Last week I urged concrete aficionados to move to Florida, where road-enamored state and local governments seem to operate under the democratic principle of “one car, one vote.” But if your idea of responsible transportation planning is paving your way out of every traffic jam, then you only need to look as far as Arizona to find your Freeway to Heaven.
That’s a crosscut of Arizona’s I-10, which state transportation officials propose to expand from twelve lanes to twenty-four between Tempe and Phoenix. That’s right… twenty-four lanes. And yes, we’re talking about a freeway, not a bowling alley.
Just imagine this baby running along Seattle’s waterfront… and a hundred feet or so out into Elliot Bay.
This is what comes from trying to build your way out road congestion, instead of adopting integrated solutions that include mass transit and rational urban planning.
Of course, Arizona also has a Democrat Governor, Janet Napolitano, just like we do here in Washington.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Napolitano
Integrated solutions? What a bunch of gobbledy gook!
If you had a clue how this town is run, behind closed doors, by the Downtown Seattle Association, you would know this whole deal is a way for the little guy to subsidize the profits of big developers like Wright Runstad.
If the Viaduct ran through the Rainier Valley, nobody would give a shit how earthquake proof it is.
This is what comes from trying to build your way out road congestion, instead of adopting integrated solutions that include mass transit and rational urban planning.
Well, yes. But RTID sucks donkey dick.
And we need to pay for the SR 520 work. I don’t give a rip how much Sound Transit wants to extend its train lines NOW, NOW, NOW. We still need to get the SR 520 project finances lined up first. That is a much higher priority for this state – economically speaking – because of the downside potentional if that bad boy goes down. Glug, Glug, Glug.
We’ve got light rail coming on line. We’ve got Transit Now about to come on line. Transit funding has been really high around here, and it will continue to be amply funded (e.g., Transit Now). So now dedicate the money needed to do the SR 520 work well. You don’t object to that proposal for timing our upcoming transportation expenditures, do you DG?
You know, if we spent as much time working on transportation options as we have caring about whether someone’s idealogy might contaminate the concrete, we’d have had an integrated regional transport system for many years now.
As a former resident of S. Florida I can tell you that despite much more favorable geography, better driving conditions and massive road building expenditures, they have some of the worst traffic in the nation. Seattle traffic, as bad as it can be, is not even close.
But because of the geography here we do not have a chance in hell of building enough road capacity to fix the traffic problems. In speaking with some transit engineers, it would take something almost the size of the Arizona project above to make 405 run at speed during rush-hour and it is simply not possible.
Whether we like it or not, we have a serious problem with the way cities in the US are currently designed and having everyone live out in the suburbs and drive to the center every day is just not sustainable. It is just crappy planning that has grown exponentially over the past 50 years or so. Fixing it will obviously take some combination of increased transit, higher population densities in the city center and some more road capacity.
The real problem with building more road capacity is that unless you put some real restrictions on development of land you will simply increase the use of the road more than you will decrease congestion.
Simply put – more roads = more drivers, not less congestion.
goldy, you disingenuous horses ass. what we’re trying to do is keep the traffic situation from getting worse. even if half (which is wholly unreasonable & overly optimistic to expect) of the traffic which is currently on the viaduct just magically goes away, that would mean another 50,000+ vehicles that have to go *somewhere* else. routing them around downtown would kill tourism & also the increased effort by developers to get people to move there.
i firmly believe that the people adovcating the surface-transit-pony plan don’t actually ever drive I5 (if they drive at all). even at 9pm last night, there was a fair amount of traffic with the occasional slowdown keeping drivers from even doing the speed limit. rapid transit is necessary, everybody is for that, but it won’t completely take care of the current situation much less all of the future.
yes, please close your eyes and imagine a 24-lane highway spread across the waterfront… now the viaduct doesn’t seem so bad, does it? :)
6 I don’t see how more traffic downtown is going to attract tourists there, unless you assume all of those 50,000+ vehicles are full of ’em. Not too likely.
One can at least hope that a significant portion of the added housing units downtown will be occupied by people who also work there.
Good lord that is scary. I was driving through Sacramento on New Year’s morning (driving in from Reno, and avoiding the snow north of Klamath Falls), and I-80 coming in to Sacramento was 18 lanes wide. Bigger than anything my wife or I had ever seen. 24 lanes would probably send me into anaphylactic shock. But at least they have the space to do that kind of shit.
Let me play devil’s advocate again for just a minute…let’s consider the unspoken assumption that “rebuilding the sea wall” will probably involve destruction (and presumably replacement) of most of the piers through the “tourist mecca” section of the Waterfront, at least between the Edgewater Inn and the ferry terminal. If So, what’s to prevent moving the seawall out another 100 feet or so and dumping fill in behind it. Not like that sort of thing hasn’t been done before. With that scenario, there’s room for lots of traffic lanes, underpasses for the cross streets and pedestrian traffic, streetcar tracks….and even more building space for all that fance new stuff Nickels and his pals have their nippless so hard about.
