Seattlest Interviews: The People's Waterfront Coalition

This same PSRC planner, Ralph Cipriani, sat down with a few of us early on and mapped out the structure of how this alternative could work, citing numerous examples of this approach succeeding in other cities. After many years as a regional transportation planner, he explained the politics of highway planning and construction that often leads cities toward investing more in highways instead of (simpler and cheaper) transit or street grid solutions. And he explained how the funding of highways is a completely different situation after Boston's Big Dig; the federal government will never make the mistake of getting involved in a urban tunnel project again. Ralph explained how every state is facing a huge funding shortfall, and many states cannot afford to replace and maintain the highways they already have. Without federal money, building a new highway is just too expensive.

Around this same time, Allied Arts invited me to lead one of the 7 charrette teams to envision post-viaduct waterfront. Julie Parrett and I joined forces and put together a team of 10 very smart local designers and planners. We showed what could be on the shore instead of a highway, and where the traffic would go instead. We got a very positive reaction, over and over, every time we showed it. "We should do this. No really, I mean it: we should do this." We submitted this proposal to a national design competition sponsored by Metropolis Magazine, called Next Generation:Big Idea, and won second prize.

What happens to the traffic that currently uses 99/the viaduct in a Seattle with only I-5 running north-south?

Our solution is a set of smaller projects to improve the grid and transit so most of the trips can be accommodated elsewhere. Here are the main elements of our proposal:

1. Improving intersections and routing on underused arterial streets to knit together missing links and untangle bottlenecks
2. Improving the flow of I-5 by reconfiguring ramps to reduce weaving problems and potentially reconfiguring the express lanes
3. Timing stoplights to keep more of the traffic in motion
4. Adding high-speed transit and linking the different modes to motivate more people to use it
5. Dedicating freight priority lanes on either freight arterials or I-5
6. Building a new 4-lane urban street in Alaskan Way's place, better linked to the grid

Our rough estimates, which have been blessed by Seattle DOT insiders, are that 50 - 60% of the trips can be shifted into an improved street grid and an improved I-5, 20 - 30% can shift to transit, and 20-30% of the trips can stop happening as people make other choices.

And here's the most compelling part. No matter what final solution is chosen, we are going to have to shut down the viaduct and live without any highway for 3 years or more. Some combination of the fixes we advocate will be done anyway by SDOT so we can all get around for those 3 years. So we have this awesome opportunity to actually test this idea in the real world with real people.

The 'no highway' option could be seen as more radical than rebuilding the viaduct, digging a tunnel or even airlifting cars from Belltown to SoDo, but the current atmosphere in Seattle seems reluctant to embrace radical changes to transportation infrastructure. How do you respond to that?

This approach is gaining currency because it has been successful in cities both around the world and as close to home as Portland. Research into actual cases where highway capacity was reduced in a city finds an average decrease of 25% in the number of car trips, while road planners' computer predictions of mass gridlock have not been borne out in the real world. At the end of an era dominated by abundant, cheap energy, city planners worldwide are shifting away from urban highways designed for the personal automobile to models of dense, walkable and well connected communities with effective transit.

The context of this decision is very different than the context in 1953, when Seattle leaders decided to build a highway on the waterfront. There is no "other people's money" to spend on new highway construction like there used to be. Seattle voters know we need transit, and want to pay for transit. People here know peak oil is a reality, and gas prices are likely to be much much higher in the future. Seattle wants to be a leader in achieving Kyoto protocol goals for reducing green house gas emissions, which will entail getting tens of thousands of cars off the road every day. And there is a strong desire to reinvent the waterfront as a civic heart of Seattle.

We believe if given the opportunity, Seattleites want to invest in a transportation system for the future, instead of repeating a decision that made sense in 1953. Many Seattleites understand how shortsighted it is to keep doing business as usual when it comes to cars and highways and our dependence on oil. We believe this is a perfect time for us to consider an alternative approach. If every family can avoid forking over $10,000, if we can get a great park and civic spaces on our downtown shore, if we can have more and better non-car choices for mobility, is it worth adding 5 minutes to the trip through downtown? Maybe it is. It's time to have that debate.

I'm thinking that a good comparison to Seattle and the viaduct today is New Orleans and the levees last year. What's the level of urgency that the PWC is feeling?

I don't want to weigh in on seismic risk and public safety; it's a complex decision, and I don't have the qualifications to opine on the appropriate response to the level of urgency. But readers should check out this Op-Ed from a set of UW professors who say the decision to shut down the viaduct -- which they believe is urgent -- should not be held hostage to fundraising for and arguing about a long term solution. If we have to live without any highway for a few years, let's make those fixes necessary for that period, and shut it down as soon as possible. That makes sense to me.