Thursday, October 27, 2005

That Pesky Alaskan Way Viaduct

Good morning! Long time no see. I've been out and about for the last week, but we'll be getting back to regular posting again.

Yesterday morning, I joined with other bloggers from Evergreen Politics and the Northwest Progressive Institute (among others) to point out to drivers on the Viaduct that their time may be short. You can see pictures of some of us standing at the 1st Ave S entrance to the Viaduct at the NPI link.

Before starting, we walked a bit underneath the structure - cracks are visible everywhere. There's really no way to know what kind of damage there is to the steel underneath the cracked concrete, but some of the cracks were visibly wet, so I wouldn't be surprised if there's a fair amount of internal damage. KOMO had an interesting article about this recently, in fact.

I-912 would take away $2 billion in funding for the Viaduct. There are a few competing options for replacing it - from a tunnel, which would allow for needed waterfront park space, to an in-kind replacement of a very similar structure. The tunnel is the most expensive, but the park would create demand for more downtown residential - something I think we need both to reduce commuter traffic and to rebalance age and income groups living downtown.

1 Comments:

At 9:01 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I was listening to Dave Ross this afternoon, and he had Governor Gregoire on. Interesting how she said she originally was going to try to avoid raising the gas tax. She also said that transportation engineers told her that had the Nisqually Earthquake lasted 16 seconds longer, the Viaduct and other freeways would have collapsed.

 

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