Three-night Highway 20 closures planned north of Oak Harbor

One of North Whidbey’s main traffic arteries will shut down for three nights, blocking Highway 20 between Regatta Drive and West Ault Field Road from 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. nightly starting Monday, May 11.

The closure will hit both eastbound and westbound traffic north of Oak Harbor near West Fakkema Road, turning a routine evening drive into a reroute for commuters, shift workers, evening travelers and anyone making late trips across the island. Drivers moving through the corridor will need to plan around the work each night until the highway reopens in the morning.

Washington State Department of Transportation said the detour for through traffic will use West Ault Field Road and Goldie Road. Local traffic on the east side of Highway 20 will be directed to Sleeper Road and West Crescent Harbor Road. The agency warned that weather could still affect the schedule, since some of the work requires dry, warm conditions and may be pushed back if those conditions do not hold.

The nighttime closure is tied to construction of the new compact roundabout at West Fakkema Road, where crews are removing and replacing pavement after the project was paused over the winter. The roundabout was selected as a cost-effective safety fix for the SR 20 and West Fakkema Road intersection, which WSDOT says carries more than 17,000 vehicles a day and has seen traffic rise 6% over the past 10 years.

WSDOT says well-designed roundabouts can reduce injury collisions by 75% and fatal collisions by 90%, part of the reason the intersection was targeted for improvement. Island County transportation planning documents put the project’s estimated cost at $928,496. The City of Oak Harbor engineering division reviewed WSDOT’s analysis and agreed with it, and a city official previously said that even a 5 mph reduction in speed could make a sizable difference in crash severity.

The project is expected to wrap up in June, when crews return to add permanent striping. Until then, the three-night closure will put a hard stop on one of the most important east-west routes on northern Whidbey Island and funnel traffic onto a small set of local roads that can clog quickly when Highway 20 is out of service.