Orphan Road

WSDOT crews knocked down the Wilburton Tunnel this weekend. The tunnel is coming down as part of the I-405 South Bellevue Widening Project. With the tunnel gone, the 42-mile Eastside Rail corridor will be officially severed in two. Nevertheless, the PSRC is still moving forward with a second study on using the corridor for commuter rail.

Photo from WSDOT used under a Creative Commons license.

Danny Westneat wants to cancel the proposed I-405 widening, divert the money to a new 520 floating bridge and set up passenger rail on the BNSF Eastside rail corridor.

The other day, I advocated using viaduct money for the same purpose. I still prefer that, since a wider 405 could strengthen the case for not rebuilding the Viaduct (by adding regional North-South capacity).

But hey, why not do both? We can take Danny's idea for 520, then use the money saved by not rebuilding the Viaduct to build a sweet little monorail between, say, Ballard and West Seattle.

Meanwhile, Westneat's passenger rail proposal comes via this reprot, which pegs the cost of track upgrades to the eastside line at $37M. That sounds compelling, until you realize it doesn't include the costs of building stations and buying trains. PSRC pegged the costs at $300M, though that's still a bargain when you consider the costs of building new light rail can be upwards of $300M per mile.

Larry Lange, in a great roundup of Proposition 1, highlights some viaduct goodness in the package:

Seattle stands to get $323 million in regional money if Proposition 1 passes to finance about 90 percent of three major road improvement projects on Mercer, and South Lander and Spokane streets. Those routes could handle traffic during the removal of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and ultimately facilitate a surface-street replacement.

Indeed. Improving east-west connecitons south of downtown will make it easier to move people and freight without the viaduct. Additionally, adding lanes to I-405 will help realize one of my own little surface-transit ideas: routing Everett-to-Tacoma through traffic onto 405, freeing up capacity on I-5 to handle the viaduct-free future.

Either way, passing Prop. 1 will make a surface-transit replacement for the viaduct far easier.

In his column this week, Josh Feit at The Stranger argues that it would be better for environmentalists and transit advocates to vote "no" on this fall's RTID/ST2 package, and instead hope for a transit-only vote in 2008.

Feit's first argument is that there's still plenty of work to do on ST1, so waiting another year to start on ST2 is no biggie. That's specious logic. Sound Transit knows how to walk and chew gum at the same time. The more advanced planning they can do, the better. Land acquisition and construction costs are increasing at 3-5x the rate of inflation. Every year we wait adds hundreds of millions of dollars to the project.

Secondly he notes that the "the compromisers inform us cuckoo idealists that political reality wont allow a 2008 vote. Governor Gregoire won't stand for it." But the "political reality" has never been about Governor Gregoire. Rather, it's been about the fact that the Puget Sound region, for various reasons, has always been skittish about big transit projects -- from the failed 1911 Bogue Plan to the failed 1968 Forward Thrust to the failed 1995 RTA package to the failed 2000 Monorail. We need to be coaxed along slowly, carefully, and with lots of candy. Because, let's remember, for all Seattle's "progressive," "big-city" pretensions, it's still a small and relatively rural town in one of America's most outlying provinces. That's the "political reality" of the region, and it has little to do with Gov. Gregoire's re-election campaign.

Finally, Feit notes that 2008 will be a much more favorable political climate for liberals, being a presidential election year. That has some merit, although one has to weigh the more favorable political climate against the increased risk of a transit-only package going in front of all three counties. It seems like a wash at best.

Regardless, it's hard to see what a "no" vote actually accomplishes. Feit calls out the $1.1B I-405 expansion, for example. But that's something that's going to happen eventually. 405 needs to be expanded and there's more than enough political will to make it happen. If environmentalists think they can kill the 405 expansion, they're misguided. The best they can do is delay it, which will make it more expensive (and starve even more money from transit projects) down the road.

Vote yes this November.

Update: In retrospect, I was a little sloppy above when I wrote that I-405 "needs" to be expanded. What meant (and what I tried to get at in the rest of the sentence) is that there's more than enough political and popular will to expand I-405. It would be very, very hard to stop it, given the relative power of the suburbs versus the city in Olympia and a general sense that Seattle gets all the attention. I-405 expansion is the one project that the Eastside really wants and, as I've argued elsewhere, it might even offer an opportunity for a surface/transit solution to replace the Viaduct.

The P-I gives us the rundown on the looming construction mess:

The state wants the job done quickly so I-5 is usable when initial work begins next year to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. There was no way to keep more lanes open and allow crews to work safely, state officials said, or to spread it over nights and weekends and get the work done before fall rains begin.

Initially, up to two lanes at a time between Spokane Street and I-90 will be closed, then three lanes toward the end of the job during the work -- 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

"In terms of the impact to traffic, this is going to be the biggest," said state transportation spokeswoman Jamie Holter of the $15.5 million project. "There isn't a place in the state where you have that many vehicles on the road."

WSDOT is doing everything it can to get the word out, Metro is pitching in with increased bus service. One logical piece would be to reroute through-traffic to I-405. In fact, as I've argued before, when they finally widen 405 in 10 or 20 years, they ought to re-name it I-5 and make the route through Seattle -- the one that goes down to one northbound lane at Seneca Street -- I-405 or I-205, like in Portland.

Who knows, maybe through-traffic isn't significant enough to make a tangible difference, or maybe even the wider I-405 can't handle the increased traffic.

Is it really true that the $16B transportation plan on this fall's ballot is doomed? The Seattle Times reports:

Legislators worry the package is too expensive for voters to accept yet doesn't fully fund a new floating bridge or complete as much work as they think is needed on some of the region's most-congested highways, such as Highway 167.

Instead, the money is spread too thin in order to cover as many projects as possible, they say.

Here's the problem: projects like this are what legislators call "Christmas Trees": everyone wants to hang their own special ornament until the whole thing collapses under its own weight. That said, there's nothing really egregious, as far as I can tell, in this package. It's not like anyone's proposing a 12-lane I-605 through the Cascades. Mostly it's a series of much-needed and long-deferred projects: fixing SR-520, widening the southern section of I-405, etc. Oh yeah, and $9.8B to send light rail to the Eastside.

All of these projects seem to have fairly broad public support. What's important now is for our legislators to stop allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. It's time to start "moving dirt," as Pierce County Exec. John Ladenburg says. This package is not perfect, but it's good enough. And the longer we wait, the more expensive the construction costs will get, meaning that we'll be getting less and less for our money, and the fights will get even nastier.

Put another way: construction costs are rising by about 10% a year. That's $1.6B on a 16B package. Meaning that if we wait a year, we add $1.6B to the cost of construction. Widening I-405 is going to cost just over $1B. In other words, it makes absolutely no sense to oppose this initiative if you're, say, trying to kill the 405 project, since by voting for it now instead of next year, we're basically getting 405 for free.