House Speaker Frank Chopp has some funny ideas. The funniest? Frank wants to cap part of the span of the new Viaduct. What does this mean, exactly?
That great Viaduct view you see while driving north into town? Gone. Instead of a great vista, you get concrete and shadow. If you want a sneak preview, try driving south on the Viaduct now!
Second, putting another level on the Viaduct will make it even taller and more obtrusive than it is now! With a new Viaduct projected to be as much as 50 percent wider, a third deck will make it humongous.
So what goes on that third deck? Plans are for a new park, accessible by skybridge from adjacent buildings. Considering new skybridges on view corridors are against city code, that seems unlikely. Also, would real estate owners warm to the idea of thousands of people a year trudging through their lobbies to access the park? What’s more, it could even exceed the Aurora Bridge in what it’s known for…
Welcome, one and all, to Frank Chopp’s exciting new “Suicide Park”!
Nice. One of my objections to the Freeway Park boondogle is the reluctance of motorists to speed into the shadows.
This is one of the primary causes of ‘the limited sight back-up’ on I-5.
Just the thing to speed our passage along the new V-Duct!
More pro-tunnel propoganda, eh Will?
Chadt-
I’m. Not. For. The. Tunnel.
Hey, They can stop people from jumping by building really high walls.
@ 2
You know, maybe you’re making a joke about this being “pro-tunnel propaganda”, but there IS an election coming up soon. I’ve seen lots of pro-rebuild “propaganda”… There’s gonna be a vote, so I guess it’s ALL propaganda.
A covered viaduct, huh? That sounds suspiciously like a tunnel, but above ground. So, we get the all the costs of a tunnel, with all the blockage of the viaduct, but none of the great view for the drivers. I call that a trifecta !!!
Yeah, A Trifecta!! Maybe we can even earn some money back from the closed off, walled viaduct by selling advertising!
In fact, What a great way to recoup some of the costs. Sell 40 foot sections to businesses for advertising (leaving 1 space in every 200 feet for the public to decorate). They can name that section after themselves, paint it whatever color they choose, decorate it with their company logo, fill it with ads.
I mean, nothing makes me want to rush out and patronize a business more than a decorated hunk of expensive concrete.
I can see it now; The Tully’s mile marker 240, WAMU offramp, Glade Air freshener lane change. Why, it would revolutionize giving directions to people not familiar with the city.
“Yeah, you get on the viaduct and drive through until you see the pack of Marlboros, then take the offramp right after the Arby’s hat. Continue past the Love Connection corset and take a right.”
You know, the old London Bridge was lined with market stalls and vendors selling all types of things. Perhaps we just let Martin Selig develop the top of the Viaduct lid? He knows what’s right for Seattle.
Would someone please stop Chopp.
He’s the one big reason why we need the upcoming stupid Viaduct election nobody likes. And he says the election is meaningless. And he’s concerned about wasting tax money? On this subject he’s a wasting us all a ton through his bullish dithering.
Chopp is the one big reason there’s no agreement on a solution to the Viaduct problem after six years, and he’s promoting two conflicting solutions (after six years!). Chopp’s prefered elevated tunnel has been costed at around $3.4 billion or so. He has yet to reveal what the heck this idea really is and what it costs. (And he’s had six years.)
Doesn’t the Speaker have enough to do? (He obviously is too busy to make a decision on the Viaduct or even finish drawing his design.)
Would someone tell him he’s a pretty good politician but a terrible architect and engineer? Maybe the fact that his dithering and designing on this topic is making the Democrats look like big taxing idiots, soup to nuts, will get his attention.
Move on Frank. On this topic you’re doing more harm than good.
Will @3:
What, ME joke about politics???
It can double as housing for the homeless…..
We’ll probably have a rash of suicides the morning after the ’08 election, but despondent rightys jumping off bridges ain’t such a bad idea … hey, just kidding!! Ann Coulter humor, ya know? A Pat Robertson joke, that’s all … merely doing my Jonathan Gardner impression on Saturday Morning Live …
HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR HAR
@9 Go ahead, build the tunnel on your dime. I don’t mind. I’m sure Frank doesn’t mind either. I think Chopp’s opposition to the tunnel would evaporate the moment you show him the money. Until then, Frank speaks for all of us seniors who don’t want to be forced to pay for an expensive project that will literally take food off our table and medicine out of our fixed-income budgets.
I should’ve said “expensive beautification project” –because that’s all the tunnel is. Hey, I’m not against making the city prettier. These things are nice, as long as they’re paid for by the people who will benefit from them and/or can afford them. My only objection to it is that — as we all know — the unaffordable costs of gold-plater projects are ALWAYS dumped on people who can’t afford them and ALWAYS financially benefit the folks who don’t pay for them.
