With all due respect to Steinbrueck, just where the hell are the other 72% of those trips gonna go?

Get this through your heads: eliminating roads won't eliminate cars. You have to provide a useful transportation alternative, or you're just making the problem worse.

Sadly, it's true that the tunnel option may be too expensive right now, but that doesn't mean we should cut off our nose to spite our face -- a big fucking "boulevard" is almost as ugly and inconvenient as a big fucking viaduct.

If push comes to shove, we should just do nothing, and wait for the next earthquake -- with any luck, a few of you whiny, anti-car types will be squished in the collapse, and obtaining sympathy money for a new tunnel will be easy.

Actually, while a full Surface Plus Transit option would work - where we literally build a six-lane no-parking major arterial thru with traffic lights only every 4-5 blocks and no left turns except at lights, and DOUBLE local transit in the affected area, removing parking lanes to give bus/taxi/vanpool only on the nearby major streets - the problem is the politics.

The state doesn't want that and won't pay for it. The feds won't pay dime one for it. The county and the port won't do squat for it.

Which, to be frank, means "Dude, you're getting an elevated Viaduct built to modern earthquake standards!"

But if they toll it, I ain't using it. I've lived here long enough to know all the shortcuts.

Lame.

The other 72% of the trips use the 4 lane highway, or get distributed to the rest of the steet grid, to which the boulevard will be well connected - unlike any other variant of the viaduct, or it's current incarnation.

The Streets+Transit plan saves tons of money for the city and state, meets overall throughput goals, aligns with Kyoto, opens the waterfront, increases freight mobility by assigning dedicated freght corridors throughout the city, and gets more people out of SOVs and into transit......why is this a bad idea again? Are we just trained to think we can't get everything we want? Do we honestly have some kind of reverse-poverty mentality that means we refuse to believe anything unless it costs billions of dollars more than the other options?

I guess I read something else in Steinbrueck's statement than you do, Josh...what I hear is "state legislators should re-examine the options" which sounds to me like a) pass the buck back to the state legislature, and b) continue to do absolutely nothing under the guise of "further study." Until Mother Nature makes the whole question moot.

Look, no one likes all the options. Some of us flat hate one or the other. Unfortunately, the reasons for disliking any of the options are valid. The tunnel's too expensive. The surface option leaves some of us shuddering with the vision of total gridlock through the Downtown Squeeze. The rebuild is a grotesquely archaic and unaesthetic monstrosity. Shoring the damn thing up could prove to be band-aids on a malignant melanoma.

We're between a rock and a hard place - or to be more specific, between a Sound and a Lake. There's only so much physical room for traffic to move, and only a few options for actual, substantive traffic reduction. Frankly, all the options suck somewhere. None of them will make everyone happy - none of them will even make MOST people reasonably happy. Every one of them is going to piss off a large number of people.

And this kind of thing is exactly what we elect politicians to decide. Sorry guys - you're going to have to lose some political capital with someone, and MAKE A DECISION, ALREADY.

Council made a decision (Tunnel) in 2002 and again in 2005 and again in 2006. The decision part is not the problem.

Steinbrueck our crony, the only ally we have in City Hall to fulfill our agendae.

There, fixed that for you.

Steinbrueck's our crony, the only ally we have in City Hall to fulfill our agendae.

There, fixed that for you.

WELL -- echoes the Sound Transit decision that happened a decade ago....Seattle needs to learn how to hurry up and get things done. Proof's in the pudding.

"The other 72% of the trips use the 4 lane highway, or get distributed to the rest of the steet grid, to which the boulevard will be well connected - unlike any other variant of the viaduct, or it's current incarnation."

Hope is not a plan.

Just for starters, how exactly does a 4-lane boulevard (which replaces 7 lanes of grade-separated highway) get "well connected" to the rest of a street grid through Downtown that is already full for most of the day?

I attest that the natives here have a master plan to eventually drive all the outsiders from the city, and this surface option is part of the plan. The Stranger KNOWS it will cause impossible gridlock, Steinbrueck KNOWS it will cause impossible gridlock, Cary Moon and the departing Grant Cogswell KNOW it will cause impossible gridlock, and that's part of the plan.

The gridlock will make living here impossible for the drivers in this city, and they will give up and move away. Then Seattle will become (and keep in mind this is in the minds of the perpetrators) once again the someqhat quaint, 150,000 denzien city that it used to be before the tech boom of the 90's.

Nevermind that it'll annihilate the city's economy. Don't get in the way of antiprogress, republican car-centric NON-BELIEVER!

"Add high-capacity mass-transit service to the corridor and suddenly you give Seattleites a real choice..."

ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha!ha! ha!ha! ha!

continuing the theme of addressing short-sighted surface proponents, wishing won't make it so. it's the tinkerbell theory of traffic planning - if erica/cary keep clapping long and loud enough, the problem will take care of itself! taking away capacity & pretending that at least 28% of drivers will magically choose to stop driving is both asinine and arrogant.

as for peter's mass transit canard, that's just insulting to every person who voted for the monorail. the costs will keep rising and we're still no closer to true alternative options than we were yesterday. offering up a wink & a promise seems to be the best our politicians have to offer.

Gomez et al:

Do you really believe that the tunnel will prevent gridlock?

Gomez,

I usually agree w/ya, but the City actually hovered around the 500,000 mark in population for quite awhile before population started climbing in the 1990's (the previous all-time high was actually something like 550,000 - but that was back around 1960 when household sizes were larger because kids still lived in the City, and before the Boeing bust of 1969-70 lead to a major exodus).

That said, you're basically right - the City/Stranger/et al all apparently believe that gridlock is super-neato, as all of those 80,000 EVIL people who live in W.Seattle (and a similar number in NW Seattle) will magically start taking the bus and/or ride a bike if the deliberate actions of government can make their commutes miserable enough.

Of course, they won't - but just try telling under-40 urban planners, Stranger writers (most of whom moved here from elsewhere), and Slog posters that....

"Council made a decision (Tunnel) in 2002 and again in 2005 and again in 2006. The decision part is not the problem. "

Yeah, well, we voted for a monorail four times and then there was another vote.

So I guess it's time to just say no to the council. they want an underwater tunnel, we get to vote it down.

"agendae" is neither an English word or a Latin one. In English, the plural of "agenda" is "agendas". In Latin, the plural of "agendum" is "agenda", but that's immaterial to English vocabulary and usage.

bullshit.

I call bullshit on any claim that we’re saving the climate by going with a surface option, but doing nothing about reducing capacity on 520. The number of trips across 520 is roughly equal to the Viaduct.

Climate change will not be solved by the moral superiority of people from Seattle who are terrified of talking to people on the Eastside.

If you want to pursue climate change go after a 6 lane 520, and obliterate the 405 project. But then you’d have to talk to people from the Eastside! Oh, the horror.

Well, at least with this proposal you’ll earn your Smug Seattle button.

See http://www.bartleby.com/61/80/A0138000.html

Steinbrueck is not passing the buck to the state legislature. He’s asking them to reconsider their requirement that any state funding be used to maintain current capacity. Without that, the surface option is DOA.

"Add high-capacity mass-transit service to the corridor and suddenly you give Seattleites a real choice."
A bunch of us went for that not too long ago. Folks ended up balking at the price. What has changed? How would it be cheaper?

AGENDAE forever, Fnarfspeare.

Yes, people will choose transit if traffic is bad enough.

For a small number of people, cars are cool, fun, a status symbol, or whatever. But for most people a car is simply a means to an end. They want to get from their home to their job, or to shop, or to entertainment (bars, movies, restaurants, etc). Right now, we have a sucky transit system, and it is generally faster and easier to get to where you want to go by getting in a car and driving there yourself. When traffic gets bad, we tend to think that we need more roads to accommodate more cars, because we are used to a car-centric society.

Seattle, and most west coast cities, were largely built after the invention of the automobile, and nearly every aspect of city planning took the automobile as prime-people-mover into account. Most people who grew up in or near Seattle, or any other city that is less than 100 years old (roughly) don't know any other way of existing.

But cars are not the only way to get from point 'A' to point 'B'. Nor are cars the fastest or most efficient way to get around. They are here, now, in this city, because we planned it that way. Or rather, failed to plan for any other way.

But cars are hugely wasteful of both resources and space, and cause huge amounts of pollution. There are any number of larger, older cities in the US and all over the world, with far better transit systems that move way more people way faster than would be possible with single passenger vehicles (cars). New York and Chicago are the obvious examples. Or Tokyo. Or pretty much any major city in Europe.

Imagine if New York had no subway system, and instead tried to increase the capacity of roads to move all of those New Yorkers around in cars. It wouldn't be physically possible! And even if you could in some fantasy alternate universe, imaging the pollution from 5 million cars a day. Yet that is the mentality of Seattle. The population is growing and we have more traffic. The answer? Build more roads.

We need more better faster transit. Not more bigger wider roads. More bigger wider roads will only encourage more cars and more pollution and even more gridlock 10 or 20 years from now. I would happily abandon my car if, IF, there was a reasonably clean fast transit option. And I think most other people would too. And good rapid transit is the ONLY real long term solution to both traffic and pollution problems.

The viaduct itself is, for those who live close-in, a) the fastest way TO downtown. With minimal street lights and only two exits from the deck each way, you get there, then you drop into the slow-ass street grid, and b) it's the fastest way THROUGH downtown. You can leapfrog the whole molassas grade-ride completely, hopping from one end to the other before you drop in.
I drive for work. I and others like myself bring you all the shit you use. And a boulevard? I just don't see how strangling the car onto the boulevard accomplishes anything. No subway, no monorail. Nothing to help keep things moving fast. Just dumb.

