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Conflicted over viaduct options

The State narrowed the SR99 options down to two last week. Maybe that’s not the final word, but let’s assume it is for a moment.

I don’t like either of them. Both options have big problems. (On the other hand, wouldn’t a decision, good or bad, be a relief on some level?)

In some moods, the new-viaduct option even seems like the better of the two. Kinda leaning that way right now.

That’s not easy to admit. I was on the viaduct-over-my-dead-body bandwagon not long ago. Why build another view-blocking encouragement to driving too much? Why choose to make the same horrible decision that so many of us have regretted for decades?

A tunnel is clearly the best option. It handles most of the traffic, and it does it out of sight. But remember our assumption.

The one-way surface couplet is scary, though it has its benefits. For a few reasons.

For all the horrors of the current viaduct, it gets traffic off the streets, and makes Western and Alaskan pedestrian-friendly. We’re talking about turning both into high-volume throughways. Sort of like Western already is in Belltown, but worse.

The surface option assumes some traffic would go away as transit use grows, and as people make new decisions about where to live and work, telecommuting, etc. But it also assumes more traffic flows to I-5 and other surface streets. We also plan to accommodate more cars on our streets.

I don’t want Downtown Seattle to be a throughways! Let the through traffic stay on the two freeways, and let our surface streets focus on people and their own neighborhoods.

The emphasis on transit is fantastic. We should do that regardless. Taking it a step further, Seattle needs its own version of the Metro and Sound Transit bus improvements that are mostly suburban. A levy in the tens of millions per year would revolutionize inner-city transit.

If you’re concerned about the aerial option encouraging driving, rest assured that it won’t add capacity, and has fewer lanes than the current version, with the plan that Downtown commuters will exit sooner. Actually Downtown streets stand to suffer even in this scenario. It’s a decent balance.

Sometimes pragmatism and compromise gives you a better result than idealism.

P.S. North of Denny, it’s all positive. Anything is better than the mishmash of pedestrian barriers we have now, crossing Aurora, going north-south west of Aurora, etc.

Tags: Highway 99, Viaduct

This entry was posted by Matt Hays on Saturday, December 13th, 2008 at 7:26 pm and is filed under Planning, Seattle lifestyle. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Matt the Engineer

I disagree with much of your assessment. Let me see if I can nail down the points:

Tunnel. I see a tunnel as yet another multi-billion dollar subsidy to cars. Yes, it would move more vehicles through our city, but I’m still not convinced we need major highways running through Seattle. Don’t forget that peak oil will be here very soon (61% of petroleum geologists predict we’ll hit peak oil in less than 10 years). Change this to an urban rail subway that would connect our neighborhoods, and I’d be on-board.

One-way couplet is pedestrian unfriendly. I do agree that it should be a smaller road, but it could certainly be worse. There are stoplights every block, and I don’t see this as any more of a problem than 2nd or 4th.

Viaduct makes Alaskan pedestrian-friendly. From a noise perspective alone, this is not true. Try to walk under the thing and have a regular conversation. You’ll find yourself yelling “what?” often. You also have parking strip and ugly back of buildings between Alaska and Western. Walk down from the base of the new stairs at 1st and Union to the waterfront and tell me how friendly that feels.

Seattle Transit. What I do agree with you about is our need for city-level transit. The streetcars will be a good first step, but only if they are traffic separated. ST3 will give us a start at a real subway system to connect our neighborhoods, but I think we need more and much more quickly.
Matt Hays

Peak oil will make oil more expensive, and will continue to cause reductions in driving. But the reductions in driving won’t be on the scale of the traffic the viaduct carries. Further, as oil supply falls, other means, as well as simple fuel efficiency, will keep cars on the road. I consider this unfortunate, because peak oil is a great opportunity to transition away from cars as our primary transportation method.

Second & Fourth have wide sidewalks and parked cars. They’re designed as places to be in addition to places to drive through. Western isn’t a wide enough RoW for that.

Would Alaskan under a new viaduct be pedestrian-friendly? First, much of the current noise is from lower-level traffic, reflected off the ceiling, which wouldn’t be the case here. Second, I’ve lived and/or worked within a block or two of the viaduct for many years, and walk there frequently, and I’ll take the noise (even at today’s levels) 1,000 times over a massive increase in street level traffic. Since the new viaduct would be much quieter, that’s a somewhat moot arguement anyway.

