Search Results for: viaduct

Speculate all you want about Seattle developer Martin Selig’s $10,000 contribution to the No Tunnel Pro-Rebuild Alliance, but from what I hear, political payback is likely a factor. Selig is still pissed off at Mayor Greg Nickels for forcing him to pay his electric bill, and nothing would please him more than to fuck with the Mayor’s Viaduct plans in return.

Notorious for his ethical ambivalence, Selig’s standard business practice seems to be predicated on the assumption that fighting long past-due bills costs far less than the profit to be earned from investing the money elsewhere. Back in 2004 it took a strongly worded shut-off notice sent to Selig’s tenants to force him to pay a $950,000 Seattle City Light bill, but unsuspecting vendors, contractors and partners who lack such leverage are apparently forced to accept pennies on the dollar, or pursue their accounts receivable in court.

And yet Selig, routinely unable to to pay his own bills, somehow managed to scrape up $927,000 in spare change to spend on an initiative to repeal the estate tax, and hundreds of thousands of dollars more killing the Monorail.

Already the Pro-Rebuild Alliance’s largest donor, you can be certain Selig is willing to spend plenty more to assure that a massive, double-decker freeway continues to run through Seattle’s waterfront. And to finance his civic participation, you can be sure that some contractor or vendor somewhere is going to be stiffed this month by Martin Selig.

I was accused of pouring it on a little thick in my last post about FoS. Truth be told, when I hear about folks doing what they can to make the city a better place, I just get weak in the knees. Call it post-Monorail syndrome, but I feel like digging in again. I think that’s where the passion about Seattle’s waterfront comes from. As a callow youth, if we really decide to put another freeway on the waterfront, I’ll have to live with the god awful mistake for longer than most of you. I got skin in the game.

In short, the FoS event was a smash. The room was packed. Lots of people: electeds, activists, hacks, and two bloggers. The crowd was quite youthful compared to most political events I’ve been to.

I don’t know if I’ll be an active part of this group. I don’t like to hitch my wagon to just anything. (Exception: Mike Lowry for Commissioner of Public Lands in ’00. Forgive me!) Besides, it’s not all “viaduct”. I want to see the new streetcar integrated into downtown. I want to see better parks downtown, even if that means getting tough on the homeless folks who’ve taken them over. I want to see the city make a greater effort to facilitate affordable housing. And more cops… way, way, WAY more cops on the beat.

If the coming Viaduct vote goes against me (My vote? No on Rebuild, No on Tunnel), and Seattle residents see fit to approve another freeway, so be it. I don’t have any kids, so I’m not too tied down. I can always move to a city that won’t build a freeway on it’s waterfront. You know… like Milwaukee!

Since there’s nothing on TV this evening, tune in to “The David Goldstein Show” tonight from 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO. I like to go with the flow, so things could change, but here’s what I have lined up for tonight’s show:

7PM: Did the Bush administration strategically manipulating the Strategic Oil Reserve to drive up prices? In 2006 oil prices rose near $80 a barrel, despite the fact that there were no significant supply disruptions, and demand actually fell in industrialized nations. Why? Economist Thomas Palley suggests that the Bush administration may have manipulated our Strategic Oil Reserve to keep prices high, an act which Palley describes as “economic treason.” Dr. Palley runs the Economics for Democratic and Open Societies Project, and is the author of Plenty of Nothing: The Downsizing of the American Dream and the Case for Structural Keynesianism. He joins us for the hour.

8PM: Replacing the Viaduct: cost, capacity… and carbon emissions? Last week at a joint press conference with the president of the Marshall Islands, King County Executive Ron Sims departed from his prepared statement on global warming to talk about… the Viaduct. Absent from the public debate over rebuild vs. tunnel, Sims said, was a discussion about carbon emissions, and whether we could in good conscience increase capacity without thoroughly exploring more environmental alternatives. Hmm. Whatever the other factors, would a surface-plus-transit alternative be the only moral choice. Sims joins us for the hour to talk about global warming, and what we need to be doing locally to both prepare for and prevent its impact.

