Seattle Department of Transportation crews are busy digging up Leary Ave NW in front of Canal Station and the Ballard Landmark exposing the old brick road.
Marybeth Turner from SDOT says that crews are repairing pavement that was previously excavated for work on underground utilities. Dan emailed us to say that traffic is being funneled down to one narrow lane in each direction and traffic is a mess. SDOT is supposed to wrap up their project by tomorrow.
Construction messes up traffic along Leary
![](https://www.myballard.com/wp-content/uploads/2024-My-Ballard-Tile-Ad-Troop-100.png")
looks like the biggest traffic jam so far this year.
repair the repair…classic!
@bruce
Usually when utility work is done, the utility crew puts down temporary pavement which is later replaced by a road paving crew. The utility crew generally doesn't have the equipment or expertise to do a proper job repaving the road. When they are done with their utility work, a paving crew is scheduled to repave the section of road.
I wonder if this will affect traffic tonight, or if it will be driveable?
And of course they have the resident garage at Canal Station blocked off, too, which meant I had to park a few blocks away this afternoon. I hear they are supposed to wrap up at 4:30 each day, though.
I'm not sure they followed standard procedure here. Has Leary recently received a major down-to-bedrock rebuild recently? You're supposed to make your cuts across the street only after you've just spent millions redoing the entire street, so that your repair job will ruin all that work and sink in and flake off twice a year henceforth.
I tried to put a gas line to my home. I live on what the city classifies as an arterial. One block south it's asphalt, but on my block, it's concrete. Puget Sound Energy told me to run the gas line, I'd have to pay up to $17,000, yes, that's $17,000 to replace two concrete panels (on a street full of chuck holes and asphalt patches put in by the City). This is because the City of Seattle now requires contractors to replace a whole concrete panel even if they dig a small hole. But if it is asphalt, there is no such requirement. Or, no, wait, if it is a developer in Ballard, my guess is you can get the city to do the fixes! And clearly it's not uniformly enforced, because there is a huge repair of asphalt over concrete on Market near 32nd and also near the liqueur store…I even tried to get a waiver from the city and they agreed to have me only replace most of the two panels, reducing my cost to $15,000. I decided to bag the idea and continue burning oil for heat and electricity for cooking.
very very good question