Hmm, I seem to be getting firmer in the aerial camp.
http://www.greatcity.org JoshMahar

I agree with Matt here. Just because cars will be on the street doesn’t mean that pedestrians can’t be prioritized. If there was a big viaduct, and western and alaskan were mainly empty, it wouldn’t mean people could just take over the street. We just make sure that cars have to stop and that people have nice big crossing spaces.

If everyone is taking their cars on the viaduct there won’t be anyone to walk around down there anyway. Hence the probably we already have.
mhays

Anyone heading for Downtown already ends up on surface streets. The question is where the through-traffic goes.

The City and State don’t have good records respecting pedestrians on through routes. I vaguely recall that some of that can be blamed on Federal mandates, but we also have disjointed policy, particularly at the local level where we talk a good game. Alaskan, Western, and some other Downtown avenues seem destined for Denny-like status, where cars are by far the main priority.
mhays

PS, I see that I get “mhays” and “matt hays” taglines depending on which computer I use. If it’s not obvious enough I’m the same guy.
mhays

I started reading the PI, and the first thing I saw about the surface option was an editorial calling for…fewer pedestrian crossings, to speed up traffic.

The surface option won’t be a bundle of our highest aspirations. It’ll be picked at and compromised, and Downtown streets will be highways, like Denny.
Matt the Engineer

I think it’s unfair to compare any of this to Denny – an area with few stoplights, and fewer pedestrians. Actually, with 4 lanes, the current Alaskan layout is more comparable to Denny. Why do you consider the current layout pedestrian friendly, but changing it to 3 lanes less friendly?

The reduction in traffic from peak oil will certainly match Viaduct capacity, especially when you factor in that people will have to find other ways to work during the years when the Viaduct is being torn down. By then we’ll have to have good transit built up in W. Seattle and down south. Which future would get them back in their cars: the surface option, or the tunnel/viaduct options?

I do agree that Western won’t be terribly friendly under the surface option, but I’d argue that it isn’t terribly friendly right now north of the Harbor Steps. South of the Harbor Steps there are storefronts and the type of destination foot traffic that you claim makes a street as lively as 4th or 2nd.
mhays

For years I lived on that stretch of Western (with a view between the viaduct levels actually). I’ve always considered it extremely pedestrian friendly. You can cross it easily, even midblock. There are stop signs rather than lights. Yes there isn’t much retail, but a street can be pedestrian-friendly even so.

My definition of pedestrian-friendly isn’t just about destination shopping streets. What about people who simply want a safe, convenient, maybe even pleasant route to work? Western is fantastic in that regard.

As for Denny, it has heavy traffic, narrow sidewalks, zero ambiance, and “no crossing” signs, just as Western might have, as well as Alaskan in terms of the traffic and reduced crossings.
Matt the Engineer

Let me just reiterate my main issue with your proposal. You want to build a 50+ year structure or tunnel, costing as much as billions of dollars, to move around vehicles that will likely be strongly reduced in numbers within 15 years.

I think your claim that peak oil will only moderately reduce vehicles is based on flawed conjecture – short term $4 gas reduced commute-hour traffic by 26% across the country. Imagine high long-term gas prices, when people have time to re-evaluate living far from their jobs. Long term we clearly need more transit and density, not more roads.
lheard

I live on Western in Belltown and it is already a mean street at rush hours, but I still prefer a surface option. Thinking long-term, it is a means of buying time, whereas another elevated structure will be a blight no matter what changes in transportation occur in the future. A surface option is essentially public open space, the use of which can change over time. I look forward to a public taking back of space on many of our streets in the future.
AJ

110,000 people travel via the viaduct today, which is equivalent to all the traffic on 1st through 6th, give or take 10,000 trips daily. Now, the main reason people use it is not necessity, it’s convenience, so you can strip a good percentage of folks making trips that way. You can also look at the disperal of necessary trips going through surface streets downtown (mainly 5th and further). Then I-5. Traffic through the city core via cars is reducing as well. Remember that 50% of all workers should be coming in via transit by 2020 or so.

In terms of pedestrian crossings, we have a good chance of reducing interaction– the over-under walkway at the market is one. You also have the two off/on-ramps at Columbia and Seneca which could easily become walkways/bikeways. That would provide Pedestrian access every 4 blocks.

Also, the couplet would travel at 30mph, which is not an unreasonable speed.

Given the fact that the Waterfront would be opened up even further by having the surface options, pedestrian movement shouldn’t be a big deal.

