West Seattle traffic alert: Why you’ll want to detour around the Fauntleroy/California intersection

(WSB photo – looking west on Fauntleroy from California)
11:30 AM: Once in a while, projects with a big short-term effect show up without big advance warnings. Here’s one of them. Thanks so much to the person who called to flag us to the major work happening right now at Fauntleroy/California – involving traffic-signal replacement and police directing traffic (since the signals aren’t working while they’re in the process of being replaced). Lane reductions on all sides. Businesses are open, but you’ll want to find alternate ways of accessing them. The crew on the scene tells us this is scheduled to continue through tomorrow (we’ll update if it ends earlier).

7:23 PM UPDATE: While the work isn’t continuing into the night, the signals are out because of it and there is an officer on-site directing traffic, with temporary portable lights illuminating the intersection.

SUNDAY, 4:31 PM: As SeaChanty51 noted in comments an hour-plus ago, the new signals are in and working! We just drove through to confirm.

Beth February 15, 2014 (1:08 pm)

How late will they be working this evening?

TW February 15, 2014 (3:02 pm)

Any word on what the goal of the replacement is? Seismic safety? New emergency vehicle signal triggering? Something else?

WSB February 15, 2014 (3:55 pm)

If I knew that, I would hopefully have had advance word of this; apologies, but we’ll find out what we can when everybody’s back in city offices Tuesday. Also don’t know how late they’re working – those bright portable lights were part of the setup so we’ll see. We do recall repeated trouble with those signals last year, though. In fact – checking the archives – five stories about signal trouble between December 2012 and June 2013. Some of it early in 2013 was blamed on the transit-priority interface, which was supposedly being fixed at the time through software updates – TR