Christine Gregiore, (Barely) Governor of Washington, decided to leave it up to the people of Seattle as to whether the Alaskan Way Viaduct should be replaced with a tunnel or knocked down and rebuilt.
The debate between the two chioces has been raging for months, with ideas such as knocking it down and NOT replacing it and/or building a raised motorway over the water and around downtown Seattle and/or double-deck Interstate 5 to handle the viaduct’s capacity trying to fight their way into the discussion.
The main problem is this: The viaduct shouldn’t even have traffic flowing on it as it is unstable from both age and the damage it took from the last earthquake a few years back. But instead of telling people the truth and shutting it down, they have a weight limit on it and have done the obligatory “temporary repairs” so that folks feel hunky-dory about driving on it.
All of the options are going to have their own price tag, with the two most popular and expensive options being replacement and the tunnel, and therefore they are the only ones to be on the ballot.
While I would like to bag on Gregiore for not being decisive, I really can’t because she is leaving up to a vote, which is the right thing to do. Granted, it should be a vote of the whole state and not just the people of Seattle, because the whole of the state is going to end up paying for it in either the money spent out of the budget from the feds or, when (not “if”) the project goes over-budget, and money is taken out of the general transportation fund.
Personally, if I could have a guarantee that it wouldn’t go over budget and be another “Big Dig” sized failure, I’d like to see the viaduct gone from the city skyline and a tunnel. But I can’t so it won’t.
My second favorite option is to, again, eliminate the viaduct and double-decker Interstate 5 as it goes through downtown. This is the 21st Century and it can be done. The collector distributor lanes would have to first be exapnded to handle the capacity, but even with that modification, the cost would be less than a new viaduct, AND traffic would move through downtown like never before.
My main problem with building a new viaduct is not just that it is ugly, its that it is part of state highway #99. While Hwy 99 does run up the majority of the west coast, as does Hwy 101, to my knowledge, the states are responsible for it’s maintenance. Spending federal dollars on a state highway is wrong and if the state cannot afford to repair/replace parts of it state highways, it should eliminate them and not fall back onto the fed to cough up the cash.
Senator Patty “Osama bin Laden builds daycares” Murray has used her postion as the highest ranking Democrat on the Senate Transportation Appropriations Committee to score Washington some fed-trans cash to help pay a goodly portion of knocking down and replacing the viaduct. Any extra funding for over-runs or the likes of a tunnel has to come from the people of Seattle (or, as the city government of Seattle likes to call them “The People of Washington”).
About the only thing funny about this whole situation is that Gregiore chose to go public with her decision to punt on last Friday, when over a million people in the state were without power.
