What's Actually Open on the Cross Kirkland Corridor Right Now

If you've biked or walked the Cross Kirkland Corridor anytime in the last year, you've probably hit a stretch of chain link fencing you didn't remember from your last loop, or noticed a squat green pipe running along the gravel where there used to be nothing but blackberry bushes and Douglas fir. Maybe you assumed it was the same closure from last summer. Maybe you gave up and rerouted through the neighborhood streets without ever finding out why.

Here's the answer, and it's stranger than most people realize: two completely separate government agencies, working on two completely unrelated problems, have both chosen this same 5.75-mile gravel path as their construction site in the same twelve-month window. One is fixing a sewer pipe. The other is building a pedestrian bridge tied to a future bus rapid transit station. Neither project needed the other to exist, and neither knew, or particularly cared, that the other was happening a few miles up the trail. The corridor just happened to be sitting on top of both problems at once.

That's not a coincidence. It's a structural fact about what this trail actually is, and once you understand it, the closures stop feeling random.

Two Projects, One Trail

The Cross Kirkland Corridor runs from the South Kirkland Park & Ride at the city's southern edge up through the Totem Lake Business District, following the old North Pacific Railroad grade past the Google campus and through several miles of quiet greenbelt. It's the kind of trail residents build entire routines around: the after-work run, the Saturday morning ride into downtown, the stroller loop with the dog.

For most of 2025 and into 2026, that routine has been interrupted twice, for two different reasons.

The first is a King County wastewater emergency. The second is a City of Kirkland pedestrian infrastructure project tied to the new I-405 interchange. They overlap in time. They do not overlap in cause.

The Sewer Line Under Your Running Shoes

Beneath a stretch of the corridor between Northeast 52nd Street and 108th Avenue Northeast runs a 7-foot diameter regional sewer main called the Eastside Interceptor Section 14, or ESI 14. On an average dry day it carries about 10 million gallons of wastewater toward King County's South Treatment Plant in Renton. In late July 2025, county and city crews discovered the pipe was leaking into Kirkland's piped stream system. Public health officials found no risk to residents, but the leak was serious enough that King County's Department of Natural Resources and Parks issued a formal Declaration of Urgency that September to speed up repairs, and the City of Kirkland followed with its own emergency proclamation to support the work.

What followed was a stop-and-start closure pattern that would confuse anyone tracking it casually. The trail segment between NE 52nd and 108th Avenue NE closed again as early as January 5, 2026. Crews diverted wastewater into a temporary above-ground pipe on January 13. By mid-February the underground repair was declared complete, and the trail reopened on February 23. Then, on March 24, the same stretch closed again for a single afternoon so crews could test soil conditions ahead of a second phase of work.

That second phase is what's visible on the trail right now. Through the summer of 2026, crews have been stabilizing a rockery wall and repairing a culvert that sits beneath the county's pipe. To keep sewer service running to homes and businesses during that work, the 3,000-foot temporary above-ground pipe installed earlier this year remains in place along the west side of the trail, along with fenced-off excavation points covered in steel plates. Once the culvert work wraps up, King County has said it will remove the equipment and plant new trees along the disturbed section.

The Bridge Nobody Asked to See Built

The second project sits about a mile away, centered on Northeast 85th Street, and has nothing to do with sewage. It's a shared-use pathway the City of Kirkland is building to connect downtown to the Rose Hill area and to a new Sound Transit Stride bus rapid transit station going in as part of the I-405 interchange rebuild. Part of that pathway includes a pedestrian bridge that spans directly over the Cross Kirkland Corridor.

Construction on that bridge closed a section of the trail starting July 18, 2025. The closure came with two posted detours, one ADA accessible and one that wasn't, and at the time the city's own project page described it only as lasting "months" with no firm reopening date. The broader target for the shared-use pathway itself was spring 2026 completion.

The bridge is one piece of a much larger, multi-year effort. WSDOT and Sound Transit are rebuilding the entire NE 85th Street interchange into a three-level structure with a new inline BRT station, and that project isn't expected to fully open to traffic until early 2027. A new roundabout on the reconfigured street level was targeted for spring 2026, but construction on other phases, including the transit platform above it, continues through the rest of the year. As of this writing, the City of Kirkland's own corridor closures page still lists the NE 85th Street pathway project alongside the county's sewer repair as active reasons for trail impacts, which tells you the area hasn't fully settled back into normal yet.

Where Things Actually Stand This Fall

Here's the practical breakdown, segment by segment, as of September 2026:

If your usual route passes through the middle of the corridor, expect construction signage, temporary fencing, and the sight of that above-ground pipe until King County finishes the culvert work and restores the area. If your route crosses NE 85th Street, budget extra time and watch for posted detour signs near the interchange, since that broader construction zone is still active on multiple levels.

Why This Keeps Happening

The deeper reason two unrelated agencies ended up digging up the same trail traces back to how Kirkland acquired the corridor in the first place. When the city bought this 5.75-mile stretch of former rail line in 2011 for roughly $5 million, it didn't get a clean, single-purpose recreation trail. Sound Transit and other utilities retained easements along the corridor as part of that deal, because the old rail bed was always understood to be a future transit and utility spine, not just a place to walk the dog.

That's the part most casual trail users never think about until a fence goes up in front of them. The gravel path is recreation. It's also a live sewer easement. It's also the reserved alignment for future transit investment. When any one of those three functions needs work, the trail is where that work happens, because there's no way to repair a pipe or build transit-adjacent infrastructure without physically occupying the surface above it.

Given that Sound Transit's Stride BRT line through this corridor is still years from opening and King County's regional sewer infrastructure isn't getting any younger, this year's overlap probably won't be the last time two agencies end up on the same stretch of gravel at the same time.

What to Expect Through the Rest of the Year

If you're planning a fall bike commute or your regular weekend loop, the middle section of the corridor is passable but not pristine. Give yourself a few extra minutes near the ESI 14 work zone, and don't be surprised if the temporary pipe is still visible into the fall before County crews finish restoration and replant. Near NE 85th Street, treat the posted detours as current until you see official word that the pathway project has wrapped, since the interchange work around it is still very much in progress.

None of this changes what makes the corridor worth using. It's still one of the flattest, most direct ways to move through the city on foot or by bike, and it still runs past some of the same quiet greenbelt and lake glimpses that made it worth building in the first place. It's just also, this year, a visible reminder that a trail built on top of critical infrastructure is going to need that infrastructure tended to sometimes, and that two agencies with two unrelated jobs can end up sharing the same worksite without either one planning it that way.

If you're thinking about what life actually looks like in a specific pocket of Kirkland, from the daily walk to the way a neighborhood absorbs a year of construction, Lizanne Wicklund can talk you through it block by block.