I spent my youth fishing for catfish under those structures, jumping off them when I was a little older, and going to keggers under them when a little older still. I'm sad to see them go.

running there this morning and saw remnants of some kind of ceremony on the bridge. stalks of wheat and gold bottles.

I lived for a year next to those ramps. Smoked weed and watched the traffic there on many occasions. RIP

Is there a page that explains their exact plan? Just wondering what all they plan on getting done on that weekend...

Spent a lot of time there in my late teens drinkin', jumpin' off those things (well, the one, really). There's really no good reason for them to remain, but I'm a little sad I'll never be able to point them out to anyone when visiting with out of towners.

Don't they qualify for "historical structure" preservation of some kind by now?

As well as a really cool place to hang out, the ramps to nowhere are an important testament to the gumption of the residents of Seattle in successfully protesting the destruction of neighborhoods for the sake of automobiles. Here's hoping that lesson has been well learned.

@7, and every time someone has to chose between a backed-up aurora or a backed up downtown/I5 crunch point with 2 through lanes, we should remember that there was a plan to provide a real freeway through the hill, the central district, and rainier valley but NIMBYs blocked it and so surface streets were turned into pseudo-highways.

http://www.centraldistrictnews.com/2009/…
even back then planners could see that I-5 wouldn’t provide enough capacity to zip people through the city, so state and city officials created a freeway master plan that would have placed additional expressways on both sides of I-5, running north and south along the length of Seattle. Additional east/west freeways would tie them together into a massive grid with controlled-access highways spaced about a mile apart in every direction.

The first big piece of that plan was the R.H. Thomson Expressway, which was designed to relieve I-5 via a route through the eastern half of the city. Connecting to I-5 near the south end of Boeing Field, it would head north with major connections to I-90 and the 520 bridge before continuing northwards to Lake City Way and the north end of Lake Washington.

@ have you ever lived near there ? or the central district ? or rainier valley ?

It was such a delight to go canoeing under them.

@chefjoe, weirdly, those neighborhoods are working really well without a freeway carved through them. I live in the CD and can get to most any part of the city I want to within 15-20 minutes by bike or car, or 30 minutes walking or bussing. I'm not sure who is disadvantaged in the bargain, unless there are a lot of people commuting daily from Montlake to Seward Park.

@9, I've lived close enough to Aurora and I5 at different points that I could throw something in them. It's called "grade separation".... and if you wonder why 7 year olds get mowed down on Rainier Ave by drivers going highway-like speeds it's helped by the cars still existing but not being grade-separated.

Nobody's going to build an elevated bike lane network, but they will try for one that can take cars, buses, and trains. Sometimes the NIMBYs win against that so enjoy the extra traffic on lake washington blvd.

@12 Your point is more an argument against the design of Rainier than pro Thompson speedway.

And, frankly, it would have had a very significant impact on the Arboretum. Plus, the 'NIMBYS' were generally folks who's homes were directly impacted by eminent domain. I would say they had the right to frame the discussion.

@8: Perhaps you've never visited our neighbors to the north in Vancouver, British Columbia. There is no freeway that runs through downtown. They somehow manage to get by with automobile traffic on surface streets. And in Manhattan, while there is an expressway on the east side, the city decided to go with surface streets on the west side, and yet, somehow, New York has not slipped into oblivion. You seem to think that another freeway blasted through more neighborhoods in Seattle (where? Leschi, CD, Madison Valley, Montlake, etc.) would somehow make life better? Yikes. Automobile traffic is dropping each year, and for good reason. As for grade separation, perhaps you haven't ridden Sound Transit in the past several years. It's a pretty good way to get from downtown to say, Columbia City, without the chaos that the Thomsen would have brought to the neighborhood.

A moment of silence for my nearly departed brothers, friends.
@BerthaDeBlues

You'd think that having lived so close to both Aurora and I-5, ChefJoe might have noticed that essentially every nightmare congestion clusterfuck involves people funneling themselves to the highways, funneling themselves off of the highways, or funneling themselves through one of the inadequate east-west crossings made exponentially more arduous by the highways.

That's the true legacy of urban highway folly. More highways just means more of that. Anyone arguing for such a "solution" 40 years after its discrediting can be summarily ignored.

