Why Seattle-area travelers might want to stay close to home this weekend

No less than six traffic disruptions in Seattle make this weekend a great weekend to explore your own neighborhood.

Some closings clash with Mariners ‘baseball traffic on Friday and Saturday evenings and Sunday afternoons, and Sounders’ soccer traffic on Saturday afternoons. But the Huskies and Seahawks soccer teams, which draw larger crowds, are out of town, and dry concrete-pouring weekends won’t last forever.

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Montlake Bridge will be closed all weekend from 10pm Friday to 5am Monday while contractors replace mechanical tensioning parts. A footpath and bike path will be retained. Buses will be diverted over University Bridge, a slower route that the Seattle Department of Transportation made a little easier by stripping off a red bus lane on the Northeast Campus Parkway heading west.

the Southbound I-5 main line through Sodo will close after an eight week respite from I-90 to the Spokane Street exit from 10pm Friday to 5am Monday as workers begin installing new expansion joints between the freeway decks.

Southbound traffic will be routed through downtown Seattle via multi-junction lanes, turn right, and then rejoin the right-hand edge of the mainline. The exits to the city center remain open. After the sporting events, the driveway from I-90 (near Edgar Martinez Drive) to I-5 going south will be temporarily open.

In the meantime it is I-5 express lanes will be closed from 9 p.m. Friday through 5 a.m. Monday to replace 26 broken concrete slabs between Yesler Way and Northgate, Washington State Department of Transportation spokesman Tom Pearce said.

This timing fits in with the fact that express lanes cannot be used to the south anyway due to the Sodo closures. But the drivers heading north are also losing capacity.

“There’s never a really good weekend for these projects, but we have to get them done,” said Pearce.

the Highway 99 tunnel will be closed for maintenance work in both directions from Friday 10 p.m. to Saturday 6 a.m.

Are you thinking of transit? Sound transit light rail will be cut off all Sunday for track replacement between the Rainier Beach and Tukwila International Boulevard stations. Train drivers passing through, including those traveling to and from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, must transfer to shuttle buses that pass through the restricted area every 10 minutes.

Why don’t you continue the shuttles to the airport? Pierce Transit, which provides the shuttle buses, lacks transport companies, said Sound Transit spokesman John Gallagher. To ensure frequent trips, they turn around at Tukwila rather than an additional 4 miles to complete the round-trip journey to Sea-Tac.

Washington State ferries continues to operate only one boat, the M / V Chimacum, on the Bremerton-Seattle route, as the M / V Kaleetan has to be repaired. Due to a lack of crew and boats, the Coupeville-Port Townsend route has been reduced to one ferry, while the service in the Fauntleroy-Vashon-Southworth triangle is reduced to two boats on Sundays.

WSDOT will close the I-5 southbound lanes again in Sodo for the next two weekends.

The state road works have created surface gaps where the new concrete is higher than the expansion joints, which are now marked with orange “BUMP” signs.

Engineers are looking for ways to mitigate the shock, Pearce said Thursday. Contractors paved the entire 1¼ miles this summer to save money instead of alternating between expansion and paving teams.

The left side of half a dozen of grout will be installed this weekend, he said. But a total of 40 expansion joints have to be fixed so that I-5 will not be completely smooth until 2022.