This post is by leaders of the Sustainable 520 Coalition, including members of the North Capitol Hill Neighborhood Association, Madison Park Community Council, Montlake Community Council, Laurelhurst Community Council, Seattle’s Boating Community, and Roanoke/Portage Bay Community Council.
- Derrick Coetzee on Flickr
- The 520 Bridge we have, spanning Lake Washington from Seattle to Medina
City council members, it’s time to represent Seattle. Instead, you’ve been enabling the state to rush toward awarding construction contracts for 520 this summer.
We know that expanding 520 is a state project. But the city council could and should be ensuring the state’s project actually helps, not harms, our city. The council should be asking, not avoiding, the hard questions:
1) How can it help the city to take a lane away from I-5? The state’s currently “preferred alternative” for 520 removes a lane from I-5 on the ship canal bridge and just south of the 520 interchange. One less I-5 lane guarantees problems for anyone commuting to or from anywhere north of the ship canal.
2) How can it help the city to start a project with no reasonable prospect of the funding to finish it? The state plans to use all its available funds in expanding four lanes to six from the eastside to near Seattle. Then it will run out of money; the state budget is without the funds it would need to finish the Seattle side of the project within the next 10 years. The shortfall will exceed $2.5 billion—an amount too big to come from tolling I-90 or from the federal government.
Please don’t tell us the legislature is considering new taxes. Even assuming the legislature would devote such a huge percent of its budget to Seattle, transportation taxes don’t pass without support from the people of the 43rd district—the people most harmed by the state’s currently “preferred alternative.”
3) How can it help the city, or the region, to leave 520’s Seattle side vulnerable to earthquakes, for 10 years or more?
520’s worst safety vulnerability is on the Seattle side, where the road is supported by columns that could crumble in an earthquake. Yet the state has allocated none of its available funds to fix these columns.
Why not use the available funds to fix the safety problems, now? That is, after all, how this project was sold to the public—as a safety fix.
4) How can it help the city, or the region, to start a project before understanding how it will impact Seattle traffic? Peter Hahn, director of the Seattle Department of Transportation, has recently written to the state highway department, pointing out that city streets will be affected from Madison to Northwest 75th and from Lake Washington to I-5, in ways not yet understood. Hahn sensibly asks that traffic impacts be studied and that good plans to preserve mobility in the city be in place, before the state issues any final environmental impact statements. We endorse this; why don’t you?
Increasing the number of vehicles that have to get through the Montlake interchange will extend the congestion far beyond Montlake, into Capitol Hill, Roanoke Park, Portage Bay, Madison Park, and the university district. Most trip times will be longer not shorter; congestion on the Seattle side will offset any time improvement crossing Lake Washington.
Council members, we elected you. We all agree the 520 corridor needs help. But it needs to be done right.
As a council, so far, you seem content with the few minor tweaks you’ve tacked onto the state’s very bad plan. Please, instead, represent the people of Seattle. Our request is simple: please critically assess the big picture and the details, before you consent to any move forward on this ill-conceived project.
If they won’t listen to your words, make them listen to your votes.
I’m cool with 520, so long as we can fund it – which means we have to kill the insane Deeply Borrowed Tunnel, cause we literally can’t do BOTH without Public Votes of the Citizens to exceed bonding authority.
Yes, it’s that simple a choice. There are no magic funding fairies any more. The insane Wars of Republican Foreign Adventure have seen to that.
The 520 bridge is a gigantic waste of money.
All it does is cause backups on I-5 and I-405.
Fix the interchanges on 90 and use that. Then route all the other traffic south around Lk Washington on I-405.
520 is a valuable project, Bailo. It’s simply poorly planned and executed and mostly unfunded.
No Billionaires Bridge!!!
The 520 Bridge should be removed without replacement and traffic should be routed to the existing street grid. We need a surface transit option. Not a bridge for billionaires.
@5, I know you’re being funny, but the truth is far more billionaires drive 520 than 99. Bill Gates used to drive his Porsche at 100 MPH+ across 520 at 3 AM back before he was married.
@3: Is this another case of you being obtuse, or do you really believe that’s a viable alternative?
@6 which is why they’re trying to force Seattle to pay for their 99 Tunnel Of Doom so they can ride their 15 mpg “green” stretch limos to their private jets and laugh at the masses who can’t afford $10 roundtrip tolls for their private tunnel they didn’t pay for …
It’s all interconnected, Fnarf.
