This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Lawmakers are united… in their desire to avoid a repeat of the Viaduct fiasco. A City Council resolution draws some broad sketches of what a new Evergreen Point Floating Bridge might look like:

The 12-page resolution, part manifesto and part wish list, reflects Seattle residents’ general acceptance that the aging span linking Seattle and the Eastside needs to be replaced.

But the measure also seized on strong public concerns about a new bridge’s potential negative effects on neighborhoods, including noise and traffic congestion, environmental problems such as water and air pollution and harm to the Washington Park Arboretum.

The council also reflected residents’ preferences for bike-path connections, and for improved mobility by discouraging single-occupancy vehicles, encouraging HOV lane use and creating better transit connections.

The main opposition here is from the Montlake and UW communities, who don’t want a bigger, nosier 520 running through the Arboretum. You can see their website here.

Councilman Richard Conlin has his preferences:

City Councilman Richard Conlin, chairman of the council’s state Route 520 committee, acknowledged that he personally favors the Pacific Street Interchange. But citing the bridge’s importance as a regional transportation corridor and its vulnerability to earthquakes and severe storms, Conlin said it was time to vote, move ahead and reduce effects through “mitigation strategies.”

You can read about the Pacific Street Interchange here. You can see all the options on the table here.

What’s most important is that a decision happens soon, and with consensus. Because once opinions start to harden, it becomes much, much harder to achieve a compromise.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Is it really true that the $16B transportation plan on this fall’s ballot is doomed? The Seattle Times reports:

Legislators worry the package is too expensive for voters to accept yet doesn’t fully fund a new floating bridge or complete as much work as they think is needed on some of the region’s most-congested highways, such as Highway 167.

Instead, the money is spread too thin in order to cover as many projects as possible, they say.

Here’s the problem: projects like this are what legislators call “Christmas Trees”: everyone wants to hang their own special ornament until the whole thing collapses under its own weight. That said, there’s nothing really egregious, as far as I can tell, in this package. It’s not like anyone’s proposing a 12-lane I-605 through the Cascades. Mostly it’s a series of much-needed and long-deferred projects: fixing SR-520, widening the southern section of I-405, etc. Oh yeah, and $9.8B to send light rail to the Eastside.

All of these projects seem to have fairly broad public support. What’s important now is for our legislators to stop allowing the perfect to be the enemy of the good. It’s time to start “moving dirt,” as Pierce County Exec. John Ladenburg says. This package is not perfect, but it’s good enough. And the longer we wait, the more expensive the construction costs will get, meaning that we’ll be getting less and less for our money, and the fights will get even nastier.

Put another way: construction costs are rising by about 10% a year. That’s $1.6B on a 16B package. Meaning that if we wait a year, we add $1.6B to the cost of construction. Widening I-405 is going to cost just over $1B. In other words, it makes absolutely no sense to oppose this initiative if you’re, say, trying to kill the 405 project, since by voting for it now instead of next year, we’re basically getting 405 for free.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

So we had this big election, there was all this last-minute posturing on both sides and then… what? Relative silence from our elected officials. It turns out that a few have been working furiously behind the scenes to move the ball forward.

David Brewster offers us a look at the new Sims-Nickels alliance and it’s efforts to break the deadlock:

From conversations with Sims’ and Nickels’ staffers comes the outline of a joint county-city-Metro Transit approach that combines the boulevard with a broad attack on various choke points for downtown traffic and freight and a good dash of faster bus service.

…

The basic pact between Sims and Nickels is that Sims gets BRT routes (which means the city giving up some traffic lanes on streets) and Nickels gets his small boulevard along the central waterfront.

Sims knows that for his BRT Plan, RapidRide (.pdf), to truly be effective, he’ll need some major road improvements. So it’s time to make nice with Nickels.

Of course, the Sims-Nickels surfact-transit plan still has to win the approval of Gov. Gregoire, whom Brewster singles out for her “Olympia” mindset on transportation:

The Gregoire maneuver cost her among many Seattle interests, and it indicated how much she remains caught in an Olympia mindset, which sees transportation as a highway issue, while Seattle is increasingly seeing urban transportation as weaning-from-highways.

Nonetheless, there might be a compromise in the works:

Former Secretary of State Ralph Munro, a master dealmaker, has predicted the shape of the ultimate compromise: a depressed roadway along the waterfront, probably six lanes wide, with pedestrian bridges across it to waterfront parks. Munro compares it to the Interstate 5 ditch through downtown. That’s not very pretty, but it avoids the cost of a tunnel lid, puts the traffic a little out of sight through use of berms, and isn’t a new viaduct. Ceis dismisses this idea out of hand, saying that if you are going to build a trench you might as well put a lid over it.

Indeed. But that might give the city leaders a backdoor route to the tunnel they’ve always wanted: agree to the trench deal and then drop a lid on it a few years later, when no one’s looking.

Either way, one thing’s clear: this thing’s far from settled.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The P-I reports that the planned UW light rail station will not have (1) direct connections to buses, or (2) a park-and-ride lot.

It’s worth unpacking what’s going on here a little bit, as these kinds of decisions will undoubtedly come up over and over again as Seattle builds this brand-new infrastructure.

The question is whether to try and turn the Montlake/520 area into an intermodal hub, where people can go to connect from one form of transportation to another, be it car, bus, bike, or rail. Now, obviously Montlake will never be a full-blown transit center, along the lines of Eastgate, Northgate, and Overlake. There’s just no space, as UW spokesman Dan Arkin succinctly puts it:

“You can’t look at the University of Washington as an intermodal exchange or station area. It doesn’t work,” Arkans said. “You can’t have people driving here to get on a (light rail) train, because there’s no park and ride — and there’s zero chance of putting one here. There’s no space.”

However, since Montalke is where 520, I-5, and Light Rail meet up, it’s tempting to want to make the area an transfer point. But once you really think about it, there’s really no reason why so many people should want to transfer at UW from bus to rail.

Certainly there’s room to make some improvements in the bus-to-bus transfers. The connection from the 520 buses to the 48 is, as Bus Chick has well documented, terrible.

But the overwhelming majority of people who board light rail at UW will be either going to or coming from… UW. If you’re coming from the East side, and you want to get on the light rail, there are better places to do it, like downtown.

Finally, I don’t see why everyone’s so hot for light rail across the 520 bridge. I see little use for it. The far end of the 520 corridor (Overlake, Redmond) is going to be served by the planned East link. Better to do what San Francisco does and have one route across the water that forks when it reaches the ‘burbs. Like a Kirkland spur that runs through Belleveue and connects with the main Eastside line across I-90, for example.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The P-I has a great neighborhood breakdown of the viaduct vote:

Support for the rebuild is clearly strongest on the West side of the city, where residents are likely more dependent on the viaduct for their daily commute. Support for the tunnel was heavier on the Eastern side of the city, where residents have other transportation options.

This presents an interesting political pickle, and a classic conundrum with respect to direct democracy: do you listen to those who use the thing on a daily basis? Does their vote count more? That’s certainly one way to interpret it. Another would be to impose a use tax (a.k.a. a toll) and build the more expensive tunnel.

In general, we need to start using tolls in the Seattle area. When the Tacoma Narrows Bridge re-opens, it will have a $3 toll. The more that people can come face-to-face with the true costs of using the roads, the more efficient our transportation network will be.