Most people and their elected officials in this region believe that we need to continue to provide an alternative to I-5 through downtown. Most of the people who don’t believe we need to address this need rarely use the viaduct because of where they live. A strictly surface/transit option simply doesn’t have the votes in the leg. Suburban Puget Sound legislators will oppose it because of fears that it will impact I-5 and I-405. Our goofy ass Speaker of the House, Frank Chopp, will try to kill it as well. The state will move to defund the surface/transit option and shift that money to 520 and tell Seattle to pay for it themselves.

I believe in the duality of all things. To believe that the surface option, or a tunnel, or an elevated has no pluses and minuses is silly. You have articulated many of the negatives about a tunnel. But a surface option in a region with limited transit to speak of will by necessity mean heavy surface traffic on the waterfront. The transit is a promise that will take years to realize, will continue to struggle with sustained funding, and will be susceptible to political struggles like the 40-40-20 Metro formula for new service.

A tunnel allows us to separate the pass through traffic from the downtown traffic which makes the surface element work much better as this region almost doubles in size. Yes, it is a lot of money, but Seattle shouldn’t assume that money is to be spent where they please.

I get people’s desire to radically change how we live for climate change reasons and those of urban design. But I also get that personal transport vehicles will continue to grow in numbers in this region. Each year we register almost 80 more cars per day than the previous year in the Puget Sound region. I want us to make the change from a auto-dominated city to a transit-dominated city like more mature cities have done. But we have just begun to build high-capacity transit and it will take a long time before we really build a network. If we build this tunnel now we will have it as a fixed resource which can be converted to rail in the future.

Under this deal the state pays for the tunnel which you don’t want. If there is no tunnel, the money goes away. The city pays for the surface improvements, and the county pays for more transit. Unless there are compelling reasons why Seattle should give away even more of our state gas tax dollars to build roads elsewhere, I fail to see what is wrong with this deal. I remain unconvinced that it will negatively affect urban design or climate change to the degree opponents suggest.

China and India are so very large, however, that their per capita consumption could be a fraction of ours and still hugely significant.

Hopefully, the leadership of China, India, Russia, and other large countries will turn sharply away from the automobile-centered development we experienced. If and when they do, we can’t expect them to have much sympathy for our addiction to cars.

–The reason the “surface option cartel” is subdued is that they all realize how close we were to getting another elevated viaduct on our waterfront. The status quo is always the default option.

–The viaduct stakeholders group was not blown off. If you actually attended the meetings you would know that all but one elevated guy supported surface/transit with meaningful study of a tunnel. And that over half of the stakeholders group would probably endorse the current proposal.

–The Seattle Transit Blog post on the tunnel encouraging sprawl is a bunch of hooey. 90% of all traffic on the viaduct is from Seattle or neighboring cities to Seattle or neighboring cities. Show me in a meaningful way how it actually breaks down the hub and spoke transit patterns that encourage transit in a city where half of downtown workers already use transit. Anyone who actually uses the viaduct will tell you that it is the yellow pages freeway. All those UPS trucks, plumbers, Amazon Fresh drivers, etc. that you depend on every day need a way to get from their offices in Ballard, SODO, South Park, etc. to places all over the city.

–Sightline is fine, but the figure on the cost per peak hour trip is laughable. To arbitrarily decide to make this the measure of the true value of an investment and deliver a figure is certainly not a meaningful exercise. I agree that we are building too much capacity still for peak hour traffic, but one doesn’t have to rely on bullshit instead of the kind of meaningful analysis the stakeholder group engaged in.

–Climate change–Agreed, roads suck. Cars pollute. From an environmental standpoint the whole auto/personal transport idea is a disaster for urban planning, the planet and everything else. But the big leap many make is to assert that building a tunnel will encourage more auto usage in the future or that we have any proven formula for meaningfully measuring future GHC emissions.

–The State Legislature will only fund a viaduct replacement scheme that they view as credible. The leg is a far more conservative body than you or I. They would naturally be inclined to ram an ugly elevated viaduct down our throats in the name of interstate commerce. Instead the deal is a much smaller tunnel, significant surface improvements to downtown Seattle as the region doubles in population over the next 20-30 years, and the promise of a more stable funding base to maintain and expand bus service in the future.

All I am saying, is this is not a simple political decision. There are a lot of stakeholders in a community and any result must include business and developer input. To ignore them and to ignore the political climate of the state and region may not be a wise strategy to achieve our long term goals.

Sorry to babble on.