A boulevard highway is the stupidest imaginable solution which accomplishes the exact opposite of what its supporters claim they want: "reconnecting the city to the waterfront". Wrong: it would seal off the waterfront forever.

Cities like New York are not remotely comparable to cities like Seattle. They're just not. You couldn't build a subway system like New York has today, because it was basically built with the equivalent of slave labor, and you can't do that today. New York's subway system would cost what, $100 trillion dollars today?

The fact is that Seattle is laid out in a certain way, predicated upon the private automobile. You may not like that fact, but that doesn't make it less true. It's not about "getting from A to B", it's about getting from "1206802" to "4807329" and every combination of digits besides that.

That's not to say that transit doesn't have a place here. But what we don't need is MORE IDEAS. We have all the ideas in world. Every ten minutes somebody on the Council says "hey, I know, what if we did THIS?" and the argue about it for a week, and then someone else says "hey, I know". It never ends. We need action, not words.

And we're getting it. Sound Transit is real. It's going to suck, but it really exists. That's what you've got to work with. It would be nice if Steinbrueck and the rest could focus their thinking on the actual instead of the imaginary.

"Yes, people will choose transit if traffic is bad enough."

Not without viable options, they won't.

Given a choice between being in their car for 45-60 minutes (for a trip that now takes 25) or being on a bus for twice that long, which do you think they'll choose?

NYC has shitloads of cars - mature transit system (built in the pre-OSHA glory days when you could kill a couple of immigrant workers per mile and no one would bat an eye) notwithstanding.

Wishing will not make it so. Sorry.

If we could only all drive at 4am -- paradise.

"Battling" global warming? It's a foregone conclusion. The seas will rise, unless a huge ice age happens. Plan for those when you prepare to spend your $X billion on transit. Otherwise, 50 years from now your pretty boulevard arterial, and 520, will be under 20 feet of water. Or ice.

I'm down with mass-transit...I've seen it work well. The Sounder could be the MAIN commuter link between Everett, Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia -- removing hundreds of cars off the I-5 corridor. But inter-city politics and the privately-owned tracks say "no".

Oh well.

Given the Federal dollar restrictions, capitalism, and our quirky geography, no wonder all our transit solutions suck.

NYC, Chicago, Philly et al built their systems around 1900, when the materials were cheaper, the cities far smaller and less developed.

This is 2006, it costs far far more than inflation says it should, and Seattle is so fully developed that development focuses on the distant suburbs and exurbs.

Citing NYC, Chicago, San Francisco as reasons mass transit will directly translate to Seattle are apples/oranges fallacies. As stated above, NYC could not build a subway today, Chicago probably couldn't build the El-train, San Francisco probably couldn't build BART and so on.

What about a canoe/kayak canal from Northgate to the Duwamish via Capitol Hill serviced by solar powered commuter boats with glass bottoms? Holy shit someone write this down!!!

Sounder could be the MAIN commuter link between Everett, Seattle, Tacoma and Olympia -- removing hundreds of cars off the I-5 corridor.

How is that going to be possible, when such a tiny portion of the intercity trips are between places near train stations? Relatively few trips start or end downtown, you know. Downtown is pretty well served by transit, already; but Seattle, like all cities, is turning into a bedroom community for the places where the real economic and community action is -- which are thousands of spots scattered across the map. How is the Sounder going to help the person who lives in Madrona or Columbia City or Shoreline and works in Factoria or Issaquah or Mukilteo?

"Hundreds of cars". Sounds about right. Embarrassing, really.

Right. North/South isn't SO much the problem (in Seattle) as East/West is.

Has anyone looked at how much emissions would be reduced by not having cars change altitude?

Fnarf,

As I've said before, station cars are the answer to creating a useful transit system for the suburbs.

If we build a BRT/light rail "spine", as planned in sound transit 2, the travel times between major suburban activity hubs should be comprable to driving.

Getting people between these hubs and their jobs & homes in the suburbs could be accomplished by simply replacing traditional park'n'ride spots with station cars: smart cars rented by the hour from a pool. Errands by the hour by the day, monthly pass commuters can drive em home at night. A slow build out to ten or fifteen garages could put a station car within minutes of almost all suburban destinations in the region.

I agree Sounder is useless, though. You need fast, frequent, all day service between the hubs to make it a real alternative to driving. Shared frieght rails can never provide that. Cancel it and use the capital to get that light rail line Lynnwood-Tacoma and Seattle-Redmond ASAP.