Does anyone know what that lane taken from I-5 is for? If it redirects 520-bound traffic from the 45th and 50th Street on-ramps this would be a huge improvement over the existing clusterfuck caused by cars bumbling to cross four lanes of traffic.
Hey all of you people:
How can it help Seattle to sit around and argue about the details for another 5, 10, 20 years?
I look forward to when the viaduct and bridges just start falling down.
I hope I’m on one and get a broken arm or something, because I’m suing the hell out of everyone who impeded their replacements 🙂
@8, it’s not ALL interconnected, Will. Your brain, for instance, is not connected to anything, internal or external.
Doesnt seem to be a road project that SLOG or the mayor cant stop bitching about. Using available funds to put a bandaid on the bridge, isnt an option, its just delaying the obvious and wasting money.
What people should fear is major wind storm, if anythings going to sink that bridge, its going to be a major wind storm. The articulated bus I take, struggles to steer straight during mild wind storms and should it sink, its going to be on the Kirkland/Bellevue side of the bridge. That is the most vulnerable part of the bridge right now, making minor repairs to the Seattle side, just embarasses Seattle as a city. Its a “Me First, You Later and hope your side doesnt sink to the bottom of the lake” piss poor mentality. Your already are crying about how the state should enforce the 40/40/20 rule when it comes to cutting bus service. To delay the completion of the project for 10 years, will be the states way of providing balance (should they enforce the 40/40/20 rule).
We hope you’re on one too. Kidding.
We wouldn’t fight these projects if they’d do them right. But car-loving Olympia knows only one way to move people around.
@ #9
The lane is taken from I-5 and given a to new ramp connecting 520 to the I-5 express lanes…. i.e commuters going to Seattle in the morning or to Bellevue in the afternoon. It will make the problems of 520-bound traffic on I-5 worse, because there is one less lane across the ship canal bridge and up to the university district… 3 express lanes instead of 4.
As 520 is expanded without any additional access for people from the north end, and with this I-5 lane removed, you can can expect the line of cars on I-5 waiting to get on 520 to get much longer. The state says you should expect an extra hour of congestion each day. See
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/3DB…
@12: Who’s proposing a “bandaid”? Nobody. What they’re proposing is a better design for the western portion and the seismically dangerous western highrise that corrects deficiencies in the existing plan which is set to dump an uncontrollable and dangerous amount of traffic into the immediate landing area, changing the fabric of the neighborhoods.
And what’s all this Seattle needs to stop asserting itself BS? I’d ask if you’d forgotten about Rodney Tom boasting that he’d screwed over Seattle by making it harder to improve our side of the bridge to our specifications by racing out of the gate with a cadillac option for the eastern landing of the bridge, but that would require you to read and comprehend the issues and I’m not sure your knee jerks that far.
Read things, please.
@12
I know, right? Like that time in 2006 when we had a windstorm that gusted up to 115 mph, and the bridge sank like a rock and hundreds of people died. Except, oh, wait, the bridge actually survived that storm, and is rated to survive all kinds of problems. Of course, WSDOT gets around having to admit all that stuff by just releasing a scary computer animated video about how the bridge will sink like a rock during a windstorm (with sustained winds over 75 miles per hour). Never mind that we’ve never actually HAD a windstorm with sustained winds over 75 miles per hour.
You remind me of one of those people who couldn’t shut up about how the ceiling tiles in the Kingdome were going to kill us all.
The problem I had with the 520 plans is that, taking them by their best intents, they move a lot more cars into Seattle — but Seattle doesn’t have *room* for more cars. We’re a city. We can handle a lot more PEOPLE, but the roads and parking are already full, and we have better uses for open space.
Even so, spending all the money to build half a bridge is unwise.
The current proposed 520 plan will make traffic much worse in several already congested neighborhoods in the city of Seattle:
First, I-5 will lose an express lane on the Ship Canal bridge so that 520 can gain an express lane which – will require an expensive new bridge connector to I-5. Lots of $ and no net gain.
