SEATTLE — On the streets of a booming Seattle, traffic lanes keep shifting or disappearing around construction sites.
"There's just activity all the time, you never know what will be the right route to get to work, some streets are closed, some streets are open," said Chris Hagen of Seattle.
Pedestrians often encounter closed sidewalks.
Brian de Place leads the street use division at the Seattle Department of Transportation.
With more than a hundred construction projects downtown in the last year, he said city officials now hold weekly meetings with contractors working near one another to coordinate the impact they have on the street.
"If someone hasn't coordinated, you can have two people trying to erect a crane on the same day or you can have concrete trucks that are getting delivered at the same time on a pretty narrow street," said de Place.
None of this is easy to manage.
At one construction site on Fifth Avenue, pedestrians need to cross in front of dump trucks.
On Second Avenue, scaffolding is going up toward the middle of the street to accommodate a construction site and maintain access to the new bike lanes.
In September a new city rule takes effect requiring developers to clearly mark temporary pedestrian routes with barriers, such as plastic jersey barriers filled with water, that can't be easily moved.
KIRO