Living in the suburbs or exurbs is a choice. When you could purchase enough fuel to transport you and 2000 lbs. of steel 30 miles for a dollar, they were reasonable choices. The times are changing. Those who don't like it can move to the cities.

The viaduct itself is, for those who live close-in, a) the fastest way TO downtown

No, those of us who live close-in don't need to get on the viaduct to get downtown. It's far out of our way. For those who live on the outskirts of town, the viaduct is a fairly fast option, but I'm only barely concerned. Living in the suburbs has its ups and its downs. Traffic is one of the downs. If you don't like dealing with traffic on your way in and out, move closer. Think it's too expensive to live in the city? How much do you spend on purchasing, maintaining, and insuring that/those vehicle/vehicles you wouldn't need if you lived here?

and b) it's the fastest way THROUGH downtown.

This may be of concern to the state as a whole, but other than as a (very expensive) courtesy to our neighbors outside the city, it's not much of a concern for Seattle residents. I-5 is a quick way to get through Seattle, and it's not going anywhere regardless of what we do with the viaduct.

Given a choice between being in their car for 45-60 minutes (for a trip that now takes 25) or being on a bus for twice that long, which do you think they'll choose?

I don't know. But regardless, they're likely to demand better mass transit.

As stated above, NYC could not build a subway today, Chicago probably couldn't build the El-train, San Francisco probably couldn't build BART and so on.

So what would they do, build more roads? Triple-deckers throughout the city? No, they'd either continue to live with increasing levels of automobile traffic or suck it up and build mass transit.

How is that going to be possible, when such a tiny portion of the intercity trips are between places near train stations? Relatively few trips start or end downtown, you know.

This wouldn't be the case if we had a more practical regional transit system. Start dropping off thousands of people at the train stations in these cities and you'll see more destinations being created near those train stations.

How is the Sounder going to help the person who lives in Madrona or Columbia City or Shoreline and works in Factoria or Issaquah or Mukilteo?

Unless there are connections available, it won't. But again, there are ups and downs to living outside the city. Why would someone who works in Factoria or Issaquah or Mukilteo choose to live in Madrona or Columbia City or Shoreline, anyway?

Process is killing Seattle. I would use rapid transit even if it was a bit inconvenient. The unfortunate thing is that its a lot inconvenient and the politicos of today operate the same as the politicos of 20 years ago- they discuss and don't act.

I'm for the tunnel, and I'm for spending to get reasonable rapid transit. That means rapid transit that first serves the dense parts of the city- not some multi billion dollar show ride that serves Al's auto body at MLK and Ryan. If people were serious about rapid transit, they would start by running stuff branching from downtown to first the "inner neighborhoods" and as time went on, expanding on that network. Instead, we have a system in which few people will ride for at least 20 years, with the hope it will remove a few hundred cars from the road. Couple that with the fact that to my knowledge buses don't feed that system but act in a corollary fashion, and once again Seattle ends up screwed.

Quite frankly, I could care less about the suburbs. They don't want to fund anything, and I say to that- fine- pay tolls and drive on your roads. Emissions from cars are down significantly on a per car basis; over time with the development of alternatives this will go down even further.

When I lived in London, and in Sydney, I used public transport 98% of the time. It wasn't always the most convenient but it was at least somewhat doable. Until we have some sort of system like that in place here, you won't see anything more than gridlock advancing.

The choice shouldn't be tunnel or no tunnel.

The choice should be spend a few billion on a tunnel or spend a few billion on a new East/West light rail route from downtown Seattle to Redmond.

That would sink the tunnel option pretty quickly.

Isn't it possible that during the time it takes to vote on and build any replacement, that significant advances in development of low/no emissions vehicles will occur?

Or is the "car culture" simply so abhorent for some other reason besides emissions?

I do think far too many have exaggerated the traffic conditions in our region. Seattle's traffic issues, when compared to many cities which have effective and efficient high speed mass transit systems, are not particularly bad.

The debate continues where it is best to spend our limited transportation dollars. Steinbrueck and others expect the automobile will continue to exist in its current form and do not take into consideration that profound technical and monetary investments are being made to ensure that automobiles will conform to environmental demands and the demands of the purchasing public. On the other hand, we are asking ourselves to consider living in denser communities that will, in some cases, prohibit the use of automobiles. Effective and efficient mass transit must be built and available to move people in dense urban settings.

At some point we have to consider both issues and reach a compromise that addresses these ideas. An honest and reasonable discussion of this has not taken place, and we have been left with what should be considered failures of regional and local transit planning: Sound Transit, The Seattle Monorail and the Allentown Trolley. These have been hardly the embryo of a well planned and integrated attempt to address the issues cited above, but more concerned with satisfying a personal political hubris and
wonkishness.

Isn't everyone looking forward to the day we all can once again ride the waterfront trolley? What an incredible asset it has been determined to be in our future mass transit infrastructure.