Next, the current plan takes away the Arboretum 520 interchanges. I understand the appeal of this to some people, but in that case, all of those thousands of cars a day will then have to go on 23rd/24th Ave. through Montlake. Even worse, the people who live in Madison Park, Broadmore, Madrona, Leschi and much of the Central District who now take the westbound exit from 520 into the Arboretum to get home from the Eastside will have to exit onto 24th Ave heading south. The problem is that there is no good place to turn left off of 24th/23rd Ave. until all the way to Union Street. There are residential side streets before Union, of course – 2 of which just head right back into the Arboretum and both of which have one-lane sections – but they aren’t designed to handle anything like the traffic that will result. Turning left on John St. isn’t a viable option because there is no left turn lane and John St. goes only a short block to another light at Madison and that short section routinely backs up completely for the entire block at rush hour already. There are no left turns onto Madison from 23rd Ave which leaves Union St. as the first eastbound arterial with a left turn lane after exiting 520 onto 24th Ave. Thousands of cars a day will be trying to find shortcuts through residential neighborhoods in order not to have to drive 3 – 4 miles out of their way simply to make a proper left turn onto a proper arterial. The Arboretum interchanges need to stay open under any 520 replacement plan.
Then, the State could add as many westbound 520 lanes as they want, but without increasing I-5 capacity, the extra cars will have nowhere to go except for Seattle city streets and that’s just what will happen. All the extra cars trying to enter I-5 in either direction will create such congestion that it will be faster for somebody coming from the Eastside to get to downtown Seattle by exiting at Montlake and then crossing Capitol Hlll or Montlake or Eastlake on surface streets. The same for drivers trying to get to I-5 north, only they will exit at Montlake and go on surface streets to other northbound I-5 entrances through the U-District or Bryan and Ravenna in order to miss the deadlock trying to get on I-5 North from 520. Our city streets are congested enough and in bad enough shape already; we simply can’t handle the traffic that will result from the current plan.
Finally, the plan calls for a second drawbridge over the Montlake Cut. This will do very little to east congestion as long as somebody in a sailboat can decide to take a little cruise and disrupt hundreds of cars. Even now, traffic can back up onto I-5 once the bridge is opened at certain times of the day. Additional lanes on 520 mean additional cars heading north on 24th/25th Ave. towards University Village and those will completely offset any gains a second bridge might make for current capacity. Heading the other way, it now often takes 25 minutes to get less than a mile from University Village to Montlake and even longer if the bridge goes up. What is needed is a way for all that traffic not to have to depend on the whims of recreational sailors, as charming as that can be sometimes. A short tunnel under the Montlake Cut for through traffic perhaps?
The State’s proposed plan for 520 is very bad for Seattle city streets, very bad for Seattle residents who work on the Eastside and live south of the Montlake Cut and very bad for anybody who uses the north/south I-5 express lanes over the Ship Canal bridge. The only winners are people who could use the proposed 520 express lanes but they only gain at the expense of current I-5 express lane users. Seattle City Council needs to make sure its constituents are well served here yet they have shown very little interest so far.
@17
That’s exactly why we should replace 520 with nothing bigger than a foot bridge.
What IS the city council thinking? How can anyone representing Seattle consent to this?
It’s farcical: if anyone told us that the state would take a lane out of I-5, we would have said “no way!” But no one did tell us. In all the open houses WSDOT has held on 520, I think they never mentioned this.
Nevertheless, it’s the city council’s job to understand before they vote for something. Do they not understand? Of are they voting to please the governor rather than their constituents?
Spending billions to expand 520 while taking capacity out of I-5 makes no sense at all.
A good portion of the Seattle we love, including Pike Place Market and the Arboretum, was literally saved from the bulldozer by citizen action a generation ago, and now it’s time for the new generation to step up and do it again.
Here’s a link to the saga of the RH Thomson, a proposed highway from I-90 all the way to SR 522 straight through Madison Valley, the Arboretum, University Village, Ravenna. The state and the City Council deemed it “necessary”, the plan was approved, and an interchange was partially constructed in the Arboretum, now referred to as the “ramps to nowhere.”
This battle in Seattle was fought around the time I was born. The bulldozers were stopped in their tracks. This story and those ramps to nowhere continue to be an inspiration to all of us.
http://montlake.net/2011/04/the-montlake…
The state’s plans for SR 520 are bad for our city, bad for our environment (more lanes than needed), bad for traffic (more congestion on I-5 and city arterials), bad for transit (removing access to buses between downtown and the Eastside), bad for pedestrians and bicyclists (a monster interchange in Montlake, right where all the trails converge), bad for historic preservation (replacing homes with roads and bridges that don’t solve the problem.) The closer you look at the plans, the worse they appear, and the closer you get to understanding the political dynamic and the process that got us here, the worse it smells. It’s 2011 in most parts of the world, but apparently it’s still 1961 in Olympia.
