Try an experiment. You are going to try it anyway if the Mayor's tunnel plan prevails.

(Note: I'm keeping this post up toward the top for a few days as it is an important one.)

•••

Even the staid mainstream media is giving the "surface option" some serious play and the Seattle P-I asks the question: Could Seattle do without its elevated highway?

The obvious way to answer the question is to experiment and close the Viaduct for a year and see if we can get by without it.

It's going to happen anyway during construction if we go with the Tunnel or Rebuild options.

So do it now, under controlled circumstances, when we still have the Viaduct up in case the experiment is too painful etc etc. We have the luxury of being able to experiment - why commit to a five year closure when we can actually try it out?

The politics are not easy and it would take self-discipline not to use it in case of emergencies.

But it is going to be closed for years anyway if the Mayor has his way.

So let's just try it and get this "Can we? No we can't. Yes we can." issue over and done with one way or another. Close the Viaduct for a year and see if WSDOT's construction period transportation plan actually works.

Note: The Peoples Waterfront Coalition plan and the WSDOT construction-period transportation plan have enormous overlap as they both assume moving a vast amount of traffic will have to move through the Seattle CBD without having a Viaduct. In fact the WSDOT plan will probably be more demanding of the street system. So let's see if WSDOT has a plan before we get committed to a 4-6 year closure.

Another note: If you are not willing to try this experiment then you cannot be for the Tunnel or the Rebuild as both require far-longer closures.

Seattlest agrees.

Comments

[Gomez]

VERY GOOD. I love this idea. This is absolutely something that the city should do, and it would probably get everyone on the same page in a hurry.

I may very well contact the city and suggest this.

[Matt]

As someone who'd rather not spend an extra hour in traffic today (at least), I'll pass.

Give these self-righteous downtown design fascists an inch, and they'll take the most usable 2.5 miles of road in the region.

[Gomez]

Matt, we're gonna have to live without the viaduct for several years anyway if we rebuild it. That's the idea. WSDOT carries on as if they have a plan to reroute traffic in the interim. Let's call them on it and see if it will work. If we go ahead with any sort of rebuild, it's going to play right into the Planning Fascists' hands anyway.

[Holly B]

This "we can do without State Highway 99 temporarily, so let's do without it permanently" line of reasoning baffles me. So what if we can do without it temporarily?

You might as well argue the logic that most residents can hold their breath in the dark for 30 seconds, so let's go ahead and bury them all alive.

[Jesse McCann]

Re: Holly

WSDOT says you can hold your breath for 3-5 years. PWC says that you can hold your breath permanently. If you can hold your breath for 3-5 years, maybe it's possible that you don't require oxygen. It's worth investigating.

If we can do without a road for half a decade, it's hardly vital infrastructure, and therefore its replacement would be a matter of choice.

I agree with Gomez that the viaduct is a highly *usable* road, considering that it's often not highly trafficked.

[Questioner]

Is there a post here that gives all the background information about this Viaduct thing (i.e. all the options, who backs them and why), for those of us who are not from Seattle? Who are the "planning fascists"?

[Alan Kellogg]

Donald Pittenger over at 2Blowhards has a post up on Seattle's Viaduct. Just thought you'd like to know.

[Luke]

I was re-reading Suburban Nation the other weekend and the author's suggestion to eliminate existing highways surprised me. They are extremely cynical about the utility of highways, since any increased capacity will be taken up by latent demand (I agree). But I didn't remember them taking the opposite argument as well: removing highways doesn't have a big impact on traffic because most of the trips lost are latent demand.

Ever since then I've been thinking about this idea with respect to the Viaduct. What would happen if it were removed and not replaced? This would be a good way to find out. I think the closure test period would have to be at least 6 months to get a good idea.

[Matt]

Folks, get real. If we permit a one year trial closure, the Alaskan Way Viaduct will NEVER reopen.

No one cares what 80,000 West Seattleites think, as City Council members are elected at large and there's no district representive that affected neighborhood residents can hold accountable (ie - target and unelect). The same goes for the rest of that third of Seattle citizens who live west of I-5 outside of Downtown and outside of near-downtown neighborhoods who rely on the AWV.

People who agree that the retrofit is the most prudent plan would be best served to oppose any and all tax increases that facilitate ANY other option, be they RTID or Nickels' proposed City tax plan that would fund Paul Allen's Mercer Street scheme that as embedded in the AWV Viaduct plan. When WSDOT has no money for the same tunnel project they have pushed for since 1995, we'll finally get an honest opinion on the viability of doing a standard and/or enhanced earthquake retrofit of the existing structure.

As a daily Viaduct user who knows the odds and understands at least a bit about risk management, I'll happily take my chances driving on the AWV - retrofitted or not - for the next 20 years.