Emissions is one of several reasons cars are abhorrent. Even if you were able to burn gasoline with 100% efficiency and emit little or no greenhouse gasses, there is a finite amount of oil to be had. Oil is not a renewable resource. We will, over time, run out. As it becomes more scarce, it becomes more expensive (witness what happened after Katrina wiped out much of the Gulf Coast oil production). Its scarceness and high value is fueling the middle east problems. Do you think our government would give a rip about what's going on in the middle east if they weren't sitting on a significant portion of the world's oil reserves? No. And none of the middle east countries would have any money to cause anyone beyond their borders any problems if they didn't have huge amounts of cash from the sale of oil.

But even if we were able to quickly convert over to hydrogen fuel cells, which don't use oil at all, it wouldn't solve gridlock. No greenhouse gasses. Cheap renewable resource. Sounds great. But there is still a finite number of 3000 lb vehicles with one person in them that you can push through city streets. You can build wider freeways and wider bridges across the lake, but eventually they still all funnel into the downtown streets. And you can't make the downtown streets any wider. And you can't make most of the residential streets and arterials much wider. Building a tunnel or new viaduct that adds capacity will just give more cars an opportunity to get downtown more easily, which will just make downtown traffic worse.

To those who argue that New York or Chicago are bad examples, I will concede that yes, most of their systems were built with cheaper labor and lower safety standards. But Washington DC's system was built more recently, as was BART in the San Francisco bay area. So was Portland's light rail. There are all sorts of cities that have built rapid transit systems in recent history using relatively modern construction methods. And building more capacity for cars isn't necessarily cheaper. Witness the Boston Big Dig. Or our own escalating estimates for the Mayor's tunnel.

The mayor seems to think there is 5 billion dollars or so that can be had for a major civic project. All I'm saying is that if we are going to spend $5 billion on something, the city would be better off spending it on mass transit than spending it on a tunnel for cars.

How many times did Peter vote FOR the tunnel? 4 or 5 times? He's no more a leader than The Stranger is an objective news source. He's a political opportunist who is more concerned about trying to fill daddy's big shoes than make Seattle a better place to live.

Subway systems are expensive but they still can be, and are, constructed. People posting on here seem to think that all the US subways were built around 1900, but that is simply not true. Since the early 1970s, we've had subways built in San Francisco, Atlanta, DC, Baltimore, Miami, Montreal...look at Los Angeles, they are still building theirs.

Ya, I understand about oil being a finite resource. That's why I am repping cars that run on electricity. Pure electric cars are getting better and better and we can get use hydro, wind, solar, and (gasp!)nuclear sources to supply the necessary electricity.

That's not to say I think public transportation is bad. However, I simply don't trust Seattle/State officials to implement an effective and comprehensive mode of public transportation in the near future. Do you? The light rail is insufficient.

Our population is only going to grow in the next twenty years. I believe we need to plan for this increase by building higher capacity roads AND by building effective transportation systems. Yes, the costs will be astronomical. However, these projects are necessary investments.

Living in the suburbs or exurbs is a choice.

What fuels that choice is the fact that rental places here cost hundreds of dollars more a month to rent than in the suburbs or exurbs. And houses there cost hundreds of thousands of dollars less to buy.

Your statement infers the choice is made in a vacuum, Phil. Ahem.

Also, good to see the usual level of misinformation, assumptions and delusion from everyone else in this debate. Where to begin....

Nuclear power is, like oil, also a finite resource. We dig fissionable material out of the ground, and according to a National Geographic article a while back, if we were to rely entirely on nuclear power, we would run out of it in 50 years. I'm all for using it as long as there's a proven disposal method, but it's not a long-term solution. Also, at the moment I refuse to take the bait on "car culture" beyond saying that yes, there are other problems with it.

The cost of a rebuild or a tunnel is not worth it. What are you going to do when you still have to negotiate your way through the Battery Street Tunnel to Aurora Avenue? The BST is still going to be 2 lanes in each direction. The new cost estimates do not even include an expansion of the BST (I don't think there ever was a plan) and the whole lowering of Aurora just north of Denny. So, with that I'll say, it doesn't make sense and it costs too damn much to justify whatever benefits people expect. What if, after 7-10 years of construction, etcetera, the new link opens and you find that traffic has not improved and that negotiation is not worth the effort? What a WASTE!

Living in the suburbs or exurbs is a choice.

What fuels that choice is the fact that rental places here cost hundreds of dollars more a month to rent than in the suburbs or exurbs. And houses there cost hundreds of thousands of dollars less to buy.

I really can't speak intelligently about the price of purchasing a home. It just doesn't seem practical to me unless I consider living out in the middle of nowhere and driving anywhere I need or want to be, and I can't imagine being happy there.

