When the 520 bridge was originally built, I doubt anyone really considered a need for cyclists or pedestrians to get across it. But since a safe path wasn't included in the original design it's served as a complete bottleneck for alternative forms of transit.

Why would they want to make the same mistake again with light rail? This is such a no-brainer.

Where can we get more info, more detailed illustrations, for Option M?

WSDOT Web site only has A, K, and L.

Conlin has a choice.

Either kill the Billionaires Tunnel so he can get the 520 plan he wants ...

or watch both die.

As with the Viaduct, there are no good solutions to the 520 problem, only bad ones and worse ones.

Which is why they should just start replacing the weakened pontoons and leave it pretty much as is. Maybe they could get it replaced in less than 25 years that way.

Perhaps 520 supporters who want to see better design should be a little more supportive of the anti-tunnel Viaduct folks.

The $1 billion isn't just for a offramp. It's been nicknamed the Frozen Offramp Tunnel Option. I guess you could call it the 'FOTO' option.

What they want to do is insert cooling rods into the ground for 9 months, freeze the ground all around, then excavate that frozen dirt out via barge. It's a hugely expensive process for a tunnel/ramp option that is really pretty bad, with a tight curve and very steep grade.

This option lacks over $2 BILLION in money so it's really just a pipe dream to talk about it. The days of getting the money from 'somewhere' are over. The State is broke. The Federal Government is broke. So Frank Chopp and Jamie Pedersen can scream all they want for the overbudget, risky FOTO option 520 bridge. But there's no money for it.

That bizarre method of tunnel construction has been abandoned as a viable option, even though it will be included in the environmental study due out at the end of the year. The gap between the construction cost of Plan A and Plan M is much narrower than it was with the previous Plan K (Plan M is about 20% over the current, fairly arbitrary budget.) Plan M itself is also much narrower than A, and also narrower than K, but maintains the mobility benefits of K. (Anyone confused yet?)

Plan M makes a major effort to improve the speed and reliability of transit from the Eastside to the UW and the light rail station there. It fixes a lot of the congestion issues in the area without inducing new traffic in the system.

Plan A puts bus "rapid" transit on a drawbridge that opens 10-90 times a day and creates even more traffic signals in Montlake for buses to get stuck at. It supersizes an interchange, builds a new drawbridge, adds giant intersections for pedestrians and bicyclists to cross, has 7 lanes across Portage Bay, 14 lanes of ramps in Montlake, takes out homes, widens city arterials... all in a desperate and ultimately doomed attempt to cram a few more vehicles into a street configuration that is already overwhelmed, as anyone who has come through Montlake has witnessed.

$2 billion is roughly the amount we are short to fund Plan A, which is unanimously opposed by every community the highway runs through. The only way to get those funds would be to toll all the lanes of I-90 (a federal highway, unlike SR 520) across the lake and send the lion's share of that money to SR 520, on top of tolling SR 520 which is already planned (by 2011.) Some vast number (about 3000, I think?) of Mercer Island residents signed a petition basically saying they reject tolling that corridor for any purpose.

SR 520 is going to sink if we don't fix it, and we will end up tolling I-90 eventually, but Plan A is DOA.

No high level bridges across Union Bay. Not now not ever. This is as stupid as the Thompson Expressway idea. More SOV capacity into the Montlake/Pacific interchange is not the way to solve congestion. Next to downtown Seattle this is the most dense area in the entire region. It's time to realize that the only way to get the type of mobility needed into this area does not include SOV traffic. The UW has a proven track record to prove this is the case. Lots of ways to work toward this goal that are effective. More pavement isn't one of them. Traffic is the problem; not the solution.