Orphan Road

Sometimes I wish I was a retired engineer with too much time on my hands, and I could waste the state's time by leading them down blind alleys:

"We're going the extra mile on this one," said viaduct project manager Ron Paananen. "We don't expect this will change the outcome at all."

The state will hire California structural engineer Kit Miyamoto, the same engineer who reviewed a plan by Port Townsend engineer Victor Gray, who for years has been urging the state to repair, rather than replace, the viaduct.

Does Gray have photos of Paananen visiting a Thai brothel or something? Why are they bending over backwards to accommodate this guy?

(via)

Larry Lange reports in the P-I. Here's my favorite:

A third "surface" option similar to the second but with waterfront traffic handled using six lanes on Alaskan Way and Western Avenue. Estimated speed: 30 mph. With all three "surface" Third Avenue would be restricted to transit traffic downtown and 10-minute Metro "Rapid Ride" service is assumed on Aurora Avenue, West Mercer and from West Seattle.

Several of the other alternatives assume a First Avenue streetcar in the scenario. I don't get that. I mean, a First Ave streetcar is cool and all, but how does it help displaced Viaduct traffic? All the people who jump on the Viaduct to get from Pioneer Square to Belltown? Then again, one of the other alternatives assumes a Lake Forest Park Park-and-Ride. How that affects the Viaduct mystifies me. But traffic flows are crazy things, and I defer to the experts.

Politically, though, it seems like the ones that make major changes to I-5 -- like a single managed toll lane -- are going to be the most difficult and time-consuming to implement.

I'm not sure what they put in the water in Seoul, South Korea, but it seems to be doing wonders for the Seattle Times' James Vesely:

With about 70,000 workers, day and night, 24/7, the people of Korea tore down their old viaduct and installed an ancient river, pushing about 120,000 tons of water a day through miles of the city.

Gone are the slums, back are the ducks. Gone is the rule of traffic above the shops and in its place, the riverwalk of all riverwalks, miles and miles in a straight line to the sea — a grand canal called Cheong Gye Cheon.

How did they do it?

In-ken Lee, director-general of urban planning, led the project under the mayor's supervision. Lee remembers the time as a coming together of the city, with notorious negotiations with some 4,000 shopkeepers who wanted the viaduct to remain.

"We met every week with the mayor to discuss progress," Lee said in an interview this past Tuesday. "Every Sunday morning, 8 a.m. to 10 a.m."

I'm thinking: Smokes, that's a serious commitment.

Indeed. Commitment means sticking to a vision and executing on it. Interesting, then, that just weeks ago a glum, dejected Vesely was calling for a retrofit of the Seattle viaduct on the grounds that he was tired of all the bickering and cajoling (you know, the stuff they call "politics").

Maybe the Seoul smog did him some good, and he'll return to Seattle with a renewed sense of commitment.

The holy trinity (Sims, Nickels, Gregoire) have a joint op-ed in the Times today on the "multidimensional" problem of replacing the Viaduct.

Mike @ CIS sees tell-tale signs of squishiness, and I tend to agree. But they do at least seem to be softening up the public for the idea that there might not be a new waterfront freeway in Seattle's future.

For folks like me who are obsessed with this stuff, the idea of going to an Embarcadero-style surface boulevard makes so much sense, we can tend to forget how much of a shock it might be to the general public when our elected leaders announce that they're going to tear down a highway and replace it with... nothing.

Well, nothing you can see anyway. Sure, gas is at $4/gallon, yes, Americans are starting to drive less and think about alternatives. But it's going to take some real public education before they announce the plan later this year.

10 options are on the table for the Alaskan Way Viaduct. You'll recall that there were once six, then it was down to two, then we voted "no" on both, and so now we're fully out the other side of the rabbit hole.

Though it's easy to dismiss this as more of the loathed "Seattle process," it's important to remember that some really critical decisions have actually been made. For example, in the time since the "no rebuild" option was first discarded, WSDOT officially re-defined its mission from moving cars to moving people. And we got a much better idea of the actual vehicular traffic on the highway (there are not, in fact, that many trucks that use it).

It isn't always obvious, but we are making progress.

Update: Erica Barnett says the Times is being too generous by giving all options equal weight.

