(Image: WSDOT)

(Image: WSDOT)

WSDOT is celebrating a milestone with the final placement of huge steel girders as it prepares for work on the “Montlake Project” to create an improved Montlake Blvd interchange, a landscaped lid over 520, a bicycle and pedestrian “land bridge” east of the lid, and a three-lane West Approach Bridge South over Union Bay for eastbound traffic to wrap up construction by the end of the year.

This past weekend’s closure of State Route 520 marked a major milestone for the SR 520 Montlake Project. Crews set in place the project’s final 37 girders. Thirty will support a new bike and pedestrian bridge over the highway in Seattle’s Montlake neighborhood. The other seven will support new bus and carpool ramps to and from the highway lid we’re building in Montlake. These 37 weren’t any old girders. They marked the last batch of the 513 total girders crews have placed for the entire Montlake Project!

The work is part of four years of construction part of a total replacement of the 520 bridge and restructuring of the Montlake streetscape around the busy highway.

Meanwhile, Montlake’s streets and roadways are already being reshaped. CHS reported here on the removal of the area’s Arboretum onramp and the northern completion of the city’s six-years-long effort to overhaul the 23rd Ave/24th Ave corridor to make the area safer and more pedestrian and bicycle friendly.

The $455.3 million Montlake Project remains on schedule for late 2023/early 2024 completion, WDOT says.

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