A bike/walk bridge connecting the 520 Trail to Sound Transit’s upcoming Overlake Village Station is now open. Hanoch at Best Side Cycling filmed a bike tour of the bridge, including its interesting forest illusion artwork by Leo Saul Berk.
The $10.4 million bridge connects directly to the 520 Trail on its northwest end, and a gradual winding ramp on the southeast end connects to the station area. Building it required cooperation between the City of Redmond, Sound Transit, WSDOT and USDOT. The project has been in development for more than a decade and opened three or four years later than originally scheduled. More than half the funding came from federal grants.
Unfortunately, you can’t currently bike across the 520 Bridge to go try the new Overlake bridge because of construction, though hopefully the 520 Bridge trail will reopen before the weekend (February 2) as planned.
The opening of the Overlake bike/walk bridge and the upcoming opening of Sound Transit’s 2 Line puts more urgency behind the need for Redmond’s vision of a 152nd Ave NE with protected bike lanes and a “pedestrian-oriented retail main street” experience.
Today, the area is in flux as it makes the transition away from car-oriented suburban office parks and parking-oriented retail into a transit-oriented neighborhood with street-facing retail. The example above almost looks like a before and after image. One side has space for a protected bike lane in front of a mixed-use building with street-facing retail. The other side has only a sharrow painted in the middle of a general traffic lane next to a sidewalk passing in front of a sunken parking lot for an office-park-style building.
Comments
3 responses to “Watch: New Overlake Village bike/walk bridge over SR 520 opens”
RE: “One side has space for a protected bike lane in front of a mixed-use building with street-facing retail.”
I agree that there’s space, but will it be allocated to a protected bike lane? Three general purpose lanes are shown on the “after” side of the street (at least as of August, 2019); two turn lanes and a center lane. I do see paint-only bike lanes on Turing; have those been upgraded to protected bike lane since the Google Street View images were last updated?
If you look close the bike lane is already there, it just isn’t connected to the street yet. You can see it curve toward the roadway, but then ends in a curb. So right now it serves as some extra sidewalk space. Imagine a ramp there to connect it to a street-level crossing at the intersection. I suppose there’s no guarantee the city will actually connect it all up, but that’s the plan.
No, the bike lanes on Turing street are not protected lanes. They are sometimes parking spaces. All along 156av adjacent to the Microsoft campus will be a two way bicycle path. I suppose it will be nice for people at Microsoft but not connected to any other lanes except on Turing. Overlake has a long way to go to building a useful bicycle network.