Snohomish County will become home to the state’s first freeway median park-and-ride when Sound Transit’s $37 million South Everett Freeway Station is built.
Construction is to start in 2006 on a 400-stall park-and-ride lot and bus stop on the I-5 median just north of 112th Street SE. The station will be built on a wide section between the northbound and southbound lanes now covered with a grove of trees.
Bus and carpool traffic will access the park-and-ride from I-5’s carpool lanes – part of an ongoing Sound Transit bid to cut bus commute times to and from Seattle.
“Every minute counts,” said Sound Transit spokesman Lee Somerstein.
The new station will allow Sound Transit buses to avoid the Eastmont Park-and-Ride, shaving as much as eight minutes off the Everett-to-Seattle trip.
Everett Transit will also use the station, which will improve connections between the two transit agencies.
Similar direct-access ramps are now being built in the Lynnwood area at the Ash Way Park-and-Ride at 164th Street SW and the Lynnwood Park-and-Ride at 44th Avenue W.
Those overpasses, when finished, will cut up to 15 minutes from the Lynnwood-to-Seattle bus trip by allowing buses direct access to the park-and-rides without having to use congested neighborhood streets.
The $18 million Ash Way project was supposed to be finished by fall, but it faced problems with building an I-5 bridge tall enough to safely allow high-clearance trucks to drive under it during the construction.
Those problems delayed the finish date until the end of next year. Despite the delay, the project is still on budget.
The Lynnwood project is on schedule and under budget. It wasn’t supposed to be finished until next spring, but will open by the end of 2004.
About 5,000 people ride Sound Transit buses each day. The new I-5 station will affect about 2,500 of those riders who travel to King County every day.
When construction is finished in 2008, traffic on 112th Street SE will be able to reach the park-and-ride and bus stop from a widened 112th Street. Only carpool traffic will be able to use the new ramps to get onto I-5.The city of Everett is chipping in to help widen the bridge from two to five lanes, while Sound Transit is paying for part of the widening and a ramp that will drop into the park-and-ride.
“I think it’s a pretty neat concept, utilizing existing property that the public already owns for a park-and-ride,” said Dave Davis, Everett’s city engineer. “Commuters won’t have to leave the freeway to take a bus (into Seattle). It doesn’t get any easier for travelers than that.”
The state Department of Transportation will kick in money to extend the carpool lane in the northbound direction by about a mile, mainly because the agency’s rules don’t allow carpool traffic to merge back into other lanes, said Ed Barry, state engineer for the project.
Barry said the carpool lane extension – from where it now ends at about 112th Street SE to the Boeing Freeway – will not interfere with the state’s plan to widen I-5 from the Boeing Freeway to just north of the U.S. 2 trestle. Both projects are to start in 2006.
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