The very long-awaited biking and walking bridge over SR 520 in Montlake will finally open with a community celebration 11 a.m. December 14.

For the better part of a decade, folks trying to bike through Montlake have been dealing with a variety of different detours, and they’ve been stuck mixing with people on the sidewalk of Montlake Boulevard for years as crews work on a new biking and walking bridge to the east of the boulevard. The new bridge largely replaces the role of the old 24th Ave E bridge, though with much more style. Rather than leaving people to wind their way through alleys to reach the Lake Washington Loop bike route, the new trail will connect to a crosswalk at E Roanoke Street. It will also feed into the still largely unplanned future park at the north end of the Arboretum, located where construction staging equipment has been. I am not yet certain exactly how the south terminus of the new trail will work or how well it will connect to the Arboretum Trail, and none of the documents available online seem to show those details. I will update when I learn more.

People heading from the north will follow the same route as usual along the east sidewalk of the Montlake Bridge, then turning on Hamlin toward the 520 Trail. At the end of the block, there will be a new trail nexus with options to go across Lake Washington, across SR 520 toward the Arboretum, or back under Montlake Blvd and under SR 520 toward Montlake Playfield.

The new tunnel and trail connection (AKA the Bill Dawson Trail) to Montlake Playfield is already open, and I ran into a very confused guy there the other day who thought he could go that way to get to the 520 Trail. That will be possible soon. But for now the most important thing to note is that you access all of these trail connections from the east sidewalk of the Montlake Bridge. The old trail connection on the west side of the street is gone and is not coming back.

There will still be some work left to finish for the project after the grand opening, but it should be reliably operational. It has seemed at times that this project would never end, and maybe it still feels that way. But this is a huge step for folks sick of navigating detours through this area. In fact, this is the first post I’ve had about the Montlake area in a long time that isn’t about a new detour or weekend trail closure. Progress!