Puzzling repaving job between Bremerton and Silverdale

The in basket: I was puzzled by the paving job done this summer in both directions of Highway 3 between Highway 304 and Newberry Hill Road.

I had a pretty good idea why only the outside lanes were done, but I couldn’t figure out why there was about a mile and a quarter distance between the beginning of the new pavement in one direction and the end of the work in the opposite direction, on both ends.

Or perhaps, I thought, the project isn’t done, and the inside lane work still is coming. The white lines looked temporary.

The out basket: The project is done, says Project Engineer Jerry Moore, except for the finished striping, now that the contractor replaced a stretch of new pavement in the northbound lanes near Kitsap Way that didn’t compact to state specifications. The contactor bore the cost.

Scott Vanderstaay of the project design office said that , as I suspected, only the outside lanes were done because the inside lanes were in good shape. The outside lanes are where the heavy trucks are driven, increasing the wear. Jerry said the inside lanes may last the 15 years or so before the outside lanes need doing again.

The deviation in where the work started and stopped in the opposite directions was  a matter of doing the most with the money available, said Scott.

“With preservation dollars the way they are,” he said, “we wanted to address the worst lane miles we had out there. We went out with the materials engineers and maintenance office and located the sections both northbound and southbound that basically were in the worst shape.”

It was pure coincidence that those sections began and ended about a mile and a quarter apart in the two directions, he said.

What they weren’t able to repave will fall to the maintenance division to keep up in coming years, so they were trying to minimize those maintenance expenditures.

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