MUKILTEO – Well in time for holiday shopping, the Mukilteo Speedway is now a four-lane highway all the way to Paine Field Boulevard.
Although the state Department of Transportation is still working on some sidewalks, signals and streetlights, work on the actual driving lanes was finished Oct. 25.
Isolated half-mile closures will persist on weekdays – mostly in the morning – until late December and there will be one stint of nighttime lane closures in the spring to apply the final layer of asphalt, but otherwise the yearlong project is finished.
“What it means is that you no longer have a bottleneck on the Speedway at Beverly Park Road,” said Janice Fahning, the department’s assistant engineer for the Mukilteo Speedway project from 132nd Street SW to Paine Field Boulevard.
Completion of the $20 million project is the last piece of a four-year plan to widen Highway 525 from I-5 to Paine Field Boulevard, which when combined with recent improvements to Paine Field Boulevard and the Boeing Freeway, creates a complete four-lane loop back to Interstate 5.
“Four years ago they had one lane, and four years later they now have two lanes the whole way,” Fahning said. “This doubles the capacity of the road.”
The project wasn’t completed without controversy, however, as businesses along the roadway cried foul last winter when the state closed off business driveways just before Christmas, the height of the shopping season.
After the outcry, the transportation department had its contractor place better business signs and had more flaggers on hand to direct traffic in and out of Speedway businesses.
“We still have a lot of complaints from our walk-in traffic, but the key is they’re walking in,” said Marilyn Jenkins, who owns PostNet, a postal and business services shop located on the Speedway. She’s also the president of the Mukilteo Chamber of Commerce.
“From the beginning, we said this is going to be a wonderful thoroughfare,” Jenkins said. “You can already see it happening.”
Work finished on the section of the Speedway in front of Jenkins’ business during the summer, but the southern end of the project – near Beverly Park Road and S. Harbour Pointe Boulevard – wasn’t finished until Oct. 25.
“They have worked very hard to keep the access to our driveway open,” said Karen Hempel, owner of Barbara’s Floral, located at the corner of the Speedway and Beverly Park Road.
“It’s wonderful,” she said of the newly finished road. “When I left Saturday morning traffic was horrible, and when I got back that night, it was like a freeway had opened up.”
Lukas Velush is a reporter for The Herald in Everett.
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