@14 I can't believe I'm going to defend any point from ChefJoe, but I will point out that NYC and Vancouver are destinations or starting points. They don't have Bellingham, Everett, Tacoma and Olympia port traffic streaming through them. Those WA cities, and their suburbs, exist, as does Portland and Vancouver. There is a shit-ton of I-5 traffic going through Seattle that has nothing to do with the city of Seattle. State level planning is designed to recognize this and develop solutions, like local freeways in Seattle to allow the residents to move in spite of all the non-Seattle traffic. Is it really all that surprising, given what we've seen with transit problems in the past decade, that NIMBY's managed to screw up possible solutions 40 years ago? Maybe the Thomson plan wasn't optimal, but to say there wasn't, and isn't, a problem that needs to be solved is ridiculous.

@16, perhaps if you'd looked at the RH Thompson Expressway article I'd linked to you'd see that there were E-W connectors also proposed, similarly not built. Northgate way would have been "decked" viaduct-style, for example.

Ha! I can't believe people here are lamenting the fact that the RH Thomson Freeway was never built.

@19, if it had a partitioned off bike lane on it, you'd be slobberingly lustful for one DOUG.

@ 20, you think they would have included that in the 70's? Ha!

@21, do you think we had any HOV or bike lanes in the 70s ? The road surfaces have been repartitioned in plenty of ways.

In the 70s? Very doubtful. HOV lanes maybe, but mostly as a reaction to the energy crisis and the push for carpooling that would fizzle out over the course of the 80s. But show me bike lanes as part of the Thomson Freeway proposal because I don't believe it for a second.

@18: And if east-west highways were built, the traffic clusterfuck would extend to them and their every access point as well. The very worst traffic would be found where the highways met, and clogging each of them for miles from the point of intersection.

For you see, that's just what happens with urban highways! Without exception.

Notice that the urban street grid in that image is clear and flowing, even as the intersecting highways are bumper-to-bumper. Nothing disperses traffic more effectively that a fully-functioning network of urban streets. Which, of course, the Auroras and I-5s and R.H. Thomsons and the various "connectors" you retroactively endorse go out of their way to interrupt.

The fact that you're still flogging the 1960 napkin theory ("more freeways = clearer freeways") in the face of decades of unmistakable counter-evidence ("freeway clusterfucks compound the more they interfere with the urban ecosystem") makes you seem, quite frankly, insane.

@24,
When do we get a fully functioning network of urban streets here in Seattle ? Do they have arterials with timed traffic lights that don't get stopped for 2 minutes behind a bus ?

Seattle has a geographic problem that funnels traffic N and S and there's like 4 bridges that connect the N to the S half of Seattle. I know the bicycling 'hillers don't recognize it, but sometimes you need to get N or S of Seattle (or cross) it in a hurry and a real "artery" like an elevated highway is a lot better way to do that than the university or ballard bridge. The idea that Seattle traffic wouldn't benefit from a second highway ignores evidence like the entire cluster-f that happens when I5 or aurora has an accident that closes them off for a good part of rush hour.

But, by all means, keep thinking we should paint our streets into bike lanes and ignore that your blueapron delivery comes from an entire network of trucks.

Everyone is ignoring the fact that one of the best gay cruising sites in the city is disappearing! For every party on the ramps there were 10 underneath them or in the bushes next to them.

Hey, Joe, remember when every east-west street in central Seattle connected through to the hills above, before I-5 severed half of them and fucked most of the rest with daily on-ramp queues?

How about when Lower Queen Anne connected through to South Lake Union as part of an unmolested whole, before Aurora forcibly funneled all users to two streets, both of which became mile-long highway-approach clusterclucks?

Or maybe when Fremont/Wallingford/Green Lake/the U-District all connected to one another, before the highways severed them and reorganized each of their streets around a handful of choke points?

I don't know about you, Joe, but I've developed some fairly complex and counter-intuitive driving routes to use anywhere near peak times to get around this city, all of which studiously avoid both the highways themselves and most of the arterials that have been reduced to feeding them.

Another freeway would just have created more of the same: maddening multi-hour spillover onto Madison and Jackson, total disasters at the 520/Arboretum cloverleafs, cascading backups to all other interchanges even worse than we have today. And thousands of unadaptable idiots like yourself, sitting in that traffic, still wondering why your "freeway" fails to flow freely.

@27 - Well said.