I do agree that the state should reduce the height of the bridge on the lake. The state must show more respect for the Lake and all the people who who use the bridge and look at it in the design. The lower the profile, the better.

That ought to be easy, and less expensive, that a high bridge.

The current actions by WSDOT are to cram a 6 lane bridge into this slot. WSDOT is all about auto traffic.

In my less perfect world, it would have no car/truck traffic and 1 lane each way with bicycle paths.

I think there are better potential rail transit lines in the city that would be more worthy of spending large sums of money building. For example a downtown/Uptown/Interbay/Ballard/Crown Hill/Northgate line has a very high ridership potential and could be much cheaper to build as much of the line could be at-grade or elevated.

Yes they continue to I-5. But since every bus will use the ramp, there’s no need to have a separate “bypass” HOV that takes up a lane width.

North Link will be one of the busiest lines in the nation the day it opens with peak loads between the U-District, Capitol Hill, and Downtown stations. You have a serious plumbing problem putting full trainloads of people on to full trains of people. The only way to possibly allow transfers is to have a matured network of trains and less pressure on each line.

And money has to be a consideration. You are talking about at least six miles of tunneling through many challenges to get to Fremont/Ballard. If we did what you are proposing we would have to tunnel under the UW (good luck with that), tunnel under the U-District, somehow cross I-5, most logically enter the hill under 45th to a cut and cover tunnel to the other side where you would transition to an elevated alignment.

Sounds like the mother of all projects to me. Who pays? Seattle? ST3? And is this even the priority right now? I love rail and want to build as much as we can as fast as we can, but we have to be realistic. West Seattle makes more sense because it offers strong ridership and development potential.

Besides a majority of the car traffic using 520 as a I-5 on and offramp is going from or to the UW, Childrens, or NE Seattle. There are plenty of other routes to and from I-5 for those areas. One of the big issues is getting cars across the ship canal, adding a second drawbridge isn’t going to do much other than destroy a bunch of historic homes and add more pavement to the area.

We have plenty of “long on-ramps” to I-5 called surface arterials.

Lets also not forget that the Blue line and bus portion of the transfer station is rather unattractive, under the freeway, and surrounded by a P&R.

Like it or not, you can’t just eliminate roads and access points for cars in your lifetime. I think a more reasonable strategy is to build a transit system that entices people out of their cars rather than deliberately making life more miserable for car users.

I’m not sure what scope of changes necessarily triggers a new (or supplemental) EIS. I believe there is some flexibility built into the process. WSDOT was able to slip the A+ plan into this SDEIS in a few weeks, though it was comprised of components that had undergone a lot of analysis already. Changes and hybridization of options is often done between a Draft and Final EIS, and the Final EIS has yet to be authored for this project. Again, I’m not an expert on the process, but I would certainly hope that any work that remains to be done can be done quickly and efficiently with a minimum of rework. The floating bridge is already being designed with quite a bit flexibility in mind. In any case, I understand and share the concern.

You’re right also about too many cars trying to squeeze through Montlake and the we can’t (or at least shouldn’t) build our way out of it. Simple, HOV only access at Montlake from 7am to 7pm. Simple, cheap and effective. You get the flyer stop, the HOV/transit lanes, a much smaller footprint and could probably even dedicate a north south lane to HOV transit without the need to build anything additional over the Cut.