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A good time to slow down

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Seattle City Councilman Peter Steinbrueck is taking Tuesday’s election results and he’s running with them:

The outcome of the advisory vote will likely add momentum to a third choice that politicians kept off the ballot: the so-called surface option that would tear down the viaduct and route traffic onto downtown streets along with beefed-up transit.

Seattle City Councilman Peter Steinbrueck, who favors that option, said he’ll submit legislation today to effectively kill a tunnel by shifting $8 million in city funds that had been budgeted for a tunnel to work on designs for a surface plan.

“This clearly opens the door to an alternative solution,” said Steinbrueck, who recently announced he would not seek re-election so he could dedicate more time to fighting a new viaduct.

Now that the tunnel is toast, Steinbrueck is pushing hard to make the “surface plus transit” option the city’s official preferred option. I, like Peter, am estatic that Seattle voters dumped two bad choices in favor of some new ideas.

But Seattle is not an island, politically. At the big press conference after the election with Gregoire, Sims, and Nickels, all the parties decided to work together. (Read more about this presser here, here, and here)

What Steinbrueck is doing may be good public policy, it ain’t necessarily in the spirit of a “collaborative” “consensus-based” discussion.

While us city folk can do all we want about the viaduct, there are folks like Mary Margaret Haugen who want to punish Seattle residents by tearing down the viaduct tomorrow. While Frank Chopp isn’t off the deep end in the same way. (He has to answer to Seattle voters, a great many of which are dead-set against rebuilding the viaduct)

The big fear is that Olympia decides to strip Seattle of the ability to issue permits for viaduct construction, essentially taking away our leverage. I would hope that Peter does not make the same mistake Nickels and Co. did with the tunnel by being too single-minded and not playing ball with other parties.

Comments

  1. 1

    Your last sentence contains wisdom, Will. It’s all too easy for Seattle residents to think of SR-99 as THEIR highway but in fact it’s a STATE highway; and whatever is done will affect people in the suburbs, in Pierce and Snohomish counties, and shippers all over the state. They have a stake in it, too, and they didn’t get to vote. The governor has to consider broader interests than what city residents want; and — let’s face it — downtown beautification is not (or shouldn’t be) the highest priority. Cost, and moving people and commerce, are the driving forces here — and the clear message of the last few months is that the governor will not allow either to be sacrificed to other agendas. In this, she is spot-on right.

  2. 2

    Residents of the city and the suburbs are going to be required by the realities of global warming to use mass transit when they need to travel to and within Seattle. DOT needs to focus on what transportation is, other than asphalt ribbons.

    Considering that 20% of petroleum usage is to produce fertilizers, a good use to put the acreage opened up by removing the viaduct would be to in-city farmland. Growing crops organically along Elliott Bay could be a very smart move for Seattle.

    Pike Place Market could provide locally grown produce, grown next door.

    Too expensive? Not compared to the oceans rising and all that waterfront going under,

  3. 3

    It’s been awhile (25 yearss), but I remember the parts of “Old highway 99” un Thurston county south to be pretty much backroads. I use to take them when I worked in OLy and lived in Centralia on the way home because it was a good relax after work.
    My point is that there should be little that’s sacred just because it’s a State Highway. In Pullman, we call the State Highways, Main Street and Grand Street. The sooner the South and North bypasses are in place, the better, then we might have resonable downtown angle parking.

  4. 4

    @1 Roger

    You need to take an other look. Only a few percent of the traffic on I99 is commercial trhough traffic. What idiot in a shipping Dept would use I99 for cargo?

    The inevitable conclusion of your logic is that we should lid Seattle.

    The solution(s) are all REGIONAL. Seatle can not finctionm as a freeway.

  6. 6

    Will, do you have any sort of link to indicate that Senator Haugen wants to “tear down the viaduct tomorrow?” That’ll certainly make the fools at The Stranger happy.

    @1:

    Applause!

    @4:

    The inevitable conclusion of your logic is that we should lid Seattle.

    Strawman.

    You know, if you’re going to blather on about regionalism, you might consider that if you foul up SR 99 without a good plan, then a lot of the traffic that’s on SR 99 is going to get in the way of all the industrial traffic on I-5.

  7. 7

    Actually, worth noting is the fact that the city of Seattle paid a large portion of the construction costs of the viaduct. From the recent Seattle Weekly article…

    In other words, the city snagged all the right of way and paid for over half of the cost of the viaduct, but somehow it basically became property of the state.

    Well, in my view that gives the city a pretty strong claim to the notion that they deserve the state highway through that section of downtown to be whatever they want.