Thankfully, the state is still over $2 billion away from being able to complete this boondoggle, and there are better, cheaper solutions. It’s a complex project, but this much is simple: If we optimize the toll levels to relieve congestion, we wouldn’t need HOV lanes to bypass that congestion, and we’d have less money to raise through tolls, faster travel times for all and less traffic congestion in Seattle. That requires systemic thinking — which is all too rare in politics — and a systemic approach to tolling, which could also help relieve traffic on I-5 after the Alaskan Way Viaduct comes down. We’ve barely scratched the surface in optimization of the road network.
Gas is $4.50 down the street. Traffic is dropping even before the toll goes on, while the population continues to grow. The new residents and the new generation are buying fewer cars per household, and every year there are louder calls to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Bicycling and transit use are up. We are getting next bus arrival times on our phones. The UW light rail station opens in 2016, three minutes from Capitol Hill and six minutes from Westlake. Welcome to the 21st century.
WSDOT’s Preferred Alternative Baby is UGLY! SR520 as it crosses the lake is designed to be a two level viaduct, with a maintenance road running below the main highway. Why would one create an ugly towering structure, higher than even the new I-90? Just so that maintenance workers don’t have to periodically access manhole covers in the roadway, a job made far easier than at present by the planned additional shoulders. I think cost and aesthetics should take priority over such occasional maintenance checks. We should not wastefully destroy the beauty of Lake Washington by building an unnecessarily tall bridge.
And how can it help the city to destroy the views of Mt Rainier over the lake (by a 30 foot high structure)? How can it help the city to obliterate the famous Montlake Bridge (by building a modern bridge next to it)?
Let’s use the money we have to make the current bridge safe and let’s design a new transportation corridor that really does help the city and our region.
This plan includes 10 lanes of traffic from Montlake to Foster Island, cutting through Seattle’s most pristine wetlands. Check out 3:45 mark of this video from WSDOT’s 520 Project home page: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCV7COUSs…
Next time you’re on I-5, count the lanes and ask yourself, is this really what we want cutting across the northern edge of the Arboretum? 10 lanes of pavement?
This is like a final hour plea for an innocent prisoner on death row….I hope the City Council opens their eyes to the bigger picture and sees beyond the limited scope of the picture that WSDOT paints. The current 520 plan is inefficient, deficient, and insufficient.
The Governor and WSDOT said we need a new 520 bridge because of safety issues. If this were true, why are they redoing the Eastside first. it is on dry land which won’t sink! They lie or they would be fixing the pontoons and the Westside first.
Responsible Tax Paying Citizen of WA
@16 “I know, right? Like that time in 2006 when we had a windstorm that gusted up to 115 mph, and the bridge sank like a rock and hundreds of people died. Except, oh, wait, the bridge actually survived that storm”
Yeah and the thing you forget is the fact that it forced WSDOT to close the bridge as it was rocking back and forth stressing the shit out of the pontoon sections to the point where they had to OPEN a section of the bridge and retract it to relieve the stress? Followed by emergency maintenance the because the storm had permanently damaged the bridge?
http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/SR520Br…
Seriously, the bridge cant take too many more of these 100+ MPH wind storms. It barely survived the 2006 storm, this is a serious threat to our safety and it would stand to reason that it would need to be replaced first. If we run out of money, the Seattle side can wait 10 years for it to be completed as the odds for major windstorms are much greater than a 8.0 earthquake.
The best thing we ever did for the Kingdom, was blow it off the map.
http://youtu.be/i0gn0MDaMCA
Seriously, the bridge is the most vulnerable piece of the project, by WSDOT’s own accounting in the SDEIS. Seriously, the second most vulnerable pieces are the West Approach and the Portage Bay viaduct, also by WSDOT’s own accounting in the SDEIS.
Fix the floating bridge, or replace it. If replacing, don’t spend so much money on a double decker six-lane monstrosity that there isn’t enough money to make the West Approach and Portage Bay viaduct pillars stronger. We might have an earthquake or two in the next ten years.
If WSDOT builds a six-lanes floating bridge now and waits ten years to finish, six lanes will funnel into four for ten years!
City Council, remind our governor that she used to be a sensible, rainy-day fund kind of budgeter. Tell WSDOT they have to do the traffic analysis. Tell WSDOT that when they build in our city it has to make sense, and it had better be good looking.
This preferred alternative is a catastrophe. Use the money we have to repair the bridge, and increase public transportation. With the price of gas looking to only go up, is simply makes sense to work on improving mass transit.
