Comments

1
Among the 3 alternatives they have at the moment, this panel selected the only viable one.

The non-selected options are just wierd, K and L. They have no connection to Montlake Blvd -- no way for 520 traffic to get to Capitol Hill, unless you detour over the Ship Canal and back, or snake through Montlake back streets (bet the neighbors would just love that!)
2
There are 2 terrible errors in this design:

(1) It is criminally stupid NOT to put light rail across the new bridge. It is vastly cheaper to include light rail in the initial design than to add light rail after-the-fact to either bridge.

(2) Like the current 520 merge onto southbound I-5, it merges into the left lane. This might have been okay 40 years ago with a fraction of the traffic, but merging anything into the left lane is stupid. Especially when a whole bunch of the cars are then forced to cross over 4 lanes of traffic in a short distance to get off at Mercer. This would perpetuate the current poorly designed gridlock for the next half century. This should be a right side merge.
3
I would like to point out a major flaw in this video.

Northbound I5 is open on the normal and express lane. Southbound IS NOT BACKED UP TO HELL AND BACK.

Something is not right here ;)
4
i like that music. shazam couldn't match it. it reminded me a bit of some sigur ros.
5
Did anyone happen to notice that the proposed bridge turns the isthmus into a giant Los Angeles-style freeway cloverleaf at the junction of three waterways, on top of Foster Island, and next to the Arboretum? It basically turns the Montlake cut into the ugliest urban freeway junction north of San Francisco. And the only thing Seattle gets for allowing this monstrosity is people from the East Side coming over here to compete with us for jobs. Yay.
6
Will,

My point is not the distance from Montlake freeway flyer stops; I'm not even sure that option A still has those stops. The point is that the options with an exit directly into Husky Stadium provide a quick way for SR520 buses to access the Link Station. Most times of day getting off and switching to Link will be faster than continuing on a bus downtown.
9
(and there are an awful lot of them)


Yeah? How many is that actually? I mean, comparatively. How many cars are eastbound and westbound at, say, 8:00 on an average weekday?

Seattle reps throwing a hissy fit


A hissy fit, huh? Like the hissy fit the LCC pitched over the Children's Hospital expansion?
10
That hissing sound you hear is the sound of many millions of dollars of home value disappearing from the Montlake neighborhood (and nearby parts of north Capitol Hill).

I love the suggestion that "Option A would have the highest local congestion, but this increase could be reduced by including Lake Washington Boulevard on-ramps", because it's so obvious that everyone wants Lake Washington Boulevard to be turned into a freeway on-ramp. Did none of these engineery types take a look at the current forty-year-old ramps to nowhere that are there, started but never finished? Do they seriously believe that this terrible idea, which was rejected back in the go-go freeway-lovin' days of yore, is somehow magically going to be more popular now?

That's the problem with every one of these options: they presume that all the connectors -- Montlake Boulevard north and south, I-5, all the other local streets -- are going to magically absorb all this new 520 traffic. You think Montlake is a clusterfuck now? They just doubled it. I-5 is already FULL. They might as well carry on with the freeway past the stadiums and right on along the lake edge to, uh, Sand Point or something. There's nowhere for all these cars to go.

Thinking that these plans are going to "reduce congestion" on the bridge is a pipe dream. The only way to reduce congestion on the bridge is to blow it up. The backups at both ends are going to get WORSE, not better.
11
@9, my impression is that 520 is a pretty significantly reverse commute. I dunno about 8:00 AM, but at 4:30 PM the bridge is wedged solid coming INTO town, while still moving pretty decently towards Bellevue.
12
R.H. Thomson liiiiiiives
14
@13, unfortunately that article, while correct, has its headline exactly backwards. A reverse commute IS one that primarily flows from bedrooms in the city out to jobs in the suburbs (and exurbs). That's what we have now; a reverse commute. The traditional commute is from bedrooms in the suburbs to downtown jobs, which is largely a thing of the past.
15
Where's the two mile long traffic backup at the toll plaza?
16
Once the Billionaires Tunnel is knifed, we'll get a decent plan for 520.
17
This is a depressing demonstration.

The civil engineers who prepared this study, as others have wisely observed, excluded dedicated mass transit. Even if it isn't light rail, then bus rapid transit would more than solve the expensive onset costs of engineering a bridge that can handle fixed rail. The implementation of BRT, as with LRT, offsets the number of single-user vehicles significantly enough that the number of private vehicle lanes need not be so extensive.

The cut-and-cover tactic proposed here isn't like what exists over the I-5 downtown. It's more like the cut-and-cover of the Ville-Marie Expressway in Montreal, Canada, built around the late 1960s and now being eyed for removal for restoring the city fabric. That expressway falls out of view from ground level like this one will, but the covered areas created a chasm of useless nothingness between one side of the city (Old Montreal) with the rest (downtown). It' resembles a demilitarized, dead man's zone.

Like the I-5 cover, it's noisy and smelly.

