This post is by leaders of the Sustainable 520 Coalition, including members of the North Capitol Hill Neighborhood Association, Madison Park Community Council, Montlake Community Council, Laurelhurst Community Council, Seattle's Boating Community, and Roanoke/Portage Bay Community Council.

City council members, it’s time to represent Seattle. Instead, you’ve been enabling the state to rush toward awarding construction contracts for 520 this summer.

We know that expanding 520 is a state project. But the city council could and should be ensuring the state’s project actually helps, not harms, our city. The council should be asking, not avoiding, the hard questions:

1) How can it help the city to take a lane away from I-5? The state’s currently “preferred alternative” for 520 removes a lane from I-5 on the ship canal bridge and just south of the 520 interchange. One less I-5 lane guarantees problems for anyone commuting to or from anywhere north of the ship canal.

2) How can it help the city to start a project with no reasonable prospect of the funding to finish it? The state plans to use all its available funds in expanding four lanes to six from the eastside to near Seattle. Then it will run out of money; the state budget is without the funds it would need to finish the Seattle side of the project within the next 10 years. The shortfall will exceed $2.5 billion—an amount too big to come from tolling I-90 or from the federal government.

Please don’t tell us the legislature is considering new taxes. Even assuming the legislature would devote such a huge percent of its budget to Seattle, transportation taxes don’t pass without support from the people of the 43rd district—the people most harmed by the state’s currently “preferred alternative.”

3) How can it help the city, or the region, to leave 520’s Seattle side vulnerable to earthquakes, for 10 years or more?

520’s worst safety vulnerability is on the Seattle side, where the road is supported by columns that could crumble in an earthquake. Yet the state has allocated none of its available funds to fix these columns.

Why not use the available funds to fix the safety problems, now? That is, after all, how this project was sold to the public—as a safety fix.

4) How can it help the city, or the region, to start a project before understanding how it will impact Seattle traffic? Peter Hahn, director of the Seattle Department of Transportation, has recently written to the state highway department, pointing out that city streets will be affected from Madison to Northwest 75th and from Lake Washington to I-5, in ways not yet understood. Hahn sensibly asks that traffic impacts be studied and that good plans to preserve mobility in the city be in place, before the state issues any final environmental impact statements. We endorse this; why don’t you?

Increasing the number of vehicles that have to get through the Montlake interchange will extend the congestion far beyond Montlake, into Capitol Hill, Roanoke Park, Portage Bay, Madison Park, and the university district. Most trip times will be longer not shorter; congestion on the Seattle side will offset any time improvement crossing Lake Washington.

Council members, we elected you. We all agree the 520 corridor needs help. But it needs to be done right.

As a council, so far, you seem content with the few minor tweaks you’ve tacked onto the state’s very bad plan. Please, instead, represent the people of Seattle. Our request is simple: please critically assess the big picture and the details, before you consent to any move forward on this ill-conceived project.