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 | Waterfall Park in Seattle's Pioneer Square. Seattle, WA July 3, 2005 |
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« Two Weeks With A MacBook Pro | Main | Back From Detroit » November 19, 2006Viaduct: Not As Valuable As We ThoughtThe Stranger's Erica C. Barnett has an article in this week's Stranger ("Fuzzy Math") that has more bad news for proponents of the expensive, boondoggle-y tunnel replacement. See, a core piece of the argument for replacing the current Viaduct with a multibillion-dollar, brand-spankin' new tunnel (or even simply rebuilding it) is predicated on the Viaduct being an essential, north-south transit corridor that carries hundreds of thousands of cars a day. Without a good, high-speed route through the city (such as would be facilitated by said tunnel), the thinking goes, those cars will wind up on the streets of Seattle, clogging arteries and causing citywide gridlock. The number that has been bandied around as the average daily "flow" on the Viaduct is 110,000 cars. It turns out that number may be, um, high: The 110,000 figure is based on traffic models and hasn’t changed since at least 2002, when newspapers first began reporting the figure. A look at WSDOT’s actual traffic counts, as measured by a computerized sensor on the roadway itself, however, shows “annual average daily traffic” of only 74,700 vehicles—just 68 percent of WSDOT’s inflated number. In general, actual traffic counts are far more reliable than computerized models in estimating traffic flow. In other words, the Viaduct may not be nearly as vital to Seattle as previously thought. Posted by Gavin Shearer at November 19, 2006 7:54 AM. Posted to Politics | Transit. CommentsPost a commentThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |