SEATTLE — As the first phase of the “Revive I-5″ closures on the Ship Canal bridge wraps up Monday morning, transit agencies are hoping to use the data collected to make improvements.
They want to use the data for 16 months of similar closures coming over the next two years.
First, though I-5 Northbound will again close Friday at 11:59 p.m. To Monday at 5 a.m. in order to reconfigure the highway into its original alignment.
Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) crews were replacing expansion joints on the bridge, improving drainage, and repaving a section of the left two lanes over the past month.
“We’ve gotten everything done that we expect to accomplish,” said Tom Pearce, a Washington Department of Transportation spokesperson overseeing Revive I-5.
The complete northbound closure will allow crews to remove barriers and restripe the Interstate. Monday will return the Express lane to Southbound commuters, which had been dedicated to absorbing the added traffic from the closure of two travel lanes.
Pearce says that it made for heavy traffic southbound, but that direction of traffic recovered in the early afternoon.
If the express lane stayed the same, the department estimated that northbound traffic would have remained congested into the evening hours.
The Seattle Department of Transportation has been monitoring traffic.
They have noted heavier volume on the Aurora Avenue, University and Montlake bridges during the closure.
“Overall, volume is down. I think that is telling the story that people have switched their mode of travel,” Ganth Lingam said, the interim director of interagency programs and the Revive I-5 lead for SDOT.
Lingam says that Aurora Avenue buses were at capacity, and the city recorded a 52-week high of e-scooter rides in the city during the closure.
Combined with Sound Transit reporting more riders on the Link 1 Line, Lingam believes people were trying to stay off the roads.
“Throughout the days, we started to see people adapting well and getting to learn and adapting to the transit system, Lingam said.
For those who still needed to drive, Lingam says the department has modified traffic signals to try to move the excess drivers through the city and keep them out of neighborhood streets.
“This four-week closure has given us a great opportunity to collect some data, see how things work, and we’re going to be using that as we plan for our closures over the next two years,” Pearce said.
Pearce says the work represents about 20% of the total work needed on the Northbound lanes, with the rest of NB I-5 subjected to eight total months of closures in 2026 to finish the job.
The first half of that work will take place before the World Cup games hosted in Seattle during June and July, then pick back up through the rest of the fall and summer.
In 2027, a full, continuous 8 months of two-lane closures will overtake the southbound lanes to repair that stretch of freeway.
Pearce says it allows a shorter period of problems, as opposed to weekend closures that have more frequent starts and stops, while also being subjected to weather.
“We’re going to finish work on both directions of the Ship Canal in two years. If we did this only on weekends, it would take us ten years or more,” Pearce said.
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