Two pieces worth reading on the Viaduct-Spokane St.-Mercer St. funding issue. Erica Barnett in the print edition of The Stranger, and Larry Lange on the P-I's Traffic Watch blog.

At issue is Mayor Nickels' attempt to push a Mercer St. upgrade through the city council. Nickels doesn't have the money for it, but he wants to link it to a rebuilt Spokane St. viaduct as a way to increase mobility when the Alaskan Way Viaduct comes down.

So far, the council isn't buying, prefering to wait until more funding is secured. They may have a point. To the outside eye, it seems like Nickels is just rushing to get Mercer done so it's nice and pretty in time for the Vulcan-built Amazon headquarters opening in SLU in 2011-2012, and he's using the Viaduct as a convenient excuse. But that's just idle speculation on my part.

That said, costs of a new Mercer St are going to continue go up, up, up. Maybe it is best to float a bond like the Mayor's suggesting and get to work.

Rendering of Mercer St. looking west from SDOT.

I'm going to propose a theory of what may be in the heads of our civic leaders. Tell me if I'm an insane dreamer.

Observations:
* The city killed the waterfront trolley.
* The city killed the waterfront trolley again.
* The mayor may want a city tax for in-city transit.
* The city has proposed a streetcar system.
* This streetcar system oddly lacks a waterfront streetcar.
* There's been a proposal to not replace the Viaduct, but instead move people using a "thousand little fixes".
* We could really use West Seattle transit to the city.
* We could really use transit from Ballard to the city.
* They're reinforcing the highway 99 tunnel to withstand earthquakes.

Theory:
What if they replaced the viaduct... with a streetcar? Perhaps they've already made the decision to do this, but don't want to tell anyone about it until they gather support for reducing/removing car traffic on this part of 99.

It could run from scenic Alki, through the tourist filled waterfront, into the tunnel and past the Seattle Center and Queen Anne over the Aurora Bridge and down the hill to eclectic Fremont, ending in Ballard. It would connect many of the tourist-attracting areas of Seattle with one line, solve transportation issues, connect to downtown, stop at all of the cruise and ferry piers, and could even be traffic-separated for a long portion of its journey.

It wouldn't be for commuters (though it could be used as such). It would be for travelling around in our city in an enjoyable and scenic way.

Congratulations on the Alaskan Way Viaduct for being included in Popular Mechanics report, "The 10 Pieces of U.S. Infrastructure We Must Fix Now."

Interesting piece in the Boston Globe talking about how cities like Seattle are re-thinking big downtown highways after the Big Dig. The article notes that the federal juice isn't there like it used to be -- the Dig would basically never have happened had Tip O'Neill not been Speaker of the House.

Of course, we've got our own Tip O'Neill here in Seattle, but thankfully she's focused on funding for transit, not big downtown highway tunnels.

I also liked this bit from John Norquist:

John O. Norquist, a former mayor of Milwaukee, concedes that his plan to tear down a 0.8-mile stretch of an elevated highway would not have passed a public referendum.

Instead, he persuaded Milwaukee's downtown property owners that the old Park East Freeway was hurting their land values and undermining economic progress. Then he took the plan to the governor and bartered a deal, he said.

Norquist is so convinced of the economic and cultural values of the project that he now goes around the country advocating highway removals, as president of the Congress of New Urbanism.

Norquist argues strenuously that successful cities are not built on their lack of traffic congestion. He offers Detroit as an example of a city that has defeated congestion, but has yet to recover from its economic problems.

"The thing that makes Boston valuable isn't its fast traffic," he said. "The thing that makes Boston is its complexity."

As much as it pains us to admit it sometime, traffic congestion is a happy problem. It means people have lots of jobs to go to. If Microsoft were to close up shop in Redmond, I'm sure it would ease traffic on the 520. But at what cost?

Couple of interesting tidbits from Greg Nickels' appearance on KUOW this morning:

- He's all but ready to bring ST 2.1 back to to the ballot in '08. That's good news indeed.

- He got very coy when Marcie Sillman pressed him for details on the 2-way Mercer Street, indicating that it was all tied up with the viaduct issue and that there would be a major announcement "in the next few weeks." The Spokane Street Viaduct rebuild also factors in, apparently.