A great way to reduce congestion is license plate restriction (banning a part of the automobile fleet from roads on certain days of the week).
Anyways, there are lots of alternatives to building a concrete monster.
I-90 is good enough for general automobile traffic. If we’re planning for the next 50 years, the new 520 bridge should be transit only, with one lane plus a shoulder/bike lane in each direction. This will effectively increase passenger capacity with a greatly reduced physical/environmental footprint, reduced greenhouse emissions, and vastly reduced construction costs.
Before committing to expand SR520, we should wait to see how much traffic volume drops on SR520 as a result of tolling. It’s quite possible that it won’t be necessary to expand 520.
The latest Tim Eyman initiative says that tolls can be used only to improve the corridor on which they are received. The initiative will likely be approved and therefore can be expected to block WSDOT’s plan to use tolls on I-90 to help fund 520. The result could be no tolls on I-90! If there are tolls on 520 but not on I-90, the traffic on SR520 is going to be far less than WSDOT is building for. WSDOT only has the funds for half of this project. The impact of tolls on traffic may prove that the half to build should be lengthwise not crosswise!
Fix the current 4 lanes all the way across, wait to see what happens with tolls, then expand if necessary.
We have to make the Seattle side of the bridge project work and that may just mean admitting that we already try to move too many cars through Montlake and current 520 I-5 interchange. There isn’t room for more people on I-5 there even at it’s present size less so if we reduce it by a lane. If we need extra people moving across the lake every day they should assume they’ll have to use I-90 bridge. Let’s just fix the bridge for any dangerous issues if it indeed needs it, and keep it it’s present size (say retrofit it for some light rail and get the commuters from Bellevue downtown quickly in style).
Fix the columns and other structures vulnerable to high winds and earthquakes and add sound reducing pavement and stop! The planned monstrosity which adds lanes and girth will make a large section of Seattle unlivable – because of ugliness yes, but also because of environmental impacts – noise and air pollution. Noise and air pollution increase death and disability from respiratory and cardiovascular illness. The current plan does not meet current EPA standards for air quality!
As to #2 projects are frequently started without all the financing in place. Light-rail to the airport didn’t have 100% of it’s financing in place when they broke ground on the project.
@31
VMT in both per-capita and total amounts are falling in King County. The state and King County don’t seem to understand this.
@27
I like how you describe measures that are actually part of the bridge’s design and function as if it were some kind of catastrophe. The bridge is supposed to close to traffic and the midsection is supposed to open during windstorms. I followed your WSDOT link. I don’t see the phrase “permanently damaged” anywhere on that page. What I see is a bunch of storm damage, at least some of which could probably have been avoided if they’d opened the drawspan earlier. Like the drawspan alignment hook — how exactly did that get torn off? Hm. Maybe the bridge was still closed until well after the storm had built up speed, and the hook was sheered off because it wasn’t meant to stand up to that kind of force. Maybe if the drawspan had been opened earlier, the hooks wouldn’t have snapped an the structure would have been placed under less strain. WSDOT will never tell.
The ceiling tiles fell in the Kingdome because the company contracted to manage the facility wasn’t opening the roof vents when they were supposed to. Moisture built up on the roof, and the tiles came loose. The I-90 bridge sank because some idiots who worked for the state left the maintenance hatches on the pontoons open during a wind storm. I have no trouble imagining that some of the damage to 520 from the 2006 storm was from mismanagement.
Ultimately, that’s neither here nor there. Even WSDOT isn’t claiming that another storm like the 2006 storm is beyond the bridge’s capacity. You’re the only one saying that. WSDOT’s only articulated claim, regarding wind storms, is that a sustained wind of 75 miles an hour or more would destroy the bridge. Which, again, has NEVER happened. Coastal storms with gusts of 75 mph only happen once every 25-50 years. And even those almost never make it inland. The largest PNW coast windstorm on record, the Columbus Day storm of 1962 (with coastal gusts over 140mph), still only produced a maximum gust speed of 65 mph in Seattle.
So, basically, you’re making a claim WSDOT isn’t making, based on fear of something that’s never happened and probably never will.
Fine. Let’s pretend for a second that you’re not basically a Chicken Little. How exactly does needing to replace the bridge for safety reasons justify adding two more lanes of traffic, and a massive interchange in Montlake and North Capitol Hill? It doesn’t.
Thanks for playing.