Kirkland’s Northeast 85th Street overlay contractor begins preparing the arterial for its new street surface this week. Cemex plans to move equipment to 85th Street and to begin surveying the section its work crews will repave and re-stripe: from 114th Avenue Northeast to 132nd Avenue Northeast.
Cemex expects to begin grinding today (Sept. 24), to be paving by mid-October and to finish the 40-day process by November. Cemex will perform some of the project’s loudest tasks during its 10 days of allotted day work. It will perform most of the work, however, over the course of 30 nights. This includes grinding and repaving the street. Both are loud operations.
Meanwhile, officials from Johansen Excavating say its crews will complete all remaining tasks by the end of November. Those tasks include the corridor’s landscaping, its missing sidewalk sections and the activation of its street lights. Johansen Excavating has already installed a new stormwater system, new traffic signals at 124th and 132nd avenues northeast, new median islands at 124th Avenue Northeast and a mile-long, 24-inch water main from I-405 to 132nd Avenue Northeast.
Here are updates on other project around the city of Kirkland:
Street preservation
Kirkland’s 2015 street preservation contractor began on Sept. 22 preparing 132nd Avenue Northeast for its new street surface. Watson Asphalt plans to grind and repair the arterial’s pavement between Northeast 113th Street and Northeast 120th Street this week and to repave it next week. Rain will affect the paving schedule.
Forbes Creek seismic retrofit
98th Avenue Northeast will close for at least five days at the Forbes Creek Bridge between Sept. 28 and Oct. 15 while Kirkland’s contractor prepares two of the bridge’s columns for the bearing pads that will enable the bridge to absorb earthquake shocks. That procedure will be the last of the Forbes Creek Bridge Seismic Retrofit project’s major phases. Crews are currently excavating the base of the columns for access.
Fourth Street water main
Kar-Vel Construction says it will restore the Norkirk neighborhood’s Fourth Street, from 15th Ave. to 18th Ave., by the end of October. Its crew finished installing an eight-inch water main along Fourth Street on Sept. 21 and began testing and sanitizing the water main Sept. 22. The workers will start connecting the water main to each of the water system’s seven lines next week.
Rose Point lift station
Residents of the Market neighborhood will meet at 6 p.m. on Oct. 21 with the project engineer of the new Rose Point Lift Station. The drop-in sessions will occur in City Hall’s Council Chambers. There, they will discuss Kirkland’s current project to replace the six decade-old sewage pump station with an upgraded model that will continue to protect residents’ health.
Lake front pedestrian and bicycle improvements
Kirkland is creating a model of multi-modal transportation on its most-traveled north-to-south corridor. The six-month design-process begins in January. Construction begins in the summer of 2016. The Lakefront Pedestrian and Bicycle Improvements project will provide buffered bike lanes, bike boxes and rapid flashing beacons along select sections of Lake Washington Boulevard Market Street and100th Avenue Northeast corridor to Northeast 116th Street.
Signal pole at Willows Road and Northeast 124th Street
Commuters who travel along Northeast 124th Street near the Willows Road intersection on Sept. 28 will likely experience delays. That’s because contracted crews will be mounting a new signal pole at the busy intersection, which the driver of a large truck inadvertently knocked down in August 2014.
Sixth Street sidewalk and signals
Construction of the missing pedestrian link along Sixth Street between Google’s campus and downtown Kirkland could will likely begin by the end of September. The contractor, Kamins Construction, plans to complete the project by early winter. A Transportation Improvement Board grant is helping to pay for the project, as well as the impact fees SRM Development paid to the City of Kirkland for building Google’s expansion wing. The City of Kirkland is currently working with property owners to acquire the land necessary to build the new traffic signals at Sixth Street’s intersections with Kirkland Way and Ninth Street South.
Intelligent Transportation systems
The Lake Washington Boulevard-through-100th Avenue Northeast corridor is one more intersection closer to becoming a networked system of traffic signals equipped with technology that allows drivers to see real-time traffic images and transportation engineers to monitor and adjust traffic signal-timing remotely and immediately.
Prime Electric workers on Sept. 22 upgraded Lake Washington Boulevard’s traffic signal at Northeast 38th Street to Intelligent Transportations System technology. It is the last along this north-to-south corridor and the most recent of 11 traffic signals Kirkland has upgraded this summer along this corridor and Northeast 85th Street. The City will also be upgrading Northeast 85th Street’s intersection signals at 120th, 122nd and 128th avenues northeast. The next step in this phase of the Intelligent Transportation Systems project is to connect each of the intersection’s signals to the City Hall-based Transportation Management Center, from which Kirkland’s transportation engineers can already monitor traffic at 15 intersections throughout the City. Transportation engineers expect have remote control over the 11 newly upgraded intersections within a weeks. Drivers will be able to view real-time traffic images from each of the intersections by next summer.
