Dearborn bike lane barriers removed for bridge painting through 2026, but crews will install temporary barricades

Photo from reader Jason, taken April 26.

People biking in S Dearborn Street's protected bike lanes were surprised last week to see the concrete barriers missing as the street passes under the Dr. Jose Rizal Bridge. Some riders even reported the bike lanes fully closed, requiring them to bike in mixed traffic on the wide and fast street.

Workers are not there to work on Dearborn itself, but the bridge above. SDOT and WSDOT are doing maintenance work on their respective portions of the bridge, including repainting the structure to help prevent corrosion. To access the bridge structure, crews needed to construct scaffolding from below, and they needed to remove the concrete barriers to access the work site. Scaffolding work should be complete or nearing completion, but the concrete barriers will not return for about a year as work continues.

However, in response to rider concerns, SDOT told Seattle Bike Blog that they have made some changes to the work plan. Any work within the bike lanes will now occur at night (between 9 p.m and 7 a.m.), and flaggers will be present to help riders travel safely through the work zone. When the bike lane area is not being used by crews, they will keep water-filled barricades in place to protect the bike lanes. The water-filled barricades are already in use.

The worst of the closures should be over, and some of the concrete barriers will be put back in place. The painting project is expected to continue through 2026," according to the project webpage.

From the project webpage.

The new plan sounds good, but it's a bit concerning bike riders weren't fully considered before work began. Dearborn has been considered a major bike route for decades. Dearborn is the only flat and direct street between the Mountains-to-Sound Trail and the downtown core, but it is also a wide roadway with multiple lanes in each direction, a set of I-5 freeway ramps, and very few intersections or other disruptions. The conditions are perfect for speeding, and it can feel more like a highway than a city street.

The original bike lanes were among the Seattle Bicycle Program's early attempts at painting on-street bike lanes, and they were planned during the 1980s and painted in the early 1990s to link with the soon-to-open bike path on the I-90 Bridge. They were very skinny, paint-only lanes, but at least they were something. Longtime SDOT Bicycle Program staffer Sam Woods talked about these lanes in an interview for my book Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from behind the Handlebars. When I first started [in 1990], you know what the budget was in the Bike Program?" she said. It was like $270,000 a year. It was nothing." So they had to be very creative about attaching bike work to other projects that had more funding. Before [the 2007 Bike Master Plan] we were more opportunistic [...] Like Dearborn. We put these little four-foot-wide bike lanes because the road was really wide and you could still have eleven-foot lanes and have four-foot bike lanes [...] Doing that kind of striping, especially with a repaving job, is very cost-effective." Woods stayed dedicated to the Bicycle Program long enough that she got another crack at Dearborn bike lanes in 2015 after she became the program manager. The number of collisions on the street involving people on bikes had been rising as bike use became more popular. This time they would dedicate more funding and space to the bike lanes, creating buffer space with plastic posts to separate the lane from general traffic. The lanes were further upgraded in early 2024 as part of the city's better bike lane project, which is when the concrete curbs were put in place along with some significant intersection redesign work.

More details on the bike lane management plan from an SDOT email to Seattle Bike Blog (sent April 30, the delay in posting here is on me, not SDOT):

This section of S Dearborn St is part of the construction zone for the Dr. Jose Rizal Bridge Repainting Project. We have been working with our contractor to review their construction plans and ensure that the needs of people on bicycles are thoroughly considered going forward. This includes adding water-filled barricades in places where concrete barriers have been removed, adjusting the work schedule to minimize work in the bike lane during the peak times, and deploying flaggers to control traffic and keep bike riders safe whenever this work does occur.

Scaffolding Construction (week of April 28)

Over the past week, we have been building scaffolding on the Dr. Jose Rizal Bridge above the S Dearborn St which requires us to use large equipment to lift workers up to the height of the bridge. This phase of construction will be done soon, and we have made several adjustments to address bike riders' concerns:

• Going forward, construction within the bike lanes will happen at night (9pm - 7am).
• Whenever construction is occurring in the bike lanes, flaggers will be present to control traffic and keep everyone safe by directing bikes and cars to travel through the work zone at different times.
• Water-filled barricades have been added to protect the bike lane from car traffic during the day.
• If all goes according to plan, we hope to wrap up this phase of scaffolding construction within a week.

Ongoing Construction (through 2026)

Once the scaffolding has been built, we will scale back construction activities within the S Dearborn St bike lanes. There will no longer be any work in the westbound bike lanes, but the eastbound bike lane will still sometimes be blocked for short periods of time as crews deliver construction equipment and load old paint removed from the bridge into transport vehicles for environmentally-safe disposal. We have been working with our contractor to ensure the safety of bike riders when this occurs in the following ways:

• We will do our best to schedule this work outside of peak commute times. Work in the bike lanes will last for shorter durations than the construction which happened during the past week.
• Whenever construction is occurring in the bike lanes, flaggers will be present to control traffic and keep everyone safe by directing bikes and cars to travel through the work zone at different times.
• Water-filled barricades will remain for the duration of the project. We will return some of the concrete barriers over the coming weeks, and will return the rest when the project is completed in 2026.