The City of Liberty Lake is starting planning to revise the Harvard Road overpass spanning Interstate 90, in an effort to improve safety and reduce traffic congestion.

The city’s website shows that plans for the project include creating an additional right turning lane off Appleway Avenue heading north onto the bridge, restriping to accommodate two northbound lanes over the bridge, and creating a new single lane structure for southbound traffic. 

Plans so far have yet to specify whether the new single lane structure for southbound traffic would be constructed as a widened attachment to the existing bridge, or as a separate section. 

The city’s website lists an overall project cost of $4.5 million, with funding coming from a mix of local, state, and federal sources. 

Andrew Staples, engineer with the city of Liberty Lake, says the planned changes should remove the current traffic bottleneck and reduce congestion on nearby Liberty Lake Road and Appleway Avenue.

“Liberty Lake is growing, and to accommodate that growth, we need to create more efficient ways of getting traffic in and out of the city,” he says. “Our current intersections are reaching capacity.”

Staples says the city is working with Seattle-based engineering firm KPFF Inc. to determine how best to design the project and phase construction. He estimates the project would take about a year to complete.  

“We’re still in the conceptual stages, but we hope to begin construction sometime in the next three to five years,” he says. “Funding for these projects is cyclical, so we’ll have to determine what’s available before moving ahead.”