus can help lighten the load.
“If you take public transit, you rely on that and the service is interrupted there, I feel that’s a bigger impact than if you have a car, you can just go around,” one person told KIRO 7′s Lauren Donovan.
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