9PM: TBA

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

There is a new organization in town. It’s called Friends of Seattle, and it’s mission is…

Friends of Seattle envisions a city that grows substantially in the next fifty years, yet becomes an even better place to live. Seattle residents and local government act progressively to create a sustainable, healthy, and livable future for all who live here, while respecting our unique cultural, environmental, and architectural assets.

To achieve this future, Seattle can and should aspire to be a city of walkable neighborhoods, more affordable housing, an efficient transit network, a restored natural ecology, and more parks and public gathering spaces, all while taking responsibility for its impact on the environment.

Pretty basic stuff, right? Seattle has a rap of being a progressive city, right?

Lets look at the facts.

Certain state and city leaders are pushing for a rebuilt Alaskan Way Viaduct. That’s a new freeway through the heart of “Let’s Reduce Greenhouse Gases” Seattle. Not too progressive, I’d say.

Old Seattle is fighting housing density tooth and nail. Single family housing, by far the largest zoning designation in the city, is sacrosanct. Have you tried to buy a townhouse in Seattle? Not too many of them, and their all as expensive as a single family house. Buying condos outside the downtown core? Good luck with that, too. “Progressive” Seattle takes another hit.

What about transportation in Seattle? We have to be ahead of the times here, right? Not so much. There’s no push to expand the currently-under-construction Seattle Streetcar on Lake Union. What’s more, city leaders are fussing over a novelty streetcar that carries tourists. Progressive points get knocked off here, too.

There are so many more places where “progressive” Seattle needs a kick in the ass, and Friends of Seattle is the organization to give it to them. Their launch party is this Tuesday, and I’ll be there.

RSVP here.

The event is free, but a $10 dollar donation gets you membership in FoS and includes an exciting free FoS cocktail.

Location: Twist Restaurant & Lounge
2313 First Ave (First Avenue and Bell Street)

Join me tonight on “The David Goldstein Show” from 7PM to 10PM on Newsradio 710-KIRO. I like to go with the flow, so things could change, but here’s what I have lined up for tonight’s show:

7PM: TBA

8PM: Will a rebuilt Viaduct sink the Marshall Islands? And should we care? The Marshall Islands stand an average 7-feet above sea level, and risk being submerged by global warming. King County Executive Ron Sims suggested this week that any replacement alternative for the Alaska Way Viaduct should consider the impact of carbon emissions. Can we afford to? Can we afford not to?

9PM: Is the initiative process perfect? You’d think so, hearing professional initiative sponsor Tim Eyman defend the current system as inviolate, but over thirty legislators have already signed on to a bill banning pay-per-signature signature gathering. Fellow blogger Andrew Villeneuve was at the hearing Friday morning and joins me in the studio for a first hand report. And TJ from Loaded Orygun will call in to tell us how a similar law is working down in Oregon.

Tune in tonight (or listen to the live stream) and give me a call: 1-877-710-KIRO (5476).

The Republic of the Marshall Islands is a nation consisting of twenty-nine atolls and five isolated islands, about 69-square miles of land scattered over 3/4 million square miles of the western Pacific. Settled by Micronesians about three thousand years ago, the inhabitants have managed to survive German, Japanese and U.S. protectorates, the latter during which their “protectors” detonated 67 nuclear weapons, contaminating a number of atolls with nuclear fallout.

Having survived all that, sometime over the next century or so, the Marshall Islands may disappear completely, swamped by rising sea levels.

Marshall Islands President Kessai Note was in Seattle this week to sign a Statement of Shared Action with King County Executive Ron Sims, the first such agreement signed between his nation and a U.S. municipal government. The agreement calls for sharing scientific and technical expertise, coordinating activities to advise international and U.S. policy makers, and developing a “shared international network of action to help slow, stop and reverse the growth of greenhouse gas pollution.” It also recognizes shared interest in mitigating the impact of global warming.