So what goes on that third deck? Plans are for a new park, accessible by skybridge from adjacent buildings. Considering new skybridges on view corridors are against city code, that seems unlikely. Also, would real estate owners warm to the idea of thousands of people a year trudging through their lobbies to access the park?
Well, given the extensive discourse that has been developed in academia, as well as other intellectual circles, concerning the bridge realm in William Gibson’s triology (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties), i would think that Seattle and King County planners and developers would at least debate the consideration of this sort of bridge use. Of course that would require them all to acknowledge that sci-fi can provide the opportunity for 20-40 foresight, versus the more vision-impairing 20-800 that government officials must generally use.
We could just tear down the viaduct and put in a park like the surface transit folks want to do.
“Would someone tell him he’s a pretty good politician but a terrible architect and engineer?”
Bingo. I’m an engineer (and a terrible politician), and some of my professional acquaintances are transportation engineers. They’ve repeatedly made a set of points about the proposed engineering projects on this corridor.
(1) The site contains landfill, in an earthquake zone, along water. This is the worst possible environment for an elevated structure. At any moment, we may receive a force nine seismic event of several minutes’ duration. No feat of human engineering could keep an elevated structure intact if such an event shakes the site, because the soil will liquefy. In this environment, any elevated structure is just “stupid on stilts”.
(2) A tunnel will fare better in such an event, since it will “ride” in the soil. An elevated structure will sway on the vertical members. The bending moment increases with the third power of the height; doubling the height magnifies the swaying effect eight times. Increasing the mass also exacerbates the effect; if an elevated structure is stupid on stilts, a heavy elevated structure is obese stupidity on stilts.
(3) Obviously, given the inherent risks of both elevated and tunnel solutions, we should remain on the shaky ground, not below or above it. Any other solution is reckless to the point of murderous stupidity.
We shouldn’t even be talking about any option other than removal without replacement. Now that Seattle controls the legislature, we should have the route decertified as a state highway, so the city can turn it into a park. It’s amazing to see such blindness, which assumes that private automobiles are somehow desirable as a transportation solution.
BTW, I like Speaker Chopp, and I normally value his leadership. But he’s failing on this issue.
Will @5:
You’re right. There’s a lot of propaganda and nonsense flying around on all sides.
Myth: The tunnel is the next Big Dig. Reality: False. This is nothing like the Big Dig. This is a simple cut-and-cover tunnel. Go drive across Mercer Island back to see one in action. We’ll probably have cost overruns no matter which way we go.
Myth: The viaduct restricts access to the waterfront. Reality: False. Thousands of people are able to stroll under it each day to get to the waterfront. I know. I checked. And I have the receipt from Ivar’s to prove it.
Myth: Tunnel + surface will open up the waterfront to pedestrians. Reality: False. It’ll open up the waterfront in the same way that the neighborhoods west of SR 99 are open to Green Lake. Not to mention that every available space will be snapped up for high-rise condo development, save for maybe a tiny concrete-covered “park.”
@16 Did you get the crazy idea that we can dead-end SR-99 from both ends from your “transportaiton engineer” buddies, too?
I can’t imagine any real transportation engineer endorsing such a notion. Throw away a third of Seattle’s north-south vehicle capacity, just like that. Nonsense.
roger @ 13:
Hey, I’m not against making the city prettier. These things are nice, as long as they’re paid for by the people who will benefit from them and/or can afford them. My only objection to it is that — as we all know — the unaffordable costs of gold-plater projects are ALWAYS dumped on people who can’t afford them and ALWAYS financially benefit the folks who don’t pay for them.
*ding*ding*ding*ding*ding*
We have a winner, folks!
I’m not even a senior and I completely agree with you, Roger. I also agree with your comment in @12: I think Chopp’s opposition to the tunnel would evaporate the moment you show him the money. Unless Speaker Chopp has said the equivalent of “Viaduct today, viaduct tomorrow, viaduct forever!”, then I do believe that is the case.
I’m not going to defend Speaker Chopp on the idiocy of a covered viaduct. But here’s something that all of his haters out there probably haven’t thought of, and I’m going to take a few moments to explain it to you now.
Frank Chopp is Speaker of the House. “Duhhh,” I can hear you saying. “We knew that already.” But I don’t think you’ve thought things through from his point of view as Speaker of the House and as one of the state’s top three elected Democrats.
Speaker Chopp has a lot on his plate right now, starting with the state’s biennial budget for 2007-9. Our kids need to be educated in our state’s K-12 schools, and then as young adults and even old adults like me, they need to be educated in our state’s universities and community colleges.