Having a legacy project like the elevated options serves only those who demand convenience over actual necessity.
mhays

I hope you’re not suggesting that a crossing every four blocks is enough! That would kill the waterfront as well as the block west of Western. It would make the surface option an unmitigated disaster. Even a crossing ever second block would render everyone’s claims about pedestrian friendliness false. It would be a real barrier as well as a psychological one.

Where does the 50% figure come from? If you mean transit mode share for Downtown workers, it sounds attainable but optimistic, like boosting transit beyond current plans (perhaps the in-city levy I suggested). But meanwhile Downtown keeps growing, and the current number (for what geographic area I don’t know) was something like 38-40% recently. Even jumping to 50%, plus a higher percentage of pedestrian commuters as housing is added, doesn’t necessarily mean a huge decline in cars coming in.

Matt the Engineer, your 26% figure seems extremely high. What’s the source?

The more I hear, the less I buy about vehicle trip reduction or how innocuous the surface option would be, even though some things about it remain excellent. The details seem to be the devil on this one.
Matt the Engineer

I linked to the source. Click on the blue words.

Re: every four blocks. How many crossings are there now? North of the Harbor Steps I count one at the hotel steps (down past the storage building, down the rusty steps, past the garbage cans, through the parking lot, under the Viaduct, and across the street), one at Pike’s market, and, well, that’s about it. At the Harbor Steps and south there will be traffic lights every block.
mhays

That’s not counting traffic…it’s counting congestion. Huge difference!

Currently, a pedestrian can get to the waterfront at every street except Virginia (Steinbrueck Park) and Blanchard (at southbound entrance to viaduct). Every one of those is important.
Matt the Engineer

I think there’s a misunderstanding happening here. Take a look at the proposed map (pdf). Nobody is proposing taking away the existing routes to the waterfront. AJ was talking about new routes to the waterfront. Notice the traffic signals on every single block, except under Virginia (where one potential new route will exist).

Also, take a look at the section – your fear of not having parking buffer is unfounded on Alaskan and on one side of Western. And there’s a bike lane built into the other side of Western (hey, it’ll be nice not to worry about car doors being opened). Again, I’d love to see fewer lanes, but I can see this working.
mhays

I might have misunderstood AJ.

But my original complaints remain:
–Regardless of how many crossings there are, a throughway with heavy traffic is undesirable for pedestrians.
–Western is narrow. They can’t fit wide sidewalks plus parking with three lanes and a bike lane. Something has to go.
–Political pressure, such as the PI’s editorial today, creates a huge risk that pedestrian crossings will be deleted in the name of traffic flow. That’s especially true where the street doesn’t go through, such as Union.
–Other Downtown streets would get more traffic under the surface plan. Big negative.
Matt the Engineer

I think the plan is to keep the same width sidewalks as are currently on Western.

Regarding traffic flow, I think we disagree about a fundamental issue. I see traffic (meaning congestion) as mostly independent of road capacity – “build it and they will come”. The more lanes of roads you build, the faster traffic flows, the more people you encourage to drive on these roads, and you end up with the same amount of traffic – just with more cars. The fewer lanes you build the more people find other ways around.

In my view you can never build your way out of traffic long term. Adding capacity only decreases traffic in the short-term, just as reducing capacity only increases traffic in the short-term.

Check out the extreme examples of this in the Texas 18-lane freeway (because 16 lanes clearly had too much traffic), and San Francisco’s Central Freeway (the second of two SF viaducts that were torn down and replaced with a boulevard).
AJ

Like I said, it’s necessity versus convenience. When you build something like this, you encourage non-essential use. Reducing this to a utilitarian road will reduce non-essential traffic to manageable levels. If you’ll notice, we’re adding RapidRide to the system on top of Streetcars and LRT. Freight will initially be the loser but will certainly take precedence over those who feel they are inconvenience by downtown.

Look what happened when they shut down I-5. Everyone flocked to transit.
http://www.callihan.com/ Steve C.

There are two “through” lanes on the downtown portion of I-5. There are six on the Viaduct. Removing the Viaduct will result in a 75% reduction in current through (or unimpeded) capacity.

As long as the federal gov’t is going to be doling out dollars, we need to snag some to build a bored toll-tunnel, not to replace the Viaduct, but to unclog the Downtown I-5 bottleneck. The feds might pay for half, with the rest coming from tolls and taxes. A fair share of the traffic on the Viaduct is simply trying to avoid the I-5 bottleneck.

Any project the planning for which is being honchoed by WSDOT always comes down to which ones will pour the most concrete. That’s what happened here as well.