It was a non-event that dominated our local papers every day for two weeks. Something that didn't happen this month strongly solidified the case for an at-grade waterfront boulevard to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. Namely, during its recent two weeks of construction, northbound I-5 south of downtown was supposed to be a parking lot. And it wasn't. It never happened.
You got the sense that our local dailies were disappointed by this. In the days leading up to the initial lane closures, they were filled with stories on the nightmare to come. Traffic would be backed up to Tacoma. If not Oregon. I-5 would become the world's longest parking lot. And during construction, they kept running stories on how bad the backup, um, wasn't on the given day. The state Department of Transportation got caught flatfooted, too; its lead piece of Web site advice on how to cope was to take vacation for those two weeks.
The message of how horrible things would be, obviously, got out, and once again people turned out to have far more common sense than politicians and traffic planners and media types assumed. We changed our travel habits. We took other routes, used public transit or simply didn't make the trips. And I-5 was just fine; if anything, the traffic was better than it normally has been when all lanes are open.
Now, admittedly, this was in August, the lightest local travel month of the year, when many of us take vacations or otherwise play hookey from our normal routines. And remarkably, the construction even wrapped up a few days early, meaning I-5 was compromised for only a few days, rather than the years it will take for any waterfront construction.
Nonetheless, this suggests that when the Alaskan Way Viaduct comes down - hopefully in a planned way during construction - people will similarly adjust. At minimum, the waterfront will be closed to traffic for the years it will take to bring down the viaduct, clean up the mess and replace it with whatever. By the time some new waterfront transportation option does open (nobody's suggesting we turn the whole place into a park and forget it entirely as a transportation corridor), folks will have had years to adjust to life without taking a waterfront route. What we learned this month is not only that we'll be able to make the adjustment just fine (SR 99 carries less traffic than I-5), but that we need not go back to the previous peak (or higher) of traffic capacity when we're done.
This is the crux of the standoff between the city and the state. The state refuses to fund any construction that doesn't replace the viaduct with something able to carry just as many vehicles, or at least riders (that point's in dispute, too). The city says that's unaffordable, and last spring a solid majority of Seattle voters agreed, rejecting plans for either a tunnel or a new viaduct to maintain the waterfront as a freeway.
Advocates of the state's position have argued that without a waterfront freeway of some sort, the traffic will spill onto downtown arterials, causing gridlock and especially damaging freight mobility between industrial Ballard and the Port of Seattle. (This assumes the mayor's office isn't planning in the interim to turn all that nicely positioned Ballard waterfront light industrial property into a new Tax-Free Condominium Enterprise Zone. But we digress.)
But what if all that displaced traffic doesn't spill onto I-5 or downtown arterials? What if an important chunk of it instead takes the bus, or the new light-rail line, or stays home, or goes somewhere else instead - and for vehicular purposes, disappears?
At that point you've saved car trips (and greenhouse gas emissions), kept a new and hideously ugly freeway off the waterfront, reunited the waterfront with downtown, and even (here's the best part) created some opportunities for development. So what's the problem again with a waterfront boulevard replacement for the Alaskan Way Viaduct?
It's easy not to notice when something that was expected to happen doesn't. But what happened in the case of this month's I-5 construction was dramatic confirmation of what urban planning experts have been telling us all along. Extra lanes in freeways don't solve traffic problems because traffic expands to fill them up.
And now we've seen for ourselves that the converse is also true: when traffic capacity goes away, so does some of the traffic. We deal with it.
Problem solved.
Seattle writer and community activist Geov Parrishmay be reached at this link. Reach out and write him.[[In-content Ad]]