As for renting: Let's assume that the one-bedroom, $800/month apartment in Seattle would cost $600/month out in Lyntuckywoodland. With transportation (about $50/month for a bus pass) that comes to $850/mo in the city. Are people out in the suburbs and exurbs really purchasing, maintaining, insuring, fueling, and parking their cars for less than $250 per month? Let's see: $100 for parking if you're lucky, $75 for fuel, $75 for insurance... and if the car is a gift and never requires any service, you break even. What if fuel prices went up to, say, what Europeans pay now? What if we quit subsidising automobile transportation and mass transit and required drivers and riders to pay for roads and rails?

Is it really so much less expensive to live out there when you need to be here every day?

Yo Phil,

Do you have any idea how many Seattle residents work in Kent, Lynnwood, Bellevue, and such? News flash - it's a goodly portion of them (for just one example, as many Seattleites drive across SR 520 to work on the Eastside as do Eastsiders who work in Seattle).

West Seattle, Ballard, and Greenwood aren't the suburbs - they're just as much a part of Seattle as are Capitol Hill and Downtown.

For people with homes, careers and families, just picking up and moving isn't the simple option you paint it out to be. Lots of regular people need cars to get around, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future. Or is there some big regional transit system that voters have funded just about ready to go in the next year (or 20) that I somehow haven't heard about?

Does everyone forget that after the Loma Prieta earhtquake in San Francisco the similarly structured cypress viaduct completely collapsed and the embarcadero freeware was badly damaged (like the seattle viaduct)? However, instead of rebuilding or making super-expensive tunnels that the state had no desire to fund, they tore them down and created surface options while working with traffic abatement in interstate corridors. As a result they have the now much beter looking and more locally appreciated embarcedero blvd and mandella blvd which are a boon to both commerce and beauty. As a result of these no build options, traffic remained about the same as it was. Lets see... less danger w/r to earthquakes, cheaper to complete, better for commerce and beauty, and with no increased traffic. Why are we not looking to san frnacisco for an example on this problem???

Going forward, let's everybody just stop pretending that any of these options is going to change the rate at which the globe warms.

Want to stop a big percentage of noxious vehicle emissions in Washington cheaply? Here's how to do it. If your car registers in the bottom one-half of one percent of vehicles taking the emissions test, the State condemns it. You get the fair market value (for the junkers that spew the most pollutants, that's not much money). I've heard old VW camper vans spew much more pollutants than the modern v8 SUV's.

Take the worst polluting 10,000 cars off the road, and the State's done a fair bit to ease global warming pressures.

But DO NOT give Sound Transit any more tax money and think you are being "green!" Those chuckleheads are not any kind of answer to environmental problems - and their programs are freakishly expensive without providing meaningful benefits to any but a few.

Do you have any idea how many Seattle residents work in Kent, Lynnwood, Bellevue, and such? News flash - it's a goodly portion of them (for just one example, as many Seattleites drive across SR 520 to work on the Eastside as do Eastsiders who work in Seattle).

What is your point? The fact that it is happening doesn't mean it's a good idea or that those of us who chose a more practical arrangement should subsidize the cost of other people's less-practical arrangement. Living in Seattle when you work in Kent, Lynnwood, or Bellevue is a choice, as is living on the east side when you work in Seattle. I don't doubt that it's inconvenient, and I have no desire to make life even less convenient for people who have made that choice, but I don't think the rest of us should be forced to go out of our way to make their inconvenient choice less so.

West Seattle, Ballard, and Greenwood aren't the suburbs - they're just as much a part of Seattle as are Capitol Hill and Downtown.

That's arguable, but I'll concede that many people do not think of those neighborhoods as suburbs.

For people with homes, careers and families, just picking up and moving isn't the simple option you paint it out to be.

I'm not sure what to make of this comment. Clearly, we're not talking about the homeless or unemployed. So let's assume that, for the purpose of this discussion, "people with homes and careers" is everyone. I'll assume that by "families" you actually meant children.

Parenthood is a choice. There are ups and downs to parenthood. One of the downs is the fact that you have more people to move when you move, and for many years, a move involves transferring your children from one school to another. Most parents, I believe, think this is a small price to pay.

But regardless of whether you have a home, a career, and children, moving is almost always a huge pain in the ass. So is a long daily commute. It's your choice: Move yourself twice per day, or knuckle down and move the whole family once. Forcing everyone else to build you a damned highway so you can live where you choose to live and work where you choose to work is another option, but not one that I am likely to support.

Lots of regular people need cars to get around, and will continue to do so for the forseeable future.

And in almost every case, those people chose that situation. Those who choose to live in the city don't need cars to get around.

Does anyone care to comment on my comparison of the cost of renting a home in the city and using public transportation to the cost of renting a less expensive place outside the city and purchasing, maintaining, parking, and fueling one or more vehicles?

