- Project typePedestrian and bicycle bridge
- Project value$22,361,517 million
- Project scheduleDecember 2020 - Spring 2023
- Contractor nameKraemer North America
The Skipping Stone was the favorite of the public and the City Council. Click on the map below to see the detour route around Totem Lake Boulevard.
WHAT IS THE TOTEM LAKE CONNECTOR?
The Totem Lake Connector will be a bicycle and pedestrian bridge, that will connect the two ends of the 5.75-mile Cross Kirkland Corridor currently severed by one of Kirkland’s most complicated intersections: Totem Lake Boulevard and Northeast 124th Street.
WHY BUILD AN ICONIC BRIDGE?
The Totem Lake Connector will help prepare Kirkland's only urban center for the way its community will live, work and play in the future.
When complete in 2021, the Village at Totem Lake will add more than 800 homes and nearly 400,000 square feet of retail space—enough for 2,000 employees—to Kirkland’s only urban center. The City's transportation planners expect these retail outlets, alone, to generate an additional 24,000 trips every day—most of them by automobile, which will apply even more pressure to Totem Lake’s traffic grid.
To prepare for this growth, the City of Kirkland is providing a series of transportation solutions that will give people more options over how they navigate the urban center.
Foremost among these options is the Totem Lake Connector bicycle and pedestrian bridge.
As it is now, the intersection creates a premature dead-end to the Cross Kirkland Corridor on the south side of the intersection, severing it from the The Village at Totem Lake and an orphaning a quarter-mile section of trail on its north side.
The bridge will connect these two ends, linking Kirkland to the mall and in the process, making possible an alternative transportation corridor that will eventually extend from Renton to Woodinville.
Kirkland is redesigning the 124th Avenue Northeast corridor to serve as a gateway into the City's only designated urban center. It has already built sidewalks to connect South Rose Hill to Totem Lake, as well as upgraded intersections with intelligent transportation systems technology and continues to create more connections to the Cross Kirkland Corridor.
This is the Totem Lake transportation strategy residents have reaffirmed they want in multiple City planning documents. That includes the 2035 Comprehensive Plan update, the Transportation Master Plan, the Cross Kirkland Corridor Master Plan and Totem Lake Park Master Plan. The Totem Lake Connector is also the largest infrastructure investment proposed in the City’s interactive “Suggest a Project.” That internet-based system has accumulated more than 500 transportation-related suggestions. Eighty percent of those suggestions ask for projects that would protect residents from cars, such as sidewalks, crosswalks, bike lanes and traffic calming devices.
The design for the Totem Lake Connector is being funded primarily from transportation impact fees on new development.