Reopening of West Seattle Bridge to ease load on detour routes

The countdown is on for the reopening of the West Seattle Bridge.

For the past two years, commuters have had to become familiar with streets like West Marginal Way and Roxbury Street — just to name a couple — to guide them to and from West Seattle.

Those detours shouldn’t be confused with shortcuts, though.

“It’s about an hour to get out of Seattle on bad days. So yeah, we’re really excited about getting to travel up north,” said West Seattle resident Charles Pha.

According to Bob Pishue with INRIX, with the bridge reopening, the chances of commuters using the detours instead are low.

“I think that as soon as the bridge opens, people are going to flock to it at least to get to where they’re going,” Pishue said. “Over the past couple years now people have been detouring around all sorts of creative detours, but I think once that bridge opens it’ll definitely lighten the load.”

But for another West Seattle resident, the detour will still be her primary route.

“I hate to say it, but I’m kind of with that camp, like, ‘Is the bridge really safe?’ So I honestly might wait a little bit just to make sure everything’s fine with it,” said Jackie Arevalos.

Pha had a different reaction when asked if he would continue detouring.

“Probably not,” Pha said. “It’s a little out of the way and what we usually do is we end up looping back up north and so it’s about 40 minutes of your time that you’ll probably never get back.”

Pishue said the most used detour route was West Marginal Way, which more than doubled the number of cars it normally had.

Although the bridge is expected to lighten the load on detour routes, Pishue said commuters might continue using the routes out of habit or convenience in some cases.

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