Fremont Bridge Closures Any Day Now
On the odd days that Seattlest drives to work rather than bus it from Wallingford to downtown and back we generally tend to stay away from 5. Sometimes we do 99, but our prefered route is Dexter / Fremont Bridge, a route that does have one significant drawback: the damn bikers. Note to Lance wannabes: There's no yellow jersey awarded for getting from Denny to Fremont in under six minutes so it may not be absolutely necessary to blow by the peloton in the middle of the road. Stay in your lane. Beating us to Fremont is not going to convince us to sell our car for a downpayment on a bike rig like yours and risk our lives daily racing you down Dexter, so chill out.
Ahem, that's been the biggest drawback to commuting via the Fremont Bridge, until now. Soon, and for the next eighteen years, the Fremont Bridge will be cut down to one lane in each direction, during which time buses and trucks will be forbidden from using the bridge at all (what now, Metro #26?) and drivers will be thrust downward into a snarled traffic hell the likes of which they've never seen even in their deepest, darkest night visions. The project won't actually last eighteen years - Seattlest will return to clipping cyclists as we careen uncaring and unconscious across the bridge some ten months from now. In that time SDOT will be busy replacing the bridge deck and repairing the elevated roads that lead up to the bridge. And adding a stoplight, apparently. How about some improvements to the bike lane while we're at it?
There was a SDOT kiosk at the Fremont Sunday Market yesterday that had a bunch of information on the new headaches, but the start date of the road work was not available so we're still working on, "In late May or early June." These audio updates to the Fremont Bridge Approaches Replacement Project are either very handy or taking podcasting way too far. We leave it to you.
