metrognome
BigPhil- Wait until you try to use the Seneca off-ramp when the Mariners are playing … southbound First and Second become gridlocked by all the cars on the viaduct trying to fit into the one or two open car lengths left by drivers blocking the intersections and fans on foot crossing whenever they want. The Columbia St on-ramp doesn’t move because of the cars exiting the viaduct at Royal Brougham and SB cars already on the viaduct get bottlenecked. Add the chaos when ferries come and go at Colman Dock and nothing moves for hours.
The thing I didn’t mention before is Seattle’s unique geology; downtown is constrained by water to the west (although considerable land was added when the Denny Regrade hill was sluiced into Elliott Bay) and hills to the east. There is no room to add any at-grade capacity, so it is go up or go under (i.e. the Metro bus tunnel and the railroad tunnel). To complicate matters, our founding ma’s and pa’s violated basic planning rules and oriented the majority of the downtown streets to the waterfront rather than to north/south and east/west … except the town drunk, Doc Yesler, who platted his property, now known as Pioneer Square, correctly. That causes huge bottlenecks at the north end of PS where the two plats meet.
Also, the viaduct and most of the downtown/SODO street capacity, including the WS Bridge and the Harbor Island/Duwamish industrial area, is based on 1950’s thinking about future road needs. Many of the related improvement project in the SODO area are designed to move traffic, incl. the huge amount of commercial cargo traffic, more directly to I-5 and to redistribute capacity and demand to a broader number of streets. Estimates are that the tunnel MAY increase travel times for some people, but once all the work is done and more alternatives are available, my guess is that things will even out.
The deep bore tunnel wouldn’t be the ‘preferred alternate’ in an ideal world, but this ain’t Kansas and we have to make a choice based on reality.
Denny Regrade project: http://www.historylink.org/index.cfm?DisplayPage=output.cfm&file_id=708
p.s. on a political note, environmentalist McGinn was running against ‘evil’ businessman Malahan after the sitting Mayor, Greg Nickels, was defeated in the primary. Neither had government experience. McGinn, a Sierra Club member (staff, board??) had opposed the deep bore tunnel until he stated during the campaign that he would not oppose it if he was elected. Also, the city held an advisory vote on whether the public preferred the new viaduct or the ‘cut-and-cover’ tunnel option; as I recall, neither received a majority. However, it is important to note that the deep bore option was not conceived until after that vote and is very different than the c&c tunnel in significant ways (doesn’t require tearing down the viaduct first and reorients the tunnel path east away from the waterfront ‘liquifaction zone’ (in the event of a large enough quake, this fill land will liquify and everything will crumble) into the more solid land near First.)
tafn.