After seeing this, I'm sort of glad, yet sort of sad I no longer live in the Seattle area.
18
What happens to the Arboretum under this plan? The place is already chronically underfunded (I'd know; I used to work there), and building a bridge through the state's only official arboretum just adds insult to injury.
19
So, assuming you're right about who uses the bridge, your premise here is that Seattle residents make the greatest use of the bridge, but that Seattle government should not have discretion to refuse, on behalf of its constituents, to have a new bridge built.

Is that about right?
20
As a disclaimer, I live in the Montlake neighborhood and have participated several design sessions.

It is interesting that the WSDOT traffic planners have moved off their initial position that it would be impossible to design an interchange without including a set of on/off-ramps at Lk WA Blvd. The stated reason for maintaining those ramps was because there was no way to absorb traffic from Mad Pk, N Cap Hill, etc. onto 24th to even get to the interchange.

Also, no direct HOV access in the Westbound direction will be a disaster for transit and GP lanes. You are creating another massive weave in confined space.
21
@19 - technically, most of it is on state land or fed land, so yeah.

In case you haven't noticed, the UW ain't called the University of Seattle, it's the University of Washington.
22
@21

Oh wow, you're so right. It's totally called the University of Washington! Jesus, I never noticed that before.

You know what my favorite thing about the UW is, is that it exists in a total vacuum. Like, nobody who goes to the UW uses Seattle city streets, the UW doesn't use Seattle's sewer facilities, and none of the people who work at UW live in Seattle. And, best of all, the UW has its own transit system. And nothing that happens on the UW campus has any effect on the rest of the city, so they should be able to build a freeway or ballistic missile shield there if the state government decides that's a good idea.
23
Eliminating the flyer stops for buses at Montlake is a bad piece of this plan. Thousands of people in both directions -- from downtown Seattle and the Eastside -- use them daily.
25
This plan has to be a non-starter:

No Montlake Flyer station (no bus on/off on the bridge, like today), which means people in Capitol Hill and the U District suddenly have no reasonable interchange option (except at the MEdical Center? Adds time and is already overwhelmed).

The UW light rail stop will have no interchange with buses, which is insane.

Basically, the UW stamped its feet about the 520 plan, and got its way. This plan destroys existing services, and kills intermodal transit options. The UW is a public institution; it should be serving a public purpose here. (Also, its students are hugely commuters; why is the UW opposing plans that would make it easier for students --and staff -- to get to school?)

Yes, I love the freeway caps. No, I hate the second bascule.
26
If Seattle wants another couple of billion in add-ons, the State is going to tell them to pay for them or get out of the way.


That's a rather strange and contradictory red herring you offer. The fact is that 520 is a state highway that touches down in the middle of Seattle, and Seattleites have to live with the new interchange. If the rest of the state wants to build a giant interchange here, they should do it in a way that doesn't take a giant dump in the middle of our city -- or not build anything at all. Which was actually my position -- if the state can't build a highway that will actually be better, they can just make due with the one they've got.
28
@26: Seriously, are you arguing that this is all nothing but a giant inconvenience for Seattle and its residents? Thousands of whom commute to the Eastside and back? Or who attend or work at UW? Or who are tired of gridlock keeping them from going a few miles from Capitol Hill to the UDistrict?

This plan isn't great, but your us-vs.-them rhetoric is absurd.
29
Want to stop congestion on 520?

Make it an HOV only bridge.

As in 2 people per vehicle or a $200 toll.
30
oh, and @26 - we ain't building anywhere for those cars from 520 to go, no matter how much the Eastsiders whine.

Get on the bus.
31
@27

Hey thanks. l'd say the same to you, but it's pretty obvious what position you prefer -- and a guy who's willing to bend over for rich people doesn't need luck.

@28

No, building a giant cloverleaf interchange on the Union Bay is absurd. Making highways bigger when 100 years of evidence shows that demand grows to meet capacity is absurd. The rest of the state pretending that Seattle is their own private dumping ground for stupid ideas while siphoning tax money off to pay for services in rural counties is absurd.

And if you think my us-versus-them rhetoric is absurd, I suggest you take Mr. X's advice and spend some time in Olympia. That's the flavor the debate in Washington State, brother.
32
@4

I was thinking the same thing.
33
Can we talk about the sound track on that video? Is Enya a transportation consultant now?
34
Why has everybody given up on Option L?
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/partners/sr520le…

No expensive tunnel, only slightly more expensive than the current option they're trying to ram down our throat, and we alleviate the traffic on Montlake. That stupid drawbridge bottleneck is a disaster today, adding a second Montlake bridge right next to the first has to be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard.
35
Why has everybody given up on Option L?
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/partners/sr520le…

No expensive tunnel, only slightly more expensive than the current option they're trying to ram down our throat, and we alleviate the traffic on Montlake. That stupid drawbridge bottleneck is a disaster today, adding a second Montlake bridge right next to the first has to be one of the dumbest ideas I've ever heard.

Please wait...

Comments are closed.

Commenting on this item is available only to members of the site. You can sign in here or create an account here.


Add a comment
Preview

By posting this comment, you are agreeing to our Terms of Use.