But the impact on King County is nothing compared to projected impact on the Marshallese.

Majuro Airport, Marshall Islands

The Marshall Islands stand an average 7-feet above sea level, with the highest point on the highest island rising to only 20-feet. In describing the Marshallese relationship to the land President Note stated that “even the loss of a few acres is devastating to every aspect of life.” Even if sea levels rise only a few feet, entire atolls will disappear or become uninhabitable. The 20-foot sea level rise predicted by a partial melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets would completely inundate the nation.

The Marshallese will be amongst the world’s first global warming refugees.

What does any of this have to do with King County?

At the press conference on Friday President Note emphasized that the story of climate change in the Marshall Islands is a story of how both local actions and local inaction has global consequences, while Sims strayed from his prepared text to talk for a moment about the Alaska Way Viaduct. Absent from our tunnel vs rebuild debate, Sims said, has been a discussion of the impact on carbon emissions, the primary cause of global warming. Both of our political establishment’s preferred alternatives are ones that increase traffic capacity. But if we were really interested in reducing carbon emissions — if we were really interested in acting globally — then we should at least be studying how we might meet our region’s transportation needs while reducing capacity and pushing more trips into public transit.

But we don’t have these debates in the U.S., not even in liberal, “metro-natural” Seattle.

Meanwhile, as we find it too difficult to even imagine getting out of our cars once and while, an entire island nation with a three-thousand-year-old culture is about to slip beneath the seas, largely due to our own environmental pollution.

As President Note said, local inaction has global consequences.

Um…

Why not THIS?

Tunnel’s too expensive, Rebuild’s is stoopid as shit… Why not at least CONSIDER an option that has 1) worked in other cities 2) meets the city’s global warming goals 3) and is affordable AND attractive.

In a KUOW report in December, the Surface+Transit option was reportedly set aside by the Governor because (I’m paraphrasing and not making this up, I swear)

The Governor doesn’t know where all the cars will go.

Is that the scientific term?

I don’t really care who came up with the idea first, Danny or Dan. (In fact, I’ve been quietly thinking along the same lines myself in recent weeks.) The point is, as long as we’re going to have to live without the Viaduct for a number of years regardless of the replacement option, why not just live without it and see how it goes?

Transportation planners predict massive gridlock if the Viaduct disappears, but… well… transportation planners have been wrong before. One thing we’ve learned from our nation’s freeway construction binge is “build it, and they will come.” And one thing we’ve learned from the few experiments in freeway removal is “tear it down, and people will find some other way to get the hell where their going.”

Okay, that second catch phrase isn’t all that catchy. But for the most part it’s true.

I’ve always found it odd, the argument that Highway 99 is a vital north-south freeway that we simply cannot do without, when in fact the vast majority of 99 runs at-grade, traffic lights and all. And ironically, my own yearlong personal experience routinely heading north on 99 from South Seattle to Ballard during afternoon rush hour found that the double-decker Viaduct was the only portion of 99 that was absolutely guaranteed to be mired in stop-and-go traffic.

How could a surface street option possibly be any worse?

So yeah, tear down the Viaduct, try the “surface plus transit” alternative, and let’s see if it works. And if it doesn’t, well… we can always blame Danny and Dan.

UPDATE:
David Sucher points out that he argued for this approach way back in May. So there you have it… two Dans and two Daves all think it’s a good idea. What’s there to lose?

UPDATE, UPDATE:
One sign that an idea is catching on is when everybody starts demanding credit for it.

Rossi appeared on Up Front with Robert Mak today. He was asked about the Viaduct, and whether it ought to be replaced with a tunnel of another viaduct. He said (and I’m paraphrasing):

That’s for the engineers to decide.

Really? It’s up to them?

Lordy!