@Phil: $800/mo. apartment? Uh, maybe a studio or small 1BR is okay for a single person, but for those who want a family, or a yard, or to not listen to the person upstairs go pee, that won't cut it.

People aren't always stupid and will make choices based on cost -- not just money but time as well.
Somebody above said:
Given a choice between being in their car for 45-60 minutes (for a trip that now takes 25) or being on a bus for twice that long, which do you think they'll choose?

They'd probably take the car. But give a choice between 45-60 minutes in the car or half that long on a train, they'd probably choose the train. When traffic is bad enough, people choose mass transit or to stay home (or shop locally as Steinbrueck said). But purposefully f'ing up traffic by installing a boulevard is a stupid option. Replacement, while not great (no option is, imo), is the best bet. It's what will be done in the end. The politicos are just lining themselves up with dreamy options so that when the replacement is made and people are unhappy, they can say "well I wanted that pneumatic tube transport, but the state said no."

I like Sound Transit. It's not perfect, but it's a start. FINALLY. Eventually it'll run where the major freeways run. Eventually after that, maybe they'll have little spur lines connecting to those arterials, but that'll happen long after I'm dead, I'm sure.

You appparently have no idea how the real world works for literally hundreds of thousands of people in this region. Take just one hypothetical - someone lives within the City limits and works in an in-City neighborhood. They work for a few years, buy a house, put their kids in school, put down roots, etc. Then their job goes away. The only work they can find in their field in in S.King or Snohomish County. In order to meet your purity test, they evidently are supposed to pull up stakes, sell the home, yank the kids out of school away from their friends, etc.

Got news, pal, that just isn't how it works in the real world for most people, and even within the City - where fully 67% of work trips still occur by car (56% of them in SOV's).

Bonus question - how many work trips do you think occur as pedestrian or bike trips? Try 7% and 3% respectively.

That's the reality for most of Seattle's residents. Get off your high horse and deal with it.

Oops, last post was directed at Phil - Him posted while I was still typing.

I'll give you a concrete example of why some folks still live in the exurbs. I live in Auburn. I bought my house seven years ago. I work in Burien. My husband is a carpenter who works all over the region, mostly in Seattle. We bought in Auburn because that's where his ex-wife lives, and that way he could have maximum time with his sons while they were growing up.

Now that they're out of the house, we both desperately want to move into the city, preferably west Seattle, as that would be the most convenient for both of us. We looked at houses. Given what I could sell mine for (and what I owe on it) and what houses cost, there is no way to move into even a remotely comparable house (modest home, no yard to speak of, but in reasonable condition). It is simply not possible. It's not a question of considering the costs of giving up cars - we both have to use our vehicles for work, so we still have to own, insure, and license them. We'd save a few bucks a week on gas, but that's not going to pay the additional $500 to $1000 a month that the mortgage would cost me.

It's all very well to talk about how people "should" live in the city. Some of us simply can't. I'd like to. I tried to make the numbers work. I can't.

$800/mo. apartment? Uh, maybe a studio or small 1BR is okay for a single person, but for those who want a family, or a yard, or to not listen to the person upstairs go pee, that won't cut it.

Having children, having a yard, or having a home built in such a manner that you cannot hear your neighbors' noise, are things that do not come for free. Someone who wants those things shouldn't ask the rest of us to absorb the costs of them. He can pay extra to have these things in the city, or he can have them less expensively outside the city. If he lives outside the city and works in the city, his transportation will be expensive, both in terms of money and in terms of time. Many people ignore this added cost of transportation.

Gomez' point was that people are driven to live in the suburbs because housing is cheaper there. I responded by noting that he did not consider the cost of transportation. Transportation is cheap if you live and work in the city, but it's quite expensive if you live outside the city, regardless of where you work.

But if you think an $800/month city apartment won't cut it, let's bump it up a full 25% and compare a $1000 apartment in the city (plus about $50 per month for transportation) to an $800 apartment outside the city (plus the cost of a vehicle). Again: Do the those people who spend less on rent by living outside the city really purchase, maintain, park, and fuel a vehicle for less than $50 + the added cost of city housing?

Geni, thanks for reminding us that some jobs require a person to drive a vehicle to work. That's a tricky situation, and it surely increases the cost of carpentry, since vehicles are very expensive. Ditto for delivery drivers or door-to-door salespeople. In all those cases, dealing with traffic is part of the job and there's no way around it, so it sounds like living outside the city to save money on housing makes sense.

