Public Asked Its Opinion On 520

For three hours last night the City Council sat and smiled at members of the public who had turned out for the forum on the best way to replace 520. The council probably nodded their heads and listened attentively while doodling notes to each other on legal pads as the neighborhood groups held forth on their grandfather's Seattle. ("2 lanes? What does this guy drive? A rickshaw? Pass it down.")

("Maybe we can dig a 45 lane tunnel from this guy's basement straight to the MS campus. Pass it down.") The council seems set on the Pacific Street Interchange option which would include three lanes out and three lanes back and a bridge from the University of Washington over the western tip of Union Bay. It's slightly less egregious to the surrounding neighborhoods than the originally-proposed 6-lane option, but it still hasn't been sitting well with neighborhood groups who would rather not have the onramps abutting the end of their driveways. ("WHEREAS, the City of Seattle would like this guy with the glasses to shut the fuck up. Pass it down.")

Also at issue is the arboretum, a place where Seattlest spends a decent amount of time either walking through the mud or paddling through the mud. We're still not used to going under the ramp system that covers portions of the arboretum, but we've learned that the more sketchy a waterway seems the more likely one is to find a heron sitting next to it. When the Pacific Street Interchange is installed we expect the population of blue herons to explode. ("Steinbrueck's a nerd - Check this drawing. Don't pass to Peter.")

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By Dan in News on October 5, 2006 12:00 PM

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Nate

I humbly submit my meager perspective on this thing: Too big, too expensive, too ambitious.

This is a massive structure, to be built over park space and natural freshwater habitat already impacted heavily by the smaller freeway it would replace.

If we spend these billions on highway expansion, how are ever going to come up with the money for Transit, (the only priority that a majority of Seattleites can unequivocally agree on, by the way). Also, why must we expand the freeway to gain a HOV lane in each direction? Unfortunately (in this age of extravagant resource consumption, population pressure and global climate change) transportation planners are still too timid to enhance mass transit travel unless it can be done without any impact on single-occupancy vehicle travel.

The traffic routing of this proposal is sensible and should be pursued, but the scale is grotesque. We do need this kind of ambitious thinking about the real problem behind 520 as well as that I-5 and yes, the Viaduct: per capita transportation expenses here rival that of any city in the world, due to our overemphasis on the most costly way to get around (both for the private citizen and the public treasury) the private automobile. Our mass transportation system is 100 years behind cities like New York and (shame on us) even Los Angeles and, of course, Portland.