We, as a state, also need to lock up our criminals, and better yet, find ways to prevent them from being criminals. We also have to figure out how to move people and goods around in this state, especially considering that Puget Sound already has waaaaay more people than it should have already. We also need to keep our parks open and to protect the state against those that would turn it into a strip mall several hundred miles long. All of these tasks have to be performed under the very skeptical eye of an electorate that doesn’t always see their tax dollars being spent wisely because “State officials screw up” makes a better headline for the local news than “Hey, your kid’s teacher can’t do it alone. Try cracking open a book and setting a good example for your kid that way.”
Speaker Chopp knows that the GOP doesn’t have any solutions to the above problems except to bash gays and bash teachers and propose phantom freeways that will die on contact with the reality of no one in Seattle or Bellevue or Federal Way or Lynnwood wanting a new freeway to go through their neighborhood.
So obviously, Speaker Chopp views the best solution to the state’s problems is to elect Democrats. And the more the merrier. Elect them not only in Seattle, but in Mercer Island and Bellevue and Redmond. And when you’ve flipped those districts from red to blue, let’s go to work on flipping, say, Eastern Washington from red to blue.
Oh. Yes. Some of you do need a reminder: There is a rest of the state beyond 145th and Lake Washington. Just thought you should know that.
Speaker Chopp’s already figured this out, and this is where the viaduct fight comes into play. You know and I know that the notion of Republicans as fiscally conservative is a joke. But not everyone has gotten the message yet.
Now, though, thanks to Speaker Chopp, every Democrat in the state legislature and every Democrat aspiring to join the state legislature has a beautiful narrative to work with, one that’ll play to the folks in Forks and Naches and Ritzville and other place that are beneath the contempt of Seattle’s(TM) tunnel supporters.
Every single Democrat running for the state legislature can now point to Speaker Chopp and say: “Hey, we’ve got a leader that is looking out for the state’s taxpayers. We need to do something about that viaduct, because it’s going to go in the next earthquake. Seattle is the economic hub of this state, and we need to keep traffic flowing through it.
“But there are certain politicians (flash picture of Nickels) and certain people in Seattle(TM) (flash pictures of cigar-chomping developers) who want to stick the taxpayers with a tunnel that will benefit people who don’t want to pay for it. And we (cue stirring patriotic music and the donkey symbol) aren’t going to let them get away with it. We’re looking out for you.”
It’s a great storyline for Democrats statewide to work with. So, please, I beg of you tunnel supporters: Keep trashing Speaker Chopp. Nickels blinked, Gregoire blinked, but Chopp is standing there with a smile on his face saying: “Next?” Or at least he should have a smile on his face. And as long as he stands firm, Democrats benefit.
In their own perverse way, those who pop a woody whenever they hear the words “world class” are helping get Democrats elected in places they don’t care about. You gotta love it.
Bless you Roger Rabbit and World Class Cynic, I applaud BOTH of your comments. As a retired City Light employee myself, I have to say that you’re right on the money! Thank heavens for the common sense of Frank Chopp, in my personal opinion!
Here in Seattle, I believe, we are already paying property taxes on 17 supplemental levies and bond issues – IN ADDITION (yes, 17 In Addition) to our regular State/County/City/Port of Seattle property taxes. Heck, we even had to pass a levy to get streetsigns replaced or fix the potholes, earthquake proof fire stations, mere basic needs. Seattle has a Champagne appetite – clearly – on a Beer budget!
On the other side, speaking as a retired City employee, our medical insurance (which the City doesn’t pay a dime towards) is going up astronomically each year. The City doesn’t negotiate towards saving any money on our plans. Retirees are not represented once their COBRAs expire. So nobody to oversee on our behalf, making it a ‘take it or leave it’ proposition. For example: a year ago, the City/Aetna PM dropped copaymts for a doctor appointment from $20 DOWN to $15 per visit – THEN 3 months later cranked up everyone’s monthly paymt an addl $75 per month. So why drop the ‘pay as you go’ which could defray costs, putting the costs onto the people who seek more doctor appts? Instead, the City lobbed everyone with a non-negotiable increase? At a cost of (this year, medical only) $649 for Aetna Prev or $600 for Aetna Trad, we have the choice of take it – OR leave it & join the millions of uninsured Americans. Retirees w/o a mortgage most likely don’t even get the tax write off.
MANY City retirees, such as laid off Clerical/PrintShop folks, are uninsured after being pushed out for retirement – years before they had planned; years before they are old enough to get on Medicare. I know it probably seems like pocket change per month to working folks, but on a fixed income it’s a hardship.
