Orphan Road

The new plan to save money on a new 520 bridge:

Depending on the final design, trimming the size of a new bridge could save the cash-strapped project $100 million to $500 million, said state Rep. Judy Clibborn, D-Mercer Island, chair of the House Transportation Committee, who has been briefed on the proposals.

...

The current $4.4 billion cost estimate would be reduced, to a range of $3.6 billion to $4.1 billion, by spending less on floating pontoons, said state Treasurer Mike Murphy, who said he was briefed by a senior Gregoire aide.

That idea will be controversial, because the state Department of Transportation had envisioned a series of twin, 75-foot-wide pontoons to provide extra buoyancy, allowing future light-rail or other trains to be added. Instead, the state would look at a single-pontoon design, Murphy said. But any downsizing might hinder a transit retrofit two or three decades from now.

Really? We're going to nibble around the edges here?

[I really don't understand why this 520 bridge thing is so complicated. It's far more straightforward than the Viaduct. Everyone agrees we need a new, bigger bridge and we need it now. Why not just tear down the 4-lane bridge and replace it with a 6-lane, with shoulders and bike lanes, and be done with it? Why all the sturm und drang?]

Look, I have no problem with running light rail across the Lake exclusively on I-90. I think it's more efficient to have one Lake crossing, and from Bellevue the rail line can fan out in multiple directions: Kirland, Overlake, Issaquah, etc. That's basically how BART works in San Francisco. But BART is running out of capacity on the Transbay Tube and is planning a second one.

And while I'm all for saving money, you have to look at the opportunity costs. The other way to save $500M it to use the Montlake Interchange option instead of the Pacific Interchange option. What's so great about the Pac. Interchange that it's worth depriving future generations of potential rail capacity? That's the implicit tradeoff here.

Update: The Governor announces $2B in State funding, the rest in tolls. But will she toll I-90 as well? She'll have to, I'd guess. Tolls could also reduce congestion on 520 in the interim decade or so until the new bridge is completed.