Of course, we could just wait for the next earthquake to bring down the existing viaduct. Then we would have the “surface plus transit” option by default. We might even get some more federal money to clean up the mess.
Oh, there is the little matter of all the people who will die in the process, pancaked under the viaduct or between the levels. Since the state has long known of the danger, the family of each victim will have to be paid off in susbstantial wrongfull-death settlements. Be sure to add that into your calculations.
let’s see, an estimated 200 deaths and an average payout of about 1.5 million, that’s 300 million dollars, and you still don’t have anything to show for it (except for some unplanned demolition).
Jason @6,
And you know this because….?
Or are you just making assumptions?
Looks like they are doubling the HOV capacity in the plan.
So they are obviously planning “integrated solutions that include mass transit and rational urban planning.”
Of course with the rapid growth of that market they understand the need to move people, which means moving cars.
They seem to embrace the approach of “moving cars” unlike the planners of this region who want to “get folks out of their cars” onto mass transit. A strategy that has brought near gridlock to our transit system.
Replacing the viaduct to maintain present capacity is not “building your way out of road congestion,” when the alternative is LESS capacity.
I’ll keep repeating it, Goldy, politely for now, every time you and the rest of the local “progressive blogosphere” flush your credibility down the shitter by misrepresenting the situation.
RHP6033 @ 10
Yeah, but the State of Washington has been accepting the risk of a wrongful death payout of up to $300,000,000 for the last 6 years and has continued to do nothing to replace the Viaduct. Apparently, for any given day, the relatively small estimated value of wrongful death settlements is outweighed by the benefits derived from being able to use this major traffic artery. And many drivers using the Viaduct have also made the same calculations, based on the chance of dying in the next few minutes, versus the time required to use an alternate route.
Well Goldy, of course we’re making assumptions, as are you. For starters, we’re assuming there is going to be an earthquake strong enough to knock down the viaduct. If that assumption isn’t true, then this whole debate is kinda pointless. And then you’re assuming that the surface plus transit option will provide sufficient capacity to handle demand without bringing I-5 to a standstill (or be so ridiculously inefficient that people will quit working downtown, thereby reducing demand). As one who uses the viaduct a fair amount, both to get downtown and to get past downtown, all I’m interested in is maintaining my travel times at roughly what they are now. I don’t think that is possible with a surface option (unless you’re talking about a freeway between the waterfront and the tracks, which I don’t think you are.)
Somebody around these parts had a pretty good suggestion a while back. If you want to see what the surface option looks like, let’s close the Viaduct for a month and see how traffic responds. Then let’s vote.
Easy guys. Goldy is quite bright (I think his post on the Legislature and dogs was quite astute) but he doesn’t know much about cities — though he has the capacity to learn if he wants — so he falls back on meaningless cant like “..integrated solutions that include mass transit and rational urban planning.”
RECEIVING MESSAGE – DATE 2035 – PHOENIX AZ:
Dangerous driving condictions and gridlock on overloaded I-10 lead to calls for its widening from 24 to 48 lanes. Arizona DOT officials heap praise on new solution to traffic congestion on I-10. Adjacent light rail line will be moved out of corridor and converted to hauling animal carcasses to rendering plants. Oscar Mayer officials predict savings on hot dogs and sandwich pack meat.
15 “If you want to see what the surface option looks like, let’s close the Viaduct for a month and see how traffic responds.”
It might have made more sense to try that before Alaskan Way was reduced to a single lane in each direction.
South Florida does have some transit coming on line. In fact, there Commuter Rail line, TriRail, a service of the South Florida Regional Transit Authority, was started as a temporary service during the widening of a highway. That project seems to be going on forever, and now they are doing improvements to improve the reliability of TriRail! TriRail has tried to be cost-effective, like the use of used Locomotives and Commuter Coaches, and some of the new cars they have bought, are Diesel Multiple Units from Colorado Railcar.
http://www.sfrta.fl.gov/
http://www.tri-rail.com/double....._sheet.htm
Miami does have some kind of rail transit, including an Elevated Metro line(in a way like Chicago’s).
On a railfan board, it was mentioned something about Governor Napolitano, now re-elected has taken a position on transit. She supports it. She signed an executive order giving ADOT 90 days to update state rail plans. That study is not finished yet, but there is one logical idea already circulating, according to some Arizona Republic articles I have seen on the Arizona Rail Passenger Association site. That would be a commuter train between Phoenix and Tuscon, and could be operational by 2012. The reason they would go for that date? Arizona’s Centenial.
Commuter Rail seems to be taking shape in the Inter-Mountain West. Albuquerque has the RailRunner Express, Salt Lake City will inaugerate the FrontRunner next year, Denver will have Commuter Rail by next decade. In fact, Phoenix even had a Commuter Train about 25 years ago. It was temporary to handle an emergency. Unusually heavy rains had swollen the Salt River, and it washed out every bridge across it in the Phoneix Area. Governor Bruce Babbit called Southern Pacific RR and told him that he and ADOT would not take No for an answer. Why was SP called in? Their bridge was the only one left standing. Once the other bridges were restored, the train was ended. That was only a few weeks.