THEN to see the Mayor banging his tamborine demanding ‘World Class’ and wanting to figure how to gobble MORE payments out of taxpayers so the developers can reap bigger rewards. To see City workers actually throwing temper tantrums because they weren’t allowed to crash an evaluation meeting last week. Downright freaky!
Sorry, I digress a bit off topic, but wanted to point out that the City of Seattle is squeezing many retirees from two different directions. Perhaps it is deliberate, where if Seattle can eliminate much of the fixed income, poor folks from this town it can truly have a World CLASS type of city. Only rich folks wanted, as in Bellevue or Mercer Island. I figure about one more year before I have to sell out and get out of town, my pension can’t cover further. Seattle “World Class” appetites have turned into world class Obesity!
with regards to my comment #20,
“At a cost of (this year, medical only) $649 for Aetna Prev or $600 for Aetna Trad” …. ”
That is the cost for a single person, per month.
Hell no no tunnel…
Chopp has it Right….This time,
Gregoire has no F’n idea what to do….Punt….Punt…She’d rather talk about how to tax the F out of us all providing healthcare to all…..attract all the low life’s from every state in the US to this state…….
Her special kind of voters, low lifes and felons…ahhhh
Maybe Pelosi 1 could shuttle them all from prisons all over the US, at $300k per trip eh…..
The Rabbit, the Cynic an the Frack have it nailed very well.
“@16 Did you get the crazy idea that we can dead-end SR-99 from both ends from your ‘transportaiton engineer’ buddies, too?
“I can’t imagine any real transportation engineer endorsing such a notion. Throw away a third of Seattle’s north-south vehicle capacity, just like that. Nonsense.”
Your limited imagination should not be this region’s problem, and I have indeed heard working transportation engineers in this town discussing all options, including removal without replacement. Your statement thus functions merely as an admission of your own ignorance of this topic; it says nothing about how we should allocate resources to transportation.
If you want to justify spending public money to subsidize private vehicles as a transportation option, then by all means try to do so. (Or, is the obvious hopelessness of that explain your use of dismissal?) I once hosted an engineer who has worked in many fields, and now works worldwide as a consultant on sustainability. He questioned why we should even want to replace such highways.
voters: ‘Seriously? You want to build another viaduct monstrosity?’
chopp: ‘No, no. See, it has grass on top!’
You anti-viaducters really get my goat. Jesus H. Christ, before the quake not one of you ever said to yourself, “Man, I like Seattle alright, but that freaking viaduct! Please!”
No, the truth is you never thought about it. But now the idea of its remaining is devouring every issue in its path. The middle class housing squeeze, increasing gang crime, crappy schools, mass transit–all trivial considerations compared with the possibility that the perfectly workable waterfront might remain the same as it was.
The debate should be almost entirely a debate about cost, and a retrofit sounds good to me. Seattle’s got enough going for it, we don’t need a half-assed Grant Park. Ever been to Manhattan? Notice the FDR and the West Side Highway? Despite these abominations, Manhattan seems to be doing well enough. I guarantee that all the cultural creatives from Boise and Spokane will keep gravitating in our direction despite the continued existence of the viaduct.
@19: From the Seattle Times article of 1 Feb:
Chopp is Mr. “Viaduct today, viaduct tomorrow, viaduct forever!” – why bother pretending otherwise when he’s defining the “worst-case scenario” as solid financing and the tactical advice from his staff is all about smearing and spinning those numbers. This asshole really is all about building a new viaduct at all costs and fuck everyone else (but especially Nickles).
His name should have to be plastered all over the damn thing. I want every pier and piling to bear the name “Frank Chopp Viaduct” so that for 100 years (or until the Cascadia fault slips) every resident of and visitor to Seattle will know exactly who to blame for this monstrocity.
For the record, I’m with #16 – make a 6 lane surface road. Maybe make a flyover for northbound ferry access. Put in a half-dozen pedestrian bridges so there’s no traffic lights. This should be doable for a hell of a lot less than 2.4 billion ($206k per foot, $17200 per inch) and won’t be any worse than a new viaduct in terms of ruining the waterfront. 99 is a surface road north of the battery street tunnel and south of the current viaduct (and – horror of horrors – has traffic lights! Oh noes!)
The construction lobby and their captive agency WSDOT are forcing a false choice between windfall number 1 and windfall number 2. This is the oldest parenting trick in the book – give a toddler a choice between X or Y and they’ll never think about Z. Too bad Seattle’s falling for it.
@27:
The four-lane tunnel is a fraud. Chopp knows that. Judging from the King 5 survey, he’s standing up for his constituents. Feel free to work against him the next election, though. Maybe he’ll get less than 90 percent of the vote next time.