Community Post

Repaving 23rd Ave near Union to start next week – UPDATED

This SDOT Traffic Advisory was just released announcing the repaving of 23rd Ave south of Union starting next week.

Contact:  Marybeth Turner, (206) 684-8548

Paving Next Week on 23rd Avenue

SEATTLE — Crews from the Seattle Department of Transportation plan to pave 23rd Avenue between Union and Spring streets next week, March 22 to 25, if the weather is favorable. The crews will grind off the old surface and lay new asphalt. When they have completed work on 23rd Avenue to the south of Union Street they will work on 23rd to the north of Union Street. They plan to work from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

UPDATE: Tom here. I asked for clarification from SDOT. Paving will be curb lanes (the outside lanes) only, and will stretch basically from Pine to Spring. From Benjamin Hansen of SDOT:

The limits of our paving on 23rd Avenue at this time are E Spring Street at the south (1 block) and roughly E Pine St to the north (2 blocks).  The crew will be making large asphalt patches in the outside lanes, addressing the most severe pavement distress.   This is an area where we have done a lot of pothole filling and received several complaints . The heavy bus traffic has taken its toll on the outside lanes in particular. 

The patches are interim repairs intended to keep the street serviceable until the larger project can move forward in 2015, according to the current schedule.  At that time, the entire section of 23rd Avenue between S Jackson and E Madison streets will be repaved.  The 2015 project is a major undertaking and will likely consume a full year’s paving budget.  We would like to do it sooner, but with limited funds and a large backlog of deferred maintenance, it takes a while to make our way through the long list of the city’s paving needs.

0 thoughts on “Repaving 23rd Ave near Union to start next week – UPDATED

  1. are they going to do a killer job like they did with that sweet asphalt they laid on the sidewalks on Union b/w 30th and MLK? always good to have uneven asphalt laid on a concrete sidewalk. #notinballard

  2. They need to do emergency repairs ASAP to the section of 23rd between Jackson and Yesler. It’s unbelievably bad!

  3. It would be good to have the curb lanes repaved, as in the area north of Madison. They badly need it. But what about the “road diet” that was proposed? With a middle turn lane and a curb bike lane, the proposed new paving would not match that layout.
    IMHO the road diet does not work on 23rd due to busses, garbage trucks and delivery vehicles. But a decision should be made on the ultimate fate of 23rd before paving work is committed. And yes, Jackson to Yesler is terrible.

  4. I agree that a road diet on 23rd doesn’t make sense. Once they close the road through the arboretum to get onto 520, all of that traffic is going to end up going down 23rd to Montlake to get on the freeway…so I think traffic on 23rd will increase significantly. And if you’ve ever tried to get on 520 at Montlake during rush hour, it can back up on 23rd quite a distance. A road diet on 23rd will force a lot of people (everyone in the CD, Madrona, Madison Valley, etc) to go through either Capitol Hill or Downtown to get onto the freeways.

  5. 23rd has bus traffic that ruins asphalt at stop lights and bus stops. Where 23rd has concrete on the outside lane its great!

    Please, don’t put bike lanes on the last remaining major street in our area! Bicyclists who take the personal responsibility to learn the rules of the road so they work prefer riding with traffic on major streets. The bike lanes are a violation of the rules of the road so they are worse for them.

    Cyclists who are traffic averse and don’t learn prefer “quiet pleasant” side streets so putting bike lanes on major streets just puts them in heavier traffic.

    Why declare WAR on responsible bicyclists by ruining their preferred streets and putting traffic averse cyclists into the heaviest traffic? This one needs to be completely rethought from the beginning!

  6. Concrete for the right 2 lanes has been part of the Bridging The Gap plan all along. It’s coming in 2015. This resurfacing is only intended as a short-term fix; the foundation under the right lanes of the road in both directions has been completely destroyed. Any new surface they put down now will degrade within a year or two at the longest, without a sound foundation below.

    Northgate Way is in the same condition – foundation destroyed, outer lanes crumbling. It’s getting done right before 23rd. Both of these projects are so expensive they require SDOT’s entire yearly paving budget.

    There are no plans for bike lanes on 23rd, and to the best of my knowledge there never have been. It’s over capacity for much of the day and SDOT wouldn’t even consider removing any lanes.

  7. SDOT will not do a road diet on 23rd. It’s a designated arterial, the main N/S arterial in the east, and over capacity for much of the day. The only potential road diet that works with the traffic volumes on 23rd is allowing night-only street parking, and that doesn’t require any changes to implement.

    SDOT only does road diets when there’s unused capacity, or nearby bottlenecks (i.e. a 6 lane road meeting a 4 lane bridge).

    The decision regarding 23rd was made long ago, and the paving plans have been committed for years. Some new ideas have been thrown around, but nothing that’s stuck – SDOT is keeping 23rd channelized as-is for the foreseeable future.

  8. It’s been bad for a decade or more, and SDOT’s known about it. The issue is the roadbed/foundation. It can’t be simply repaved, the whole road needs to be dug up and rebuilt, foundation and all. Without doing that, any new surface will simply crumble (just like this resurface will).

    It’s a project that will cost the entire paving budget for the entire city for a whole year. You can’t pull that off on a whim. And that’s why it’s taking so long to get done – a project that costs your entire yearly budget needs to be scheduled well in advance.

    If we make enough noises in the direction of SDOT, we might be able to get it moved ahead of the Northgate Way paving project, but it’d be an uphill battle. Northgate Way is constructed the same way and in the same condition as 23rd, and that neighborhood has a LOT more pull at City Hall than the CD.

    We need a good strong neighborhood organization that can lobby the city for us – that, in large part, is why neighborhoods north of the Ship Canal get so much more attention from City Hall.