
The city released their latest study yesterday on what to do with the aging Magnolia Bridge, which was built 90 years ago and needs to be demolished. The city’s Department of Transportation (SDOT) studied four options for after the bridge comes down and, surprise surprise, their preferred option is to spend between $200 to $420 million on building a new automobile bridge.
SDOT’s two preferred options are to either rebuild the Magnolia Bridge with a nearly identical, modern bridge ($340 to $420 million). Or replace the Magnolia Bridge with a new span positioned about a half mile north ($200-$350 million). If these projects seem expensive wait till I tell you the second part of this story: the city has not identified any local, state, or federal funding sources for these bridges, according to Ethan Bergerson, an SDOT spokesperson.
“What we’re looking at now is there are several different possibilities but funding hasn’t been identified for them,” Bergerson told The Stranger on Thursday. He also said SDOT does not have a specific year that the bridge needs to come down and that it is currently being monitored for safety.
Here were the four options studied:
1. Armory Way Bridge ($200-$350 million): This option would build an entirely new bridge between 15th Avenue West along Armory Way and connect to Thorndyke Avenue W at Halladay Street. A new road named the “West Uplands Perimeter Road” would be built on the north side of the railroad tracks that would connect to the Elliott Bay Marina and Terminal 91.
2. Dravus Street Upgrade ($190-$350 million): This project would tear down most of the Magnolia Bridge and then direct drivers onto the Dravus Street Bridge, which would be widened. This option would also build the same “West Uplands Perimeter Road” from the Armory Way Bridge option.
3. Lower Magnolia Bridge ($210-$360 million): This option would see the reconstruction of the lower section of the Magnolia Bridge, providing vehicular access to Smith Cove and Terminal 91 from Interbay, but it would not extend the bridge up Magnolia’s bluffs. That would force drivers onto the existing Dravus Street Bridge, which would be widened under this option.
4. In-kind replacement ($340-$420 million): This option would replace the existing Magnolia Bridge with essentially an identical bridge.
The study’s authors then calculated a score for each option. Option one, building a new Armory Way Bridge, scored the highest at 58.2. The other three options were nearly tied with option two scoring 50.3, option three scoring 48.8, and option four scoring 51.1. These scores were found to fluctuate greatly when the study's authors changed the emphasis of different metrics, for instance by placing greater importance on “ease of implementation” instead of “public acceptance.” The authors found that when they placed a greater weight on “public acceptance” the in-kind replacement consistently won out.
“In public meetings, Magnolia residents and users of the Magnolia Bridge expressed strongly that their preferred solution is Alternative 4, an in-kind replacement of the existing bridge, over any of the other alternatives,” the authors wrote.
If you read my story back in February, titled “Should We Help This Island of Rich People?,” you can probably guess that I’m not too happy to see our city try to justify spending upwards of a quarter of a billion dollars on rebuilding the least-trafficked entrance to one of Seattle’s most expensive and smallest neighborhoods. For perspective, only 2.7 percent of the city’s population lives in Magnolia, it already has two other entrances and the Magnolia Bridge is the least trafficked, and this project is so expensive that it would have accounted for nearly half of the spending in our last transportation levy.
The land around Magnolia Bridge is also dynamically changing at the moment, so there are plenty of more palatable ideas than the uninspiring private vehicle bridges SDOT is proposing. A 25-acre National Guard site is getting ready for redevelopment within walking distance of the bridge. Expedia is spending nearly $1 billion to build a brand new headquarters just south of the Magnolia Bridge. And Sound Transit is getting ready to bring light rail to Interbay, with the possibility of stations within walking distance of Magnolia.
Could the city find some kind of innovative way to leverage these new projects into a solution for the aging bridge? Could new upzones and affordable housing developments inside of Magnolia pay for a bridge?
It’s clear that the mostly wealthy residents of Magnolia Bridge want a brand new bridge. What’s not clear is how we are going to pay for it. Or if we are even going to give it to them at all.