Results tagged “waterfrontcoalition”

ELECTION NIGHT PARTY: Get happy with Cary Moon and the People's Waterfront Coalition, the prophets of the surface/transit waterfront.

Holy crap are we not getting enough sleep. We woke up this morning and did battle with the dueling alarms we have to set to enforce our five hours of shut eye, slugged ourselves to the bus stop, inched our way downtown to the soothing sounds of Don Edwards and then experienced our first radical optical illusion since a beach rave and a handful of mushrooms five years ago. We peered into a newsbox and the letters of the Seattle Times headline picked themselves up from whatever arrangement they were in and realigned to read "Viaduct fight: Could streets be the answer?"

Al "Ballard is a city unto itself" Gore and his political campaign came to Key Arena last night. Officially he was here on An Inconvenient Truth business and the majority of his time on stage was spent delivering the world's most famous slideshow, but he also knocked down a few White House anecdotes and dropped his Clinton impersonation. If we're expected to believe that Bill is the Clinton most on his mind, though, we're not buying it. The man has more election websites now than he had when he was actually running. Check them out here, here, here and here.

This almost got past us, but really there is no way to escape the steel jaws of Seattlest's newsreader. The Seattle Times mentioned earlier this week that north-south travel times through downtown have actually improved since the bus tunnel was closed.

Today we're happy as clams because of a harmonic convergence of two pet obsessions: that damn Viaduct and the end of the world as we know it. Over the weekend, the Seattle Times asked, "Hey, uh, aren't there likely to be Indian burial grounds where the tunnel would go?" Not to be outdone, the Stranger reported that a $1 million WSDOT study has determined that Viaduct traffic can be dealt with for four years of planned construction in precisely the ways that the People's Waterfront Coalition claim can keep on dealing with traffic for even longer.

Studies pertaining to the downtown viaduct/99 /tunnel/bridge/ boulevard/clusterfuck are coming in, and the discussion is started (or "raging" if you prefer). It's been the People's Waterfront Coalition's contention that if traffic through downtown can be managed for long enough to tear down the Viaduct and build something in its place, then traffic can be managed indefinitely. The items below were taken from documents that were received by the PWC in response to their public disclosure request for the Construction Transportation Management Plan:

Transportation nerds, civics geeks and mayor's office moles will all likely be in attendance tonight for the People's Waterfront Coalition's event at Town Hall with John Norquist (former mayor of Milwaukee, New Urbanist type), Scott Bernstein (Brookings Institute Center for Urban and Metropolitan Policy), Anne Vernez Moudon (UW professor of Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design and Planning), Bruce Agnew (Cascadia Center, Discovery Institute) and David Brewster (founded Town Hall, founded Seattle Weekly). That's a lot of expertise in one room, even for Town Hall. They're going to talk about the impact of replacing elevated highways with grade-level streets in presentation and discussion formats.

Sometimes when you're preparing for an argument you spend so much time lining up all your facts and figures and imagining every possible counter and building such a gigantic monument of persuasivness brick by logical brick that you fail to see that if you do absolutely nothing it's probable that things will go your way anyway. Dave Sucher over at the City Comforts blog suggests that the People's Waterfront Coalition may be in that very situation with regards to the viaduct.

Ever since Mayor Greg Nickels sent out a letter back in mid-February about Viaduct replacement financing, everyone who pays attention has been trying to figure out the math. We're all used to spin from City Hall, but there was a huge, crucial problem. In the letter, Nickels claimed that, "Today, with $3.2 billion already committed to the project, we have the resources needed to start building the tunnel."

Ok, this is a friendly interview, yes, and pretty straightforward. The People's Waterfront Coalition has a pretty straightforward approach to our problems downtown, though, and we wanted to give them an opportunity to talk.

Seattlest (like much of Seattle) likes to ignore the Viaduct's continued existence. Sure, we're as happy as anyone to propound our right-thinking solution to a disinterested audience, but the weather's been very nice. We've had other things on our plate.