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Doesn't matter whether you rebuild, retrofit or dig. Doesn't matter if the State Dep't of Transportation pretends they need to maintain the Viaduct's current capacity of 110,000 vehicles a day (even if The Stranger and others make it clear the number is closer to 75,000).
No matter what, there's still the annoying question of what happens to all those northbound cars when they get to the northern end of Alaskan Way. Or to the southbound cars when they get to the southern end of Aurora Avenue.
That would be the Battery Street Tunnel, friends. A classic, 55-year-old, cut-and-cover trap. Two lanes in each direction, no shoulder, for two-thirds of a mile. Cars going 40 or 50 miles an hour for some 3,140 feet, encased in a concrete chute.
The State's cement junkies claim that a four-lane tunnel under Alaskan Way is inadequate for Highway 99's traffic. so what's going to happen once they realize that traffic already feeds into an inadequate and unsafe Battery Street Tunnel? Dig up the tunnel? And will Belltown's condo owners lie down in front of the bulldozers?
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Quick fact check here - the WSDOT figure for 110,000 trips or so per day on the AWV is well-vetted and solid, and the Stranger didn't discredit squat. That figure is for all of the trips that use some portion of the AWV, not that all of them use the entire route all the way through.
For example - thousands of AWV trips originate downtown (including most of the southbound express buses) and proceed south using the Columbia Street on-ramp. Trust me, people who want to ride a fast bus to West Seattle/points south would REALLY rather not have to use 1st or 2nd as would occur under the PWC's scheme. Or, for another example, can you imagine what downtown streets would look like if a daytime M's game ended and all of the northbound traffic that enters on the current onramp on 1st Ave S had to drive downtown?
To address your point, the reduced capacity of the Battery Street Tunnel doesn't create the same gridlock that the so-called "hybrid" would at 4-lanes because not all of the 110,00 trips now taken on the Viaduct (which actually totals 7 lanes along the Central Waterfront) would use the BST.
BTW - WSDOT and the City gave up on the idea of widening the BST after the initial $11B cost of the tunnel alternative was released a few years ago.