But you've implied that a house similar to the one you are purchasing in Auburn is a necessity for you, and that since you can't afford to purchase such a house here in Seattle -- even on the southwest edge of the city where you would have to rely upon the crumbling viaduct for easy access to the core of the city -- you can't afford to live here. That's like someone trying to move from Arkansas to a city on the West Coast, but giving up because he can't find another modest four-bedroom McMansion on a little one-acre lot for anywhere near what he is paying for his house in Arkansas. (I used to live there and I saw the reverse; lots of people moved there and bought enormous homes for what they sold their tiny West Coast homes for.)

It's all very well to talk about how people "should" purchase a single-family home. Some of us simply can't. I'd like to. I tried to make the numbers work. I can't -- without moving to Auburn, which is something I don't want to do. So I rent my townhouse apartment in Seattle.

Some people who think they can't afford to live in the city have, in my opinion, confused luxuries with necessities. My family (just two of us) lives in a one-bedroom, 850-square-foot, home. We'd like to have more space, but we don't need it. We could afford more space if we moved farther away, but then we'd have to pay a lot more for transportation and either deal with traffic or make everyone else build more roads for us.

Phil reminds me of former Mayor Paul Schell telling us we all just had to learn to live in smaller spaces. Remember how that worked out for him (Whidbey Island and French vacation homes notwithstanding)?

We don't have to live in smaller spaces any more than we have to drive a car or deal with a long commute. We can avoid all those things, but it costs more to do so.

I'm not asking anyone to make my home bigger for me, and I don't think people who choose to live farther out should ask me to make their commute shorter for them. Want a shorter commute? Live closer to work. Work in the city and don't want to pay the extra price of living here? Live in a smaller space or get rid of the car. Don't want to live in a smaller space or give up the car? Live in the suburbs -- but please don't complain about how long it takes to get back into the city.

A dense population using mass transit is an efficient use of our resources. You're welcome to splurge on larger property or a personal vehicle, but please don't ask the rest of us to subsidize your luxuries.

the Steinbrueck op-ed was quite useful as it suggested the state to reconsider its requirement for six lanes of limited access highway capacity on the central waterfront and by reminding decision makers of the role of transportation in global warming. Steinbrueck omitted another option that could be considered if the capacity requirement was relaxed: a four-lane tunnel with dynamic tolling and some surface improvements and ramps to Western and Elliott avenues.

all the mega highway projects and limited access highways should be tolled. the post suggesting that the AWV and SR-520 decisions be made together is sound.

downtown Seattle is not congested in the midday.

transit is not very attractive if it is stuck in general purpose traffic congestion. it requires its own rights of way or priority through the streets. is there political will to provide it? there seems political will to build a silly half-baked streetcar for our local billionaire.

West Seattle is what it is precisely because the AWV has been there for 50 some years - and replacing it simply preserves the status quo, it's not some "subsidy" we're imposing on you.

Fuck West Seattle? Fuck you!

Settle down, Rudeguy. Is West Seattle really what it is today because of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, or because of the West Seattle Bridge. I think you are confused. I don't hear anyone suggesting that we tear down the West Seattle Bridge.

Besides, this discussion has shifted from the AWV to the question of whether we should devote more of our shared resources to reducing the cost of living outside the city. It is my opinion that we should not. I definitely do not think that we should encourage sprawl.

Gomez pointed out that many people live out in the 'burbs because they think it is less expensive to live there. I responded by reminding him that while housing may be cheaper there, transportation is far more expensive there. So much more expensive, in fact, that I suspect the additional cost offsets the "hundreds of dollars per month" that can be saved by renting a home there instead of here.

Does anyone care to comment on whether or not the added cost of purchasing, maintaining, licensing, insuring, parking, and fueling the vehicle that is essentially necessary for living in the suburbs or exurbs while working in the city (or another suburb or exurb) offsets the cost savings of renting a home there instead of in the city? Gomez, does your silence indicate agreement?

Fuck settling down and fuck civility - you're talking about getting rid of a major lifeline to an established in-city neighborhood of well over 80,000 people.

BTW - the West Seattle Bridge opened in 1983. I think most of West Seattle was around a tad bit longer than that.

As to your last question - no, for most people, it doesn't. Your dismissive attitude regarding Geni's cogent post above completely dismisses the fact that renting closer-in doesn't create enduring value in the way that purchasing one's home does, and speaks volumes about your agenda.

You want subsidies - how about West Seattle tolls subsidizing a promenade for cruise ship tourists and affluent downtown condo dwellers?

So, once again. Fuck me? Fuck you!

west seattle developed long before either the AWV or the high level bridge. it developed along three streetcar lines: two were along California Avenue SW (routes 54 to Fauntleroy and 55 to Admiral follow the lines); the third was along the shoreline out to Alki.

the auto-orientation of West Seattle and the remainder of Seattle increased as more limited access highways were added: AWV, 1953; I-5, 1963; high level bridge, 1980s.

Eddie,

Good points. Do you know when W.Seattle was annexed by Seattle (my guess is early 1920's, but I have no idea)?