  8. 8

    Actually, worth noting is the fact that the city of Seattle paid a large portion of the construction costs of the viaduct. From the recent Seattle Weekly article…

    The secret history of the Alaskan Way Viaduct is one of little opposition and even less public scrutiny. The documents I followed through our city library and municipal archives aren’t even remotely complete, and the gaps and literally X-Actoed-out pages hint at a broader problem that haunts us still: a lack of government transparency and accountability. No one can fully account for how the viaduct was built. No one seems able to clearly explain how it ended up under the control of the state.

    …While manpower and federal largesse were tied up during the war years, the city began a stealthy program of condemnation, clearing warehouses, businesses, and other obstacles to the viaduct’s future path. Ultimately, the city spent $1.2 million, or 10 percent of the initial viaduct costs, on securing land for the right of way.

    …The viaduct, 50 percent funded by the city and 100 percent built on city land, was originally part of the U.S. highway system when it opened. Yet at the same time, the state was considered operator and owner of the highway, even before 99 was downgraded from a federal to state route in the late ’60s. Basically, city and federal involvement with the highway ended with the ink drying on the checks. Seattle appears to have granted the viaduct’s aerial right of way to the state in perpetuity. Where the specific city ordinance or state legislative act may lie within some forgotten archive, no one at WSDOT or SDOT has been able to tell me. Remember the vast warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? It’s something like that.

    In other words, the city snagged all the right of way and paid for over half of the cost of the viaduct, but somehow it basically became property of the state.

    Well, in my view that gives the city a pretty strong claim to the notion that they deserve the state highway through that section of downtown to be whatever they want.

  9. 9

    My own personal belief is that surface+transit will actually work pretty well. 99 is only two lanes in each direction through the Battery Street tunnel; a lot of the backups that you see on the viaduct are from the exits at either end of downtown (southbound is 1st Ave, northbound is at Western).

    Get rid of those exits or integrate them into the street grid overall, and the traffic flows change dramatically.

    If we could have a creative team work on it, it might be possible to build some kind of a boulevard that puts freight and other commercial traffic on a “throughway” that has limited access; that traffic could flow right through the area while local traffic (in other words, all those yuppies in Belltown who’re using the viaduct as the back door to/from I-90) just uses the street grid.

  10. 10

    Picture this in ten years:

    “Guess the surface option wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. I guess since the viaduct is gone, we will have to build a tunnel”

    No wonder the Mayor is warming up to the idea. It is effectively halfway to a tunnel.

  11. 11

    How can the doom & gloom Global Warming True Believers even consider a tunnel or surface street option???
    If you truly believe the pending doom, an elevated structure is the ONLY option, isn’t it??
    I mean why in the world would any red-blooded Global Warming Proponent ever risk his fellow man/woman to be wisked away by the pending rising sea levels????

    Oh, I forgot…you only believe in Global Warming & the pending doom when it’s convenient.

    How about another crudely written $1 million Ballot Initiative? Peter ought to sponsor it….he has consistently shown a reckless disregard for taxpayers hard-earned money in the past. My guess is the Surface Option, once the impact on businesses & traffic is fully vetted….would failed with over 60% NO.

    The only answer is to retrofit the existing structure. Most minimal impact on business & traffic.

  14. 14

    @ 12

    Do you read this blog? I’ve stated pretty clearly what I’m for (surface plus transit) and what I’m against (everything else).

  15. 15

    Impressed is right. We need an elevated option. We could have had one already pretty much built, except some business leaders didn’t like the idea, and made us vote how many times? until they finally killed it. And they did it with scare tactics over the financing. The financing would be like a 50o year mortgage. Add up your mortgage payments over 30 years, and you pay for your house two or three times. Of course, by now you’ve figured out I am talking about the Monorail. And strangely enough, it would have run right along where the viaduct is. There would have been a surface-transit option to reckon with.

  16. 16

    @6 World Class Cynic

    Of course closing the Viaduct will impact the region. That is the basis of the state’s claim to a right to impose the rebuild on Seattle.

    Bit, no one claims that the rebuild is any more than a bandid to the inevitble increase in NS.

    The ON:Y ansers that make sense are regional.

  17. 17

    11.

    No, Unimpressive, the reasonable people, who waited seven years (since Kyoto was ignored) for the scientific community to assemble incontrovertible evidence of global warming and its potential consequences, now want to do everything possible to curtail the oceans’ rises, as well as other cataclysmic potentialities.

    Providing more capacity for idiots (like you, evidently) to tool around surrounded by a dozen feet of steel in individual CO2 and other noxious gas spewing contraptions is not the way to stem that tide.

  18. 18

    @ 16. (cont’d)

    I do agree, however, that it would be OK to strengthen the existing viaduct, until alternatives are put in place. Something that is already contemplated by Gregoire, Sims, Nickels, et al, but for only a few years.

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