I hope everyone had a great New Year’s Eve. I know I did, and if you listened to Goldy’s show and heard my call-ins, you know I did! Let’s just say that the lyrics to Auld Lang Syne turn into some mash-up of Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar On Me and ABBA’s Dancing Queen after a few Heinekins. You know you had a good time when you wake up in your bed with a pounding headache, and not in jail, or dead. Let that be a lesson to all you folks… take a cab. It’s cheaper than a Deferred Prosecution for DUI.

On to the links!

Blatheresolutions!!! Moderate-ish predictions! On the Road to 2008 checks predictions made one year ago. Democratic congress? Check! Local races go big for Dems? Check! Machines rise up to take their rightful place above humanity as the dominant species? Wrong on that one, Dan!

Chinchilla Blogging is back!!!

Dan Savage: Basketball is overrated.

Wingnut blogger Jonathan Gardner claims there has not been a single case of torture by American forces or our allies. Effin’ has the scoop.

Erica C. Barnett is 25 percent “male.” Since when does being the toughest reporter in Seattle make you guy-ish?

When I say the liberal interest groups should be more like conservative interest groups, this is what I’m taking about.

One day in 2002, Stefan Sharkansky started writing hit pieces on Rep. Nancy Pelosi. After Stefan declared victory against Pelosi and moved to Seattle, Pelosi was never heard from again. First Nancy Pelosi, then Chris Gregoire, and now Ron Sims, is there any progressive whose career is safe from Stefan’s cutlass of righteousness? (That’s cutlass the sword, not the car.)

Robert Reich writes about how the GOP foments cynicism, and how it helps their agenda.

UPDATE

I never thought I’d see the day: someone has questioned the Democratic credentials of Ivan Weiss (the chair of the rock-solid, top-notch 34th District Democrats). I don’t see eye to eye with Ivan on some things (viaduct!), but if ever there was a guy who gets it, it’s Ivan:

I won’t win many friends here with this opinion, but whatever the “progressive movement” is and whoever is to decide, it is not going anywhere without its vehicle, which is the Democratic Party. The “progressive movement” does not nominate any candidates that I am aware of, any more than the “religious right,” whose vehicle is the Republican Party, does.

The “progressive” movement should do like Howard Dean did a few years ago: if you don’t like the Democratic Party, take it over! A note to the diarist: when someone comments on your diary in a critical way, you shouldn’t knock them for commenting. If you don’t want comments from folks who disagree with you, don’t diary.

A last item from The Left Shue:

As we come to the end of this “Year of Transition” in Iraq, we note the death of the 3000th American service member to die as a result of duty in Iraq, the death of former president Gerald Ford – the man who brought us George HW Bush (CIA), Dick Cheney (Chief of Staff), and Donald Rumsfeld (Department of Defense), and Saddam Hussein – a man both embraced and despised by this country as it fit our purpose. However, as noted by Riverbend, perhaps the most significant “transition” is the loss of Iraq itself.

If anything, in ’06 we’ve seen most Americans turn against the war. Rep. Jack Murtha was right: the American people are ready for a change, perhaps more ready than their own leadership.

Happy Festivus! Here’s Gov. Jim Doyle (D-WI) with his Festivus pole.

• EFFin’ Unsound is fast becoming a must-read, in large part to it’s author Carl Ballard and contributor TheHim. The both of them never let a stupid post at a conservative blog go unmocked. Here’s a recent gem.
• Public financing of judicial races isn’t enough, says Lynn.
  

  My question is, “Why stop there?” The timing is good to jump on public financing for the judicial races given the insane amounts of money that was spent on the three Supreme Court races between the primary and the general elections. I understand that. Plus, Gregoire is cautious by disposition. But what an opportunity to go all the way and ask for public financing of all statewide and legislative races.

  I’m very interested in any blogger who has a credible arguement AGAINST public finance, as I’m sure one exists.

