Seattle's Transformation

Seattle may be perched on the precipice of a huge transformation.  A huge number of projects are on the boards including:

• Streetcars, Streetcars, and also Streetcars
• Light Rail to the Airport
• Light Rail to the University and Northgate (via Capitol Hill! yay!)
• Fixing the Mercer Mess
• Replacing the viaduct, or building a tunnel, or
• Not replacing the viaduct (you know how the mayor feels.  I feel differently.)
• Replacing SR 520 Floating Bridge
• Giving over the I-90 express lanes only to transit traffic
• Total revamp of Seattle Center -- including a new or renovated basketball arena

Those are the public projects focused on the west side of Lake Washington.  Meanwhile a slew of pits all over Seattle and Bellevue's downwtowny areas have been dug and are in various states of fill, soon to be new skyscrapery type buildings.  Also, on the east side of Lake Washington, there are a number of transportation projects on the boards or underway, especially considering the east side hasn't spent anywhere near the money it has banked for Sound Transit improvements.

This ties in to macroeconomic theory as relates to the movement of people and goods on a grand scale, and is indicative of what is happening to major cities located near ports these days.  They are just popping!  Any place with a sizeable container freight capacity located nearby tends to benefit from the activity at the container port.  The more economic activity to happen in your area, the more skilled labor needs to move in.  Labor of this sort tends to be highly paid, and people with full stomachs and free evenings have time to think about things like density, public transportation, the shape of their urban environment, and its sustainability.  They tend to create a tax base capable of carrying out grand proposals and this is often timed to coincide with concurrent expansions of freight capacity.

We need to be thinking about transit to Northgate via Ballard, and to West Seattle.  I have a series of diagrams I've worked up for a project that would tie those two neighborhoods in with light rail that I'll be uploading here soon along with some thoughts on infrastructure and the utility of versatility in transit technologies.

Comments

[Scott Schrantz]

So what are your thoughts on the viaduct? As a future transplant to Seattle (we hope to move there sometime before the end of the decade) I need to start taking an interest in the future of the city. I've heard the viaduct compared to the Embarcadero in San Francisco, and how the removal of that freeway revitalized the waterfront there. Of course, I think that even now, with the viaduct still in place, Seattle's waterfront is more inviting than San Francisco's. But the big difference about the Embarcadero is that the Embarcadero didn't go anywhere. It was just an orphaned stub that gave out after a mile or two. Hwy 99 definitely goes somewhere, so you can't just tear the viaduct down and call it a day. You've got to have a replacement.

I've seen there are five different ideas for what to do at the waterfront. Which one do you like?

[Ken]

What a balanced view you have of the viaduct situation. You're right, this is not the Embarcadero, and in comparison to Boston, it's not the Central Artery either. It's a little bit of both.

So which do I support? I support the straight-up rebuild option. We already have the money banked and the views while driving on the thing as well as the fact that SR-99 is the only reliable way to the airport in a hurry during rush hour means we'd be fools to spend too much time and money trying to fix something that ain't broke.

Of course I believe it _is_ broke, in that today's facility is not perfectly structurally sound... but the route and the facilities are the right solution to the traffic problem they were designed to solve.