Thanks. Wasn’t clear from video that there’d be a street level stop for 520 service. My main concern was that through two-way service on 520 not miss Montlake entirely. Only thought is that when we do put real rapid transit on 520, a flyer-type station would work better.

As for property values, truth is noplace is bad enough for housing to be reasonable- price we pay for this really being a nice place to live, even though us Easterners are born and bred to complain and agitate.

Shouldn’t have brought up property values in any case, since in current usage the two words contradict each other, and also common sense. Am dealing with neighbors who think a beautiful pine tree is lowering the value of their homes because it partially blocks a clear view of two miles of roofs with some water behind it.

Point about machinery versus scenery is for real, though. Ought to be a tax on every car- paid not in money but in trees.

Mark Dublin

2) Just want to point out again that the flyer stop at Montlake was removed in response to the neighborhood’s desire to make the highway smaller. WSDOT was going to integrate the flyer stop with the lid at Montlake Blvd. Go take a look at the Draft EIS.

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/SR520Bridge/DraftEIS.htm

Think trees and plants are “amenities”? What about breathable air? We’re not talking about scenery here, we’re talking about the natural machinery we need to make life possible, let alone bearable. There’s an old sci fi short story where aliens are buying up real estate to sell to non-air-breathing species, speculating that Earth will soon be oxygen-free. Can’t fault the business-plan, but us eartlings still deserve a few rights.

Sorry, Ben- you don’t put a major transit corridor through a neighborhood like Montlake and not give it a station, route 542 or not.Public transportation is for serving and improving the neighborhoods it goes through. Replace the current shabby platforms with a station people will enjoy using, built into the park. Lane problems- like the man said, deal with them.

Underneath it all, though, I-5 reversible express lane setup really should take this whole project back to the boards. Idea of crippling a twenty-first-century corridor with an old twentieth century freeway, and a bad one at that, sucks like a black hole. We can’t fix one without fixing them both. Call it stimulus, homeland security, and national security and fund accordingly.

Mark Dublin

UW seems like it would be a brick wall for any Pacific St alignment continuing west from Husky Stadium and terminating at the stadium doesn’t make much sense.

Maybe some sort of convertible transit-only bridge could be built earlier to get buses from 520 to the heart of the U District more easily and quickly? A 30-35 ft wide bridge across Union Bay would be a daunting permitting challenge, but much easier than the tunnels proposed under the cut (which ST and Metro do not appear to be enthusiastic about). Such a structure could possibly also facilitate service to the U Village vicinity, which would probably be a better place to collect riders from the Ravenna/Wedgewood/Laurelhurst/Sand Point area.

A bus only structure would probably need to merge into the 45th St viaduct, while a rail line would tunnel into the hillside next to it.

In the meantime, I think A/A+ or some variation seems like the only reasonable and feasible option. If you don’t like it, start working on Option N.

In a couple of months we’ll have a whole lot of new information to pore over, in the form of the Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement (SDEIS) and related appendices, and we’ll have an opportunity to comment.

There’s quite a lot posted now on WSDOT’s site for the SR 520 project, and there’s about 3000 pages of technical appendices from the last DEIS round for the die-hards like us. All that stuff is available in printed form at the Central Library and online.

I’m for more transit options, all else being equal. Until recently it appeared that all else was far from equal, that the only way to get those stops back was to add another 2 lanes (for bus acceleration / deceleration) all the way up to I-5. While this seems excessive, WSDOT maintained it was necessary in the new highway design to provide a safe merge back into a fast-flowing HOV lane on a 5% grade with a loaded bus.

Recently it occurred to me that we can get the stops back if we convert the HOV lanes on Portage Bay to transit-only use. Carpools are better than SOV’s, but in my view, transit is the most important, so I’d like to see that concept explored.

The general purpose lanes on 520 are allegedly going to be flowing better with modern highway geometry and tolling. If that’s true, the carpools and vanpools would not be so inconvenienced by getting kicked out of an HOV lane for maybe 1500 feet. So maybe everybody can win on this one.

If there’s one thing I’d like to see out of the funding crisis – if you were to move Viaduct money to SR-520, you might get local approval.

In the final revision to A+ before it went public, a HOV direct access ramp (providing eastbound HOV direct access to 520 from the north only) was added on the east side of Montlake Blvd. which removes it from the loop ramp; the HOV lane would be deleted from the loop ramp, thus eliminating HOV bypass access from the south.

In either case, it’s not quite the same, but fairly close to what’s there, compared to the rest of the interchange, which is indeed quite different (and much bigger.)