[Joel]

Here's an important piece of information (particularly for those 80,000 West Seattleites) that I think has been glossed over. Quoting from a comment on a similar thread on The Stranger's blog:

If the Tunnel gets built there will be NO entrance or exit in Downtown. So all those buses to/from West Seattle will have to come by street anyway.

During the YEARS of construction of a tunnel or elevated replacement, most traffic is planned to be routed to 4th Ave.

So WSDOT will build a new off-ramp to 4th Ave from the Spokane Street Viaduct, create bus-only lanes into Downtown, and divert most (if not all) traffic onto the street grid.

If we're going to spend the money on street and transit improvements ANYway, and get used to it for at LEAST four years (maybe up to 11), then why not just go all the way and actually plan for good, efficient street and transit improvements and NOT replace the Viaduct?

[Joel]

I've been ruminating a little more, and I think I need to add/clarify the above.

I live in West Seattle. One of the most interesting things about the tunnel and elevated options that hasn't been communicated by their advocates is that they will change the way W. Seattleites get into downtown. Gone will be the on/off ramps at Seneca and Columbia. Also on the chopping block is free parking downtown in the evening. The way people in neighborhoods to the south (and the north, for that matter) get access to downtown is going to change over the next 10 years, no matter what happens.

So, with a new tunnel, I'll be driving from W. Seattle and getting on the street grid farther south than I do now. For getting access to downtown, a fancy tunnel or an new elevated structure will represent a net loss to my access to downtown.

Ok. But I still will get a 50 mph drive straight through downtown so I can get to Ballard faster. That's great. Is it $4.5 billion worth of great?

Couldn't the brains down at WSDOT figure out a way to give me the same level of access to downtown I'd get with a tunnel, and then optimize a surface street solution that could get me through downtown at, say, 35 mph? I'd imagine someone down there could figure out a way to keep 10 cars from waiting while one car tries to make that all-important left hand turn into Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe.

Or rather, less facetiously, I'm sure there's a solution for getting me to Ballard reasonably fast and on the surface and getting cars on and off the ferry dock, and that it would be a mite cheaper than raising or lowering the whole 1.5 miles or so of the current AWV. A WSDOT study with the advantages and disadvantages compared to the tunnel and a couple of drawings showing the number of stoplights on the surface street would help me and everyone else to decide how much money that fast ride to Ballard is really worth.

[Matt]

Joel,

You'll get no argument from me when you say that the tunnel plan's elimination of almost all of the existing access/egress points (Seneca and Western for northbound traffic and Western, Columbia, and 1st Ave S for southbound) to downtown is extremely ill-advised. However, even in the scenario which you pretty accurately describe, a significant portion of the current AWV traffic that is heading for points south and north of downtown will still be able to get there directly - and westside residents heading downtown (or to places like Capitol and Queen Anne Hill) won't have to contend with dumping all of the traffic onto the few surface routes into/out of downtown from West Seattle and/or Ballard etc that the PWC and Co. seems to think can handle all 110,000+ AWV vehicle trips. In other words, all of that money doesn't just deliver a fast ride to Ballard, keeps a lot of vehicle trips off of downtown streets and I-5 which, for a lot of the day, are gridlocked already.

WSDOT did look at a surface route in some detail during the draft EIS process. If I recall correctly, there were several stoplights, and they looked at both 4 and 6 lane configurations.
I can envision a surface route that moved enough traffic to be a viable option, especially given the cost of a tunnel, but it would have to be so highway-like in nature that it would be politically unacceptable to the downtown development and design crowd now dominating this debate. A pretty little two (or even four) lane road by the ferries and our new cruise ship waterfront just ain't gonna cut it - and you still have railroad tracks to deal with, to boot.

[kieth nissen]

The big force for change in a large population is not what the government or a corporation does it's what some large segment of the population decides to change... stop drinking (actually enough people have at least cut down that distillery stocks are lagging), start walking to work, stop buying futons, stop driving everywhere. 10%, 15% of the population can collectively make huge changes. Government notices, retailers notice (not necessarily in that order), things become different.

People seem to want the larger powers, government, markets, etc. to make sure that each individual can keep on doing what he's doing (driving big, eating big, traveling big, consuming, living in the USA). The "larger powers" can't always do that; they bump into reality. Then people are pissed "..hey, I'm still fat and broke...what's going on here?".

Have you noticed how it has become political suicide for a politician to ask people to change? last venture in that direction was Jimmy Carter ("turn that thermostat down a little"). Ronald Reagan told us we were doing great and we could keep on keeping on. So rather than asking people to stop driving so much the political leaders propose economically dubious fixes. Sell some bonds and fix it.

So, higher gas prices and a non-lethal earthquake might be best news we could hope for.