Slog - The Stranger's Blog

Line Out

The Music Blog

« Re: For Gun Control Yet? | African American Film Fest Thr... »

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

Council Agrees to Study Third Viaduct Option

Posted by on April 26 at 14:42 PM

The city council agreed today to spend $15,000 to study the “surface/transit” option for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct. According to the press release, the $15,000 will pay for a consultant who will “analyze whether the capacity of the street grid and a reconfiguration with the deployment of additional transit services could sustain mobility given the loss of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.” Translation: Can we replace the viaduct’s capacity with transit and improvements to I-5 and the street grid? The People’s Waterfront Coalition, which has been pushing the council to consider its proposal for highway-free waterfront for more than two years, says yes.


CommentsRSS icon

Then the city better be ready to pay for this itself and send the state's money back...no way will this sit right with voters around the state or their lawmakers, who were sold on raising taxes to pay for replacing infrastructure vital to the state's economy.

A good idea for the city, but won't work the way people are playing it out.

So long, $15,000! Why is this consultant necessary? Everybody knows that far fewer people will travel on the boulevard + grid, the PWC has acknowledged that. Once a $15,000 report surfaces the obvious, it will screaming in all the headlines. The point is that we need to convince people that few trips will occur with a surface boulevard, which is a win for everybody.

That is, FEWER trips will occur on the surface.

LAME!!!!!! Hippie Fucktards!

Mrs. Y - why do you hate America so?

Oh I beg to differ Will, I LOVE America and I LOVE Seattle. I just hate stupid ideas that mean nothing will ever get done.

Fucking right on! And you know what they're going to find (despite the rampant skepticism of this thread)??!?! That it's way fucking cheaper to build a surface option, fix the street grid, and buy more busses than it is to flush gigantic wads of billion dollar bills down the toilet to build a rebuild or a tunnel.

Hey, what can we do with that money we don't have and won't have to spend? Why, we could think about crazy things like replacing the Magnolia Bridge or fixing the Mercer Mess. Why the fuck, when confronted with two excruciatingly bad ideas that cost a ton of money, and a far less expensive one that aligns with our stated Kyoto-friendly goals, do we as a city want to go for the two stupid ones?

The Council is a bunch of weenie nimcompoops especially Steinbrueck and Licata. I am really wishing we had someone who is progressive and a little more grounded in reality-- someone like Dwight Pelz (Damn!)

Right on Lorenzo!

The State should chip in something to tear the monstrosity it built across the waterfront down, though, and shore up the seawall.

Lorenzo, This just shows how out of touch you and the hippie Moonies are on this issue. You can't just take the state and federal money and fix the Magnolia Bridge or the Mercer Mess. It does not work this way. The Mayor bascially had to spend shit loads of capitol convincing the State and Feds that SR 99 is a highway of national and regional significance because of the freight access, etc. They aare not going to pay to fix local projects like the bridge. City Council is basically kissing away 3 billion dollars of State and Federal money. Now they will use it to build expand roads in the suburbs of King County and Clark County and the federal money will go to someplace like Alaska, probably to build a highway up to those new oil tanker in ANWR.

Hmm.

$3 billion? Really? I think that's more like $2 billion in state money and a lot less than $1 billion in federal money.

While it's true that the State won't pay to rebuild the Magnolia Bridge, they'll more than likely chip in for Mercer, which acts as a regional corridor - what are the numbers on the Center, something like 70% of people who go there aren't coming from Seattle?

And depending on how one does whatever one does to replace the Viaduct, there's no reason the State doesn't chip in. Say you build freight priority lanes on Elliott - the state could certainly get behind that. They could pay to rebuild a (much cheaper) surface street along Alaskan Way. They may not want to pay to move the utilities, but that money isn't in the current plan yet anyway - it's waiting on Greg's proposal for a utility tax.

Nobody said it would be easy to make this change. I don't see anything in your analysis that says it would be *bad* to make the change. Rebuilding 520 is a higher state and regional priority than the Viaduct anyway, and that $2 billion could easily go a long way toward making 520 actually happen.

You know, we could have built monorail from here to SeaTac, here to Renton, here to West Seattle, here to Shoreline, and here to Lake City for this much money.

Vancouver BC already did that - and they're building more.

Meanwhile we argue.

Man, we are so xxxxxed.

oh, and noone cares what Magnolia wants. if they don't like it, they can move to Bellevue.

;-)

I doubt the surface option can be put into action by anything short of an act of god but it would be irresponsible to not spend the tiny amount to fully understand the cost/benefits. I love how some would make this a discussion about keeping funding in place as if we should not consider whether the plan is any good. Seattle should spend the relatively small amount to explore what's been a viable option in SF. At least that way, when we build the wrong $3B thing just because the state and the feds will pay for it, we will know what we could have had.

$15K won't even scratch the surface on the analysis needed for this option. They just bought the front cover of the report.

What a waste.

Maybe they will simply staple the front cover to the existing DOT analysis of the surface street/transit plan to cover the 1.5 to 3 years the viaduct corridor is going to be shut down regardless.

Money down a rat hole. At least it is a pittance in the City Hall scheme of things.

PEPEAT, the State will not do the no build.

ALSO - there is no inter connection to the 520 project. The state must rebuild taht bridge- it is not a Seattle centric issue. Fed money, interstate system, MUST appease the mega bucks and workers on the Eastside.
Period.

Seattle will be at the table to listen......and try for some bnefits of design or routing or shrubs or bus stops..... But that rebuild is all the state and fed game.

Fair enough, and I actually think this is a very good thing to do.

But don't you and the PWC bitch and whine IF (notice I'm not saying 'when') they come back and say there's no way it could feasibly work.

LOL Pablo. All they need is some engineering types to analyze traffic patterns during rush hour in downtown and the surrounding roads. That can be done on $15K. The report's typsetting and printing wouldn't cost more than a few hundred dollars.

The no build option is not exactly cheap, like some people seem to think. it is the cheapest of the three,yes, but the PWC estimate the cost at about a billion dollars to do everything that would need to be done. hardly chump change.

520 replacement and the freight link to 90 from the waterfront are much more important projects than that stupid viaduct. Tear it down, and let's not hear anymore stupid arguements about it being "the workingman's waterfront view" - possibly the lamest arguement EVER for ANYTHING.

I live in West Seattle and I a fucking pissed!!!! There is no way in hell that I will EVER support a no build option. NO WAY! I support the tunnel. I have always hated the idea of a rebuild but I will support that over the No Build Plan. I have consistently supported transit and given money to transit advocacy groups but I will not go along with this plan. West Seattle WILL NOT support this plan and this will have serious implications for Seattle City Council re-elections.

Sign me up for the anti-"no build" campaign or West Seattlites for the Tunnel!

West Seattle is going to be screwed in any case for at least a year and a half, possibly as long as three years. Depends on which option is selected (elevated/tunnel). Either way, you're all going to suffer.

Makes a heck of a lot more sense to take advantage of the mitigation they'd have to do anyway AND MAKE IT BETTER. Find the $130 million to get a direct busway ramp from Spokane so you actually have a chance at decent bus service to downtown. Get the City Council spending its energy on Metro so you actually have decent frequency on West Seattle routes (as Sims has proposed in his Transit Now plan).

And Cite - you are right, it's not cheap, but it's still cheaper than the alternatives, and at least you get something positive (more transit facility, re-knit street grid, tax revenue from an improved waterfront) that you don't get with either of the other two proposals.

Gomez,

Problems with the State's current analysis of the Viaduct:

1) They assume that vehicle trips must be replaced 1-for-1. Therefore transit has no role at the table. Neither do land-use changes, better ped/bike connections, or anything else.
2) They further assume that a 'great waterfront street' can't handle high volumes of traffic. Yet other countries have great boulevards that move 50-60,000 cars per day (First Avenue carries around 25,000 right now) and are still great pedestrian streets. Why aren't we looking at that?
3) One amazing assumption is that a surface street alternative couldn't have a 4-lane Battery Street tunnel, to try to keep cars from using the street! This assumption automatically cripples the carrying capacity of a surface-level Alaskan Way, totally skewing the entire model.
4) The model they use assumes that vehicle trips continue to increase forever. No accounting for price of fuel, land-use changes, global warming, etc.

And that's just the beginning.

John, John, John....

1) You seriously think, in your right mind, that a considerable portion of the 80-100,000 motorists who use the viaduct daily will just cease usage of their vehicles and either not bother driving into Seattle at all, or all jump on buses instead? Short of putting guns to people's heads, it's not realistic to do anything other than what you say the DOT will do: assume a need for 1 to 1 replacement. Don't let dreams cloud reality. This analysis needs to be objective, or we'll have another local project doomed for disaster due to unrealistically optimistic projections.

2) Comparing Seattle's waterfront to other cities, let alone other countries, is an apples/oranges comparison. The terrain, topography, street grid, traffic patterns, transit options and many, many other factors are completely different from city to city. Don't think that because Milwaukee, NYC and other locales made a relatively seamless transition, that you can stuff the Seattle peg into the same-shaped hole. Plus, 'seamless' is subjective: there may have been problems with removing those highways that get swept under the rug by people who want to push highway removals like the surface option, like the PWC.

3) Do you have documentation that shows the DOT is making this assumption? Or are YOU assuming that they're making this assumption?

Also, the four-lane surface boulevard idea is redundant, given the current viaduct is situated right next to four-lane Alaskan Way. Are you going to put down a four-lane boulevard right next to a four-lane surface street? or will you just have Alaskan Way act as the boulevard, thus eliminating ANOTHER road and even more capacity than we lose from the viaduct?

4) The model must account for growth, even if growth isn't likely. People drive, people move here. How do you propose stopping people from driving, aside from the baseless passive-aggressive suggestions of 'well, they'll be less roads so they'll just decide to stop driving' we keep hearing from the surface option types?

Comments Closed

In order to combat spam, we are no longer accepting comments on this post (or any post more than 45 days old).