Advice for bypassing Skagit River Bridge?
I'm heading down I-5 next week but will need to bypass the Skagit River Bridge area. Any advice on which route to take? What is Hwy 9 like for a nervous RV'er? Nui
Forum Discussion
The "other bridge", joining Burlington Boulevard to Riverside Drive used to be a very narrow, two-lane steel truss bridge of similar design to the one that just collapsed. Since the streets it joined were both 4-lanes, it was a bad bottle-neck. It was replaced about 10 years ago by a concrete 4-lane bridge.
The bad thing about the "close-by" detour using that bridge is that those streets are already badly congested by local traffic. Adding 70,000 more vehicles a day (many of them 18-wheelers) will make a real mess.
We went into M-V yesterday from Anacortes. It took about 15 minutes longer than usual. WADOT has a number of detours on its website. The biggest snag is that, so far, they haven't re-programmed the priority algorithms in the traffic-light controllers. There was a 3-mile back-up at the junction of Best Road and SR 20 for northbound traffic. A 3-vehicle back-up used to be cause for comment!
Headed south from Bellingham, I'd be tempted to head over to Old 99 at Nulle Road and go south to Cook Road (just after the wood trestle bridge over the railroad track) then east on Cook Road to Sedro-Woolley with a short stretch of SR 20 east to get to Highway 9. Headed south, you have a couple of options to get back to I-5.
The first you come to is the roundabout at Big Rock, where College Way meets Highway 9. Unfortunately, the last few blocks of College Way is where the close-by detour goes back on I-5, so it would be backed up a long way. You could take a left turn onto Riverside Drive and go through downtown Mount Vernon and get back onto I-5 at Kincaid Street or go south of town on 2nd Avenue and get back on I-5 at the Cedardale Orchard on-ramp.
The second option is to go south on highway 9 to old-town Arlington, then take the SR back to I-5 just north of the Smokey Point rest area. That's the narrow, twisty stretch of highway 9 mentioned by an earlier post.
It's not just the TV guys that get things wrong. Associated Press put out a story, that made some of the British newspapers, stating that the bridge "connected Seattle to Canada". The would be a VERY long bridge!
Actually, the Seattle TV stations have done a fairly good job getting the facts straight and ABC has a resident reporter in Seattle (Neal Karlinsky) and his report on the evening news was fairly accurate.
The bad thing about the "close-by" detour using that bridge is that those streets are already badly congested by local traffic. Adding 70,000 more vehicles a day (many of them 18-wheelers) will make a real mess.
We went into M-V yesterday from Anacortes. It took about 15 minutes longer than usual. WADOT has a number of detours on its website. The biggest snag is that, so far, they haven't re-programmed the priority algorithms in the traffic-light controllers. There was a 3-mile back-up at the junction of Best Road and SR 20 for northbound traffic. A 3-vehicle back-up used to be cause for comment!
Headed south from Bellingham, I'd be tempted to head over to Old 99 at Nulle Road and go south to Cook Road (just after the wood trestle bridge over the railroad track) then east on Cook Road to Sedro-Woolley with a short stretch of SR 20 east to get to Highway 9. Headed south, you have a couple of options to get back to I-5.
The first you come to is the roundabout at Big Rock, where College Way meets Highway 9. Unfortunately, the last few blocks of College Way is where the close-by detour goes back on I-5, so it would be backed up a long way. You could take a left turn onto Riverside Drive and go through downtown Mount Vernon and get back onto I-5 at Kincaid Street or go south of town on 2nd Avenue and get back on I-5 at the Cedardale Orchard on-ramp.
The second option is to go south on highway 9 to old-town Arlington, then take the SR back to I-5 just north of the Smokey Point rest area. That's the narrow, twisty stretch of highway 9 mentioned by an earlier post.
It's not just the TV guys that get things wrong. Associated Press put out a story, that made some of the British newspapers, stating that the bridge "connected Seattle to Canada". The would be a VERY long bridge!
Actually, the Seattle TV stations have done a fairly good job getting the facts straight and ABC has a resident reporter in Seattle (Neal Karlinsky) and his report on the evening news was fairly accurate.
