Theoretically buses can have dedicated lanes too, but they have to be wider.

But good streetcars also have better acceleration and deceleration than regular buses (though not than trolleybuses). All of these advantages are lost with street running, of course.

I’m glad that it looks like the foot ferry will have additional funding to continue, possibly year round, very important for many West Seattleites, hopefully with an expanded shuttle service. I’m not moving due east, same distance away from the city. I can get around quite easily thank you…I’m just advocating better transit options for a forgotton and misunderstood section of the city.

I was always a surface street supporter, until it was pointed out that truck traffic from the viaduct would then be rumbling through downtown, which seems counter to our goals for a ped-friendly, kid-friendly center city.

From this standpoint, a tunnel seems like the best option, since anything elevated would be adding insult to our already-decades-long injury.

Like others, I like the tunnel option the best, but I recognize it is too expensive (unless, of course, the federal government decides to make a massive investment in highway construction funds for jobs-creation and economic stimulus purposes), so options A and B are my next favorites.

I actually liked the tunnel options the best, but they are the most expensive, and have just no chance of getting built. The elevated options are bad for numerous reasons, not the least of which is they will take a long time to build and everyone will be b*tching about not having their viaduct.

The street options + transit are the least expensive, fastest (almost 1/2 the time or better) and have the least risk. I know “A” is the cheapest, but politically speaking, I think “B” is a better sell. Hard to just say “demand management” without convincingly offering alternatives. I think B is the best balance of cars, tourists, businesses, open space, transit, etc.

You could tear stuff down and rebuild the surface roadway and all connectors in 3 years (faster if we do big public works style stuff because of our big recession). In the same time it’d be easy to do more buses and work on the streetcar/I5 improvements.

I put an Excel spreadsheet comparing the options up here: Comparison.

It’s just my first hack at comparing the PDFs and noting the differences. Let me know if you see anything wrong or missing.

I don’t like E at all, the elevated park would be very out of the way, moreso even than freeway park, and it creates a narrow pedestrian corridor not by a street as well as a narrow street, basically a bunch of north/south corridors none of which I would feel safe walking along at night. Plus the elevated park would scatter the freeway noise downward, much the way the second level of the viaduct scatters the noise of the lower level and makes the waterfront noisy. The only place I would consider an elevated park over the viaduct is an extension of Victor Steinbrueck park.

About the transit in B… Honestly, I’m not that enthusiastic about it. Streetcars are for short trips and are really the wrong technology to connect to Ballard. And they don’t create more transit in aggregate because they are no bigger than buses, no faster, and no cheaper to run. If we’re going to invest capital in transit to Ballard, we should make something fast, not capacity limited, that actually brings Ballard closer to Seattle and would be worth transferring from local buses to. Really, the best things transit wise on these plans are the bus improvements. I’d like to see something better, but B isn’t it.