• If you have iTunes, download this now, while it’s still free.
• There’s been excessive spinning over whether or not the Governor actually made a decision regarding the Viaduct. Dan’s satisfied:
  

  The fact is, if she had decided to take it upon herself alone to decide a matter that’s more a Seattle concern than anyone else’s, she would have been lambasted for overstepping her authority and power.

  If she had chosen in favor of a replacement viaduct, she would have pissed off one half of the people, and if she had decided on a tunnel she would have pissed off the other side.

  Count me as one of those that thinks she made the correct decision[…]

  If the replacement option is “financial viable”, and the tunnel option isn’t (according to the Governor herself), why vote between the two? Why present voters an option that isn’t paid for? No, I think the real “punt” the Governor made was by advocating that Seattle vote between two options, only one of which is feasable. As Josh Feit says, this will result in selection of the rebuild option. The Seattle City Council, which lists another Viaduct as its third choice, ought to be sharpening their knives over the Governor’s actions.

• How to replace a popular county executive: Pierce County Edition.

King County Executive Ron Sims supports a public vote on the future of the Alaska Way Viaduct, but apparently thinks it should initially be limited to an up or down vote on the rebuild option alone. Or so says Sims spokesman Sandeep Kaushik, who joined me last night on 710-KIRO to discuss Gov. Chris Gregoire’s proposal to hold a public vote pitting the rebuild vs a tunnel.

At first glance a lot of observers thought the Governor had punted on the Viaduct, but a closer look makes it clear that she’s really made most of the decision, eliminating the retrofit and surface options, and setting up a vote that strongly tilts towards a rebuild. The rebuild is by far the furthest along in the design phase, and comes closest to a fixed price tag, with the Governor promising that the state will pick up any cost overruns. So if the Governor gets her way, Seattle voters will be faced with a choice between the devil we know (a 50-percent wider Viaduct with a fairly fixed cost range to local voters) and the devil we don’t know (a tunnel that could end up looking like anything and eventually cost us $5 billion or more.) I think the Governor is fairly confident that given that choice, voters will choose the rebuild.

Sims however thinks it’s too soon to give up on a “surface-boulevard-plus-transit” option, especially since we haven’t fully explored what such an alternative might look like.

“Governor Gregoire’s announcement today that the public should vote between two Viaduct replacement options – a tunnel or a rebuild – is too limited. While I can support the idea of a public vote, and strongly prefer the tunnel over the rebuild, I disagree with the governor’s call for excluding a surface-boulevard-plus-transit option from public consideration.

“That option, which could potentially open up the waterfront while providing an affordable, environmentally friendly means of moving traffic through the city, has not yet been studied. The surface option that WSDOT briefly examined contained no transit element and bears little resemblance to what surface-transit advocates are proposing.

“If we are going to position Seattle as a vibrant world-class 21st century metropolis, we need to proceed with boldness and vision. We need to think beyond present-day categories, with an eye to the long-term. How we decide on the Viaduct today is a profound test of our commitment to a better, more enlightened future. The right sort of transit-friendly surface proposal could meet that test.”

I agree.

If the Viaduct wasn’t already in place, nobody in their right mind would propose constructing a massive, double-decker freeway through Seattle’s waterfront, and our transportation planners’ inability to envision options beyond a rebuild or a tunnel is a failure of imagination and vision. By all means, let the voters decide if they want a rebuild. But let’s not set up a false choice where a tunnel is the only other option.

Maria Cantwell’s drug policy… um, not so great.

The youth vote in Western states is killer. Killer good for Democrats.

State GOP leaders, beaten like a bad dog in recent elections, resort to whining. You’d think they might accidentally learn something.

Stahl is dead-on:

In order to make good public policy decisions, one must consider all the options, all the facts, fairly and without prejudice. It is clear that everyone who has approached the Viaduct thus far has done it with strongly preconceived notions and wishful thinking, and that has prevented an open, honest discussion about a critical decision for our city’s future.

