Date:  Friday, October 26, 2012

Contact: Meghan Pembroke, WSDOT communications, 206-440-4704

SEATTLE – The Washington State Department of Transportation’s popular Seattle-area traffic map and cameras will be out of service Friday night as crews work to upgrade WSDOT’s Puget Sound-area fiber optic system. Crews will take down the system from 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 26, to 10 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 27, while they splice in new cables.

Crews are upgrading WSDOT’s fiber optic system and replacing failing data strands as part of the I-5 Dayton Avenue North to 128th Street Southwest Intelligent Transportation System Rehabilitation project. When work is completed later this year, the system of data detectors, cameras and signals will be faster and more reliable.

The outage will primarily affect traffic cameras on state roadways between Shoreline and Everett, including I-5, I-405, SR 104, SR 525, SR 96, SR 522, SR 527 and US 2. Visitors to WSDOT’s website will see white areas on the Seattle-area traffic map during the outage. The disruption will also limit engineers’ ability to remotely monitor traffic signals and confirm traffic incidents from the WSDOT traffic management center in Shoreline.

During the outage, drivers can check traffic conditions by following wsdot_traffic on Twitter (www.twitter.com/wsdot_traffic) or viewing current travel alerts on WSDOT’s website: www.wsdot.com/traffic/trafficalerts.

Two more outages are planned for the weekends of Nov. 2 and Nov. 9. Crews expect to finish work by early December.

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