We'll Replace The Viaduct With A Road Despite The Vote

Sometimes when you're preparing for an argument you spend so much time lining up all your facts and figures and imagining every possible counter and building such a gigantic monument of persuasivness brick by logical brick that you fail to see that if you do absolutely nothing it's probable that things will go your way anyway. Dave Sucher over at the City Comforts blog suggests that the People's Waterfront Coalition may be in that very situation with regards to the viaduct.

Regardless of which avenue we enable whenever we get to vote on this thing we're looking at some serious viaduct downtime. No viaduct, no tunnel, no nothing for at least 3-5 years. It could possibly be much longer. Even that 3-5, though, is a lot of time to get used to a new commute. The people behind either the tunnel or the rebuild have to have some credible plan to deal with traffic over the course of that 3-5-whoknowshowlong when the Viaduct is destroyed but its replacement is still being bullt, but the plan can't work too well because if things seem to be going smoothly we'll just call the whole thing off. "You know what- The tunnel sounded ok, but we're really not feeling it. We're good here." How bad would things possibly have to be for 3-5-whoknowshowlong for us to actually carry out a $4B rebuld?

He says it better himself:

The interim transportation plan has to be a Goldilocks plan: It has to work just right.

It can't work too well because if it does the political pressure to stop construction -- stop spending these billions -- will be irresistible.

But it can't work too poorly because then every elected official (and the senior staff in the agencies) will be looking for new jobs as we suffer through years of CBD gridlock.

In the final analysis, I don't think the political establishment will be willing to take the gamble; and everyone will blink. The risk of doing without the viaduct corridor is too high. You have to rely on WSDOT's "traffic management strategy." And if it really does work, you won't be able to rebuild anything at all.

His conclusion is that the viaduct retrofit is the only politically tenable solution and that will make it the eventual winner. Seattlest, however, feels that Seattle being Seattle we'll end up going with either the tunnel or the rebuild and then correct the course halfway through to adopt the PWC's surface roadway. Nickels Inc doesn't really seem like they're going to blink on the cut and cover tunnel thing. They'll probably be able to get it elected/selected/beknighted/whatever. And three years after the old Viaduct is dead and gone we'll change our minds, decide that our billions can be better spent somewhere else, and just build a road where the Viaduct was at a fraction of the cost.

When we talked to Jonathan Raban about the viaduct he said this:

Another reason to query the tunnel--along with Mayor Nickels's other plans for automobile-related transportation fixes--is that this is a bad time to be predicting the future. We still don't know what the impact of telecommuting is likely to have on the urban-suburban commute. It's not impossible to imagine I-5, I-90 and 520 becoming increasingly unclogged at rush-hours during the next few years as more and more people stay home to work. Plus, we have no idea about what's going to happen to oil supplies. Projects like the tunnel, which won't be usable for ten or a dozen years from now, assume a future that's going to be much like today only more so--a dumb assumption in these peculiar and unstable times.

Long-term transportation projects nearly always misread the future. The London Tube, for instances, fossilizes a pattern of city-traveling that was typical of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but has become ever more quaint and irrelevant since.

A little scary when he says it, but never fear. If Seattle has proven anything lately it's that we're willing to make bets on our future transportation infrastructure needs again and again at the polls, but then pull our chips off the table when we get a clear look at the odds.

To date we haven't seen anything that makes us think that the People's Waterfront Coalition isn't on the right track with their surface level roadway. We're becoming convinced that, regardless of what we decide at the polls in November, we're going to end up with the road anyway.