520 Sucks And Everyone Knows It
We keep a close eye out for any mention of Seattle in Forbes magazine, as we suspect many of you do. Right. But, with the internet being the internet if anyone we do actually watch happens to see something in Forbes that we should see we're likely to come across it.
In a "world's most strangle-riffic traffic choke points" piece last week Forbes tagged 520 as a nationally competitive problem area and having paddled, sailed, motored or swam under the 520 risers more times than we've driven over them we can't confirm or deny this. We can say we've given up on rush hour I-5 due to the backup at the 520 exit, though, so there may be something to it.
Seattle is more water than land, and there's the rub. Bridges are just so wide and no wider. Like the bridges crossing from San Francisco to Oakland, this is a necessary passage for many, and its vulnerability at peak times can be a disaster.
We remember having the thought back when NOLA was being sacrificed to the twin gods of incompetence and cronyism that Seattle is a lot like that town in that there are not all that many routes out of it and nearly zero that don't involve an automobile. Ok, Seattle is convex and not concave like New Orleans so we're probably pretty safe from the whole flooding thing (or if we aren't there really won't be anywhere to go) - There are other potential disasters that could befall us, though. Locusts or whatever. That's when Seattlest had the idea of building regional monorail connecting Vancouver to Seattle to Tacoma to Portland and points east as an emergency evacuation system. Right after that we woke up, opium pipe in hand, in some strange basement near Sea-Tac that we haven't been able to find our way back to since. Man, we want another hit of that stuff...
Check WSDOT for an update to 520's health or lack thereof.