Bush wants to “win” on Social Security. I hope our Democrats show the same backbone they did last time when they told Bush to go to hell.

Andrew’s got THE power.

I don’t support Kucinich For President, so according to one diarist, I’m a coward. Ladies and gents, let’s go to the Primary Season Rule Book. Can we all agree to cool it with that stuff for a while now? Just a little while?

I first heard about Gov. Gregoire’s viaduct “punt” last Friday following the big wind storm right as I was in the middle of a two-hour commute from Redmond to U-Dub. (Yeah…I know I should have stayed home, but I didn’t really have a choice.) Normally, my commute is 25 minutes by car or an hour by bus. On Friday, however, the SR520 floating bridge was shut down to repair wind damage. At about the one hour mark, crawling along at under 10 mph on I-405, I was contemplating the many ways my quality of life would decline if the SR520 bridge decided to sink. And then the news broke about Gregoire’s statement.

Frankly, I was irritated by another delay in replacing a failing piece of critical infrastructure. Gregiore had her chance to be The Decider™ and she decided to punt. Or so I thought from the media account.

After the sting of a painful commute faded, I looked into Gregoire’s statement and it became clear to me that she had, in fact, made nearly all of the important decisions. She decided that all options were out except the tunnel and the rebuild. Essentially, Gregoire validated (politically and practically) the engineering, environmental, and fiscal analyses found in DOT’s Supplemental Draft, Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) that rejected all but these two options. And eliminating the fringe options is a good decision.

The DEIS dealt with each fringe option in turn. I’ll only mention the so-called no-replacement option because, I believe, Goldy disagrees with me on it. The DEIS finds that the no-replacement option isn’t viable:

• Replacing the viaduct with a four-lane surface street would substantially increase congestion for most of the day and part of the evening on I-5 through downtown Seattle, downtown streets, and Alaskan Way. These congested conditions are predicted to occur even if improvements were made to downtown streets and transit ridership substantially increased.
• I-5 through Seattle doesn’t have room for additional trips since it’s already congested through much of the day and into the evening. However, under the No Replacement concept, many trips that currently use the viaduct would shift to I-5, causing it to become even more congested.
• Downtown street traffic would increase by 30 percent, though traffic increases to specific areas like Pioneer Square and the waterfront could exceed 30 percent.
• With a four-lane roadway, traffic on Alaskan Way would quadruple to 35,000 to 56,000 vehicles per day compared to about 10,000 vehicles today. This traffic would make it difficult for patrons to get to waterfront businesses and would create more conflicts between vehicles and the many bicyclists and pedestrians that use Alaskan Way.
• Neighborhoods west of I-5 (Ballard, Queen Anne, Magnolia, and West Seattle) would have less direct connections to and through downtown; therefore, travel times for trips to and through downtown would increase for drivers from these areas.

A four-lane Alaskan Way would create more congestion on I-5 and downtown streets than the Surface Alternative evaluated in the Draft EIS. The project partners dropped the Surface Alternative because it didn’t meet the AWV Project’s purpose, which is to “maintain or improve mobility, accessibility, and traffic safety for people and goods along the existing Alaskan Way Viaduct Corridor.”

More congestion, longer trip times, and greater susceptibility to accidents, construction, and events? No thanks. The no-replacement option would make a trip to (or through) downtown Seattle less desirable than a field trip through a rendering plant. If anything, it’s a plan to slowly strangle downtown Seattle.

I’m also not convinced by reports that other cities have removed capacity with minimal long term effects. Such decisions are generally not made randomly—there is engineering judgment that precedes such a drastic move. With I-5 at capacity and downtown already too congested at peak times, the engineering judgment suggests that the Seattle waterfront is not a good candidate for capacity reduction.

