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March 24, 2006

Tear It Down, Leave It Down

Allie and I have been going back and forth in e-mail these last few weeks (and, briefly, at last nights' Confab) about the best way to deal with Seattle's aging (and increasingly unsafe) Alaskan Way Viaduct along SR99. (The Viaduct, in case you don't know, is a double-decker concrete freeway that runs along the Seattle waterfront, much like San Francisco's old Embarcadero freeway.)

Option #1 is to simply replace the thing, building a new, modern Viaduct in its stead. Allie hates this option, and so do I.

Option #2 is to tear down the Viaduct and replace it with a tunnel, conveying cars and trucks underground and reconnecting Seattle with its waterfront. Mayor Nickels loves this proposal, and Allie thinks it's the right one as well.

Option #3 - the one I favor - is to tear the Viaduct down and replace it with ... nothing.

Yep, that's right. Let's get rid of the Viaduct. We don't need it.

First, let's be frank about something: the Viaduct is coming down. It was damaged in the Nisqually earthquake of 2001, and the thing is currently listing. WSDOT predicts that the failure rate of the Viaduct increases by 5% for each year it stays up. The road carries about 120,000 cars per day, which means that the failure of the Viaduct - either through its own, natural decline or hastened by another earthquake - will kill a lot of people and disrupt Seattle's economy.

It's also an eyesore (as well as an earsore). If you've ever walked along Seattle's waterfront, you've been treated to the sight of this sprawling, 50-foot-high concrete monstrosity running from one end of the city to the other. The noise is considerable - I mean, you have a frickin' freeway running over your head, and the concrete construction gives the already-considerable noise this wonderful amplification/reverb effect. You can think of the Viaduct as the ultimate conversation killer - if only because you can't hear anything else.

The Washington State legislature recognizes the increasing risk to life, limb and property, and has allocated $2.2 billion to replace the Viaduct with ... another Viaduct. While we certainly need to deal with the current Viaduct's considerable structural issues, replacing one loud eyesore with another - especially one that's going to be 50% wider than the current design - is insane. Mayor Nickels (quite correctly) recognizes that the need to tear down the Viaduct is an opportunity to reshape Seattle's skyline for the better. Hence: his tunnel solution.

Problem is, tunnels are expensive. Like, nearly a billion dollars more than the straight-up Viaduct rebuild. So Nickels is engaging in political brinksmanship to get the project built, and state legislators are pushing back.

Meanwhile, the Viaduct continues to decay. Tick, tick, tick, tick...

Interestingly, the collapse of San Francisco's Embarcadero freeway may provide us with an insight about the Viaduct that could save us a few billion bucks - namely, if the Viaduct vanishes ... so does a lot of traffic. In other words, if we simply remove the Viaduct, well, it may not have a negative impact on traffic at all. The Stranger went to SF in December, and came back with the following:

In 1989, San Francisco faced a similar dilemma: The two-level elevated Embarcadero Freeway, which citizens voted to preserve in 1986, was badly damaged in the Loma Prieta earthquake, leading city leaders to close it down and forcing car traffic to find another way through the city. In the earthquake's immediate aftermath, officials predicted gridlock for miles in each direction; but that gridlock never materialized, and eventually, Mayor Art Agnos (seconded by a closely divided San Francisco Board of Supervisors) decided to tear it down, reducing car capacity on the waterfront and distributing Embarcadero traffic onto city streets.

Despite the nightmare scenarios painted by those who opposed its demolition, the Embarcadero today is a relatively uncrowded, six-lane surface thoroughfare: it carries 16,000 vehicles a day (compared to a previous level of up to 110,000), with the remaining trips either eliminated or distributed onto city streets.

Interestingly, a local group, the People's Waterfront Coalition, has spring up to sell this exact solution to Seattle. They point out that, economically, for the same money as a tunnel we could "purchase 10,000 helicopters, one for every dozen Viaduct commuters and fly them downtown instead" ... or simply write every Viaduct commuter a check for $50,000.

Now, as I've been in heated arguments about this with pro-tunnel friends, they often will tell me that "Seattle isn't like San Francisco" (translation: we should not expect the removal of the Viaduct to work for us as it did for them). The pro-tunnel forces will tell me that the poor people who work in West Seattle need the Viaduct to get to work every day, or that the through traffic carried on the Viaduct absolutely depends on its continued operation in order to make Seattle's economy work.

Fair enough.

But interestingly, it turns out that, in order to build the tunnel, you have to close the Viaduct for four years. Read that again: four years. Those poor folks in West Seattle? That economically-necessary through traffic? Well, they're going to lose their transit methods for more than a thousand days.

You know what? Over a thousand days, a "new normal" appears. People find accommodations with their environment. They get to work differently. They move to new houses. Businesses relocate. Things sort out.

In other words, if you're going to close it for four years anyway, why reopen it at all? Hell, it'll be a new freeway at that point, right? People will have to re-learn to take the shiny new tunnel, because they'll be so used to working around its absence.

Would I like a tunnel? Of course: tunnels are cool. Problem is, we just have other, more pressing issues that demand our dollars. So take the $2.2Bn from the state and pump it into other transit problems, like replacing 520 or untangling Interstate 5.Let's tear it down and leave it down - 'cause after four years, who'll know the difference, anyway?

Posted by Gavin Shearer at March 24, 2006 4:05 PM. Posted to Politics | Transit.

Comments

Posted by: Song at March 24, 2006 6:12 PM

Posted by: Danika at March 24, 2006 9:35 PM

Posted by: Song at March 26, 2006 1:55 PM

Posted by: marnie at March 26, 2006 5:30 PM

Posted by: Allie at March 27, 2006 10:44 AM

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