US Department of Transportation Names SR 520 Bridge Replacement A Federal Priority

“We welcome the announcement that the USDOT has made the replacement of the SR 520 bridge a national priority and will work with the agency to secure this additional federal funding,” said Paula Hammond, Interim Secretary of Transportation. “The SR 520 bridge is among the most vulnerable structures in our state and needs to be replaced. The features of the federal Urban Partnership program are a good match for the SR 520 bridge because better transit, technology, telecommuting and electronic tolling strategies have already been identified as part of the future of the corridor.”

The grant is timed to coincide with upcoming state legislature decisions on the bridge, ongoing mediation and the development of a finance plan for the bridge replacement. Under terms of the grant, King County would receive up to $41 million to purchase 45 new buses for the corridor and make other transit improvements, and about $86 million would be provided to develop and implement active traffic management and traveler information systems, and to support future decisions by the Washington State Legislature on how best to toll the bridge. In addition, the grant would deliver up to $11.6 million for improvements to Puget Sound ferry service.

Can someone explain to me how $11.6M dollars for the ferries and $41M for buses will enable the replacement of the 520 bridge, before it falls into Lake Washington?

Ouch…

I’m not feeling too bad though…

This weekend, Carly and I went out to Mount Rainier and did some hiking and camping (after months of talking about doing it).

The weather cooperated for us on Saturday. We struck out on the Wonderland Trail from Longmere around 8:30am, thinking we would go about 7 miles or so into the wilderness and then come back.

Well, we ended up going out 11.4 miles. Round-trip we did near 23 miles (with a mile of vertical thrown in): from Longmere to the Indian Henry Hunting Grounds, and then on up to Emerald Ridge, then all the way back. Needless to say, our bodies were both broken after the trip, and we didn’t go out on Sunday. And, the mosquitos were terrible.

Yellow: the trail, aka “death slog”

Overall the trail was quite good… the National Park Service has done a fantastic job rehabilitating the trail after the floods last November.

Also on the trip, we got to try out some new equipment. I bought the MSR WhisperLite Internationale stove, mostly because I liked the fact it would burn any kind of liquid fuel you put into it. It works very well, but it only has two settings: Off, and Jet Engine.

I know the Internets might not be able to handle it, but you can increment that user-generated-content page counter++, because there’s another blog a-comin.

Hopefully, I will have enough time and desire to keep this up better than my last blog.