Gregoire made another important decision. She decided that the decision between the tunnel option and the rebuild option would come down to a vote of the people. But not just any people. She put it up to a vote by the people who would gain the greatest benefit. Oh…and the people who would have to pay the price difference for a tunnel.

The Seattle Times editorial board refers to this as Gregoire’s pragmatic punt.

Effectively, Gregoire is saying, “we will go with the rebuild option because the State has an obligation to replace an important and failing part of the highway infrastructure and, by the way, Seattle, if you want a tunnel instead let us know (soon!) and, if so, include your credit card number.”

What some consider a “punt” is really an offer of an upgrade option for Seattle.

The tunnel upgrade option for Seattle is good politics, too. If the voters decide to spend a couple billion of their own dollars for the tunnel, who can deny them? Or if the voters cheap-out and decide that a rebuilt monstrosity along the waterfront is good enough, then…well, then let them lie in their own noise pollution.

This morning on KUOW’s Weekday, Joni Balter and Joel Connelly had a mini-debate over the Governor’s decision. Balter considered the decision strategically sound. Why? Because Gregoire knows that House Speaker Frank Chopp will do everything he can legislatively to kill the tunnel. And Mayor Nickels will interfere with any attempt to implement the rebuild option. As Balter points out, there is one power higher than Gregoire, and that is the voters.

Joel Connelly, on the other hand, felt that Gregoire offered a shanked punt. We pay her to be The Decider™, and she ought to decide. In case you haven’t figured it out, I find Balter’s arguments more compelling.

Clearly, Gregoire favors the rebuild option; she probably expects Seattle to fail in coming up with either the public support or the funding for a tunnel. The ball is now in Nickels’ court to both build public support and convert his fantasy funding plan into something grounded in reality.

The DEIS prices the tunnel at between $3.6 and $4.3 billion, and the elevated rebuild from $2.5 to $2.9 billion. Funding for the rebuild is almost in place, as there is now $2.45 billion committed to the project, including $2.2 billion from the State, $0.24 billion from the Feds, and $0.016 billion from Seattle.

The tunnel option would likely draw an additional $500 million from Seattle and $200 million from the Port of Seattle. Other potential funding sources include a local improvement district (actually, this was proposed by Goldy) that could provide $250 million, a regional ballot measure (i.e. new taxes), additional Army Corps of Engineers funding for the seawall part of the project, and additional Federal highway and emergency relief funding.

In the long run, the tunnel option offers significant advantages. Most importantly, it will remake the downtown Seattle waterfront. Have you ever walked from the Pike Place Market to the waterfront? Man…talk about an unpleasant experience! A tunnel would …

…dramatically decrease noise levels by about 12 A-weighted decibels (dBA) along the waterfront. This would sound like cutting the noise level by more than half. Noise along the central section of the project corridor is currently loud and would not change much if the Elevated Structure Alternative is built.

The way I see it, the tunnel option is a long term investment, and one that will be appreciated by generations of Seattleites. I can imagine thirty years from now, two lovers will be strolling down to the waterfront, hand in hand. Under one scenario they’ll excitedly discuss their future life together as they take in the pleasant views. Under the other scenario, one will bellow at the other , “I can’t believe they built a fucking freeway through the waterfront!”

So I hope Seattle goes for the option…who knows what kind of difference it could make. I’m just sayin’.

You’ll never guess who volunteered to help put back up those Christmas trees.

At least we’re winning the drug war, right? Inmates are sneaking into prison to buy drugs. Fantastic.

Sen. Gordon Smith is no moderate. Even Lincoln Chafee agrees. Serously folks, what’s up with Smith has his sudden disgust with the President’s Iraq policy? When you see your fellow GOP Senators get sent to the woodshed en masse, it makes you want to flip-flop like a mofo, huh?

And you thought my viaduct idea was goofy.

This is hilarious. President Bush goes to court against… blind people.

Twas the first day of Congress…

Election Day is so last month, but that isn’t stopping Democrats. Unbelievable!