The speaker program included Joy Shigaki, CEO of Friends of Waterfront Seattle, and Leslie Koch, a donors’ representative with Elliott Bay Connections project, a public-private partnership to extend park improvements farther to the north. Both talked up the transformative potential of the linear park, with the new Seattle Aquarium and the Overlook Walk connecting it to Pike Place Market expected to open next year. The new pedestrian connection will join the new Marion Street overpass as a way to access the public spaces along the waterfront without dealing with the busy freight corridor that is Alaskan Way.

“The Overlook Walk [is] the real sweet spot and a selfie spot that’s going to give you the experience of a 360-degree views, the same height as the viaduct, for those of you who are really missing those views driving during the morning,” Shigaki said. “People talk about that a lot.”

Already elements of the new waterfront are coming online. A new Pier 62 park opened in 2020 and an overhauled Colman Dock ferry terminal and a next door Pioneer Square Beach Habitat opened last year. The new waterfront Alaskan Way Boulevard is also open as is a new four-lane Belltown connector called Elliott Way — the City gave the pairing of streets an honorary Lushootseed name of “Dzidzilalich.”

The Friends of Waterfront Park has been heavily programming Pier 62, with activities like giant chess boards and mini soccer fields in place on most days, and fitness or dance classes and musical performances scheduled throughout the year. “Over a million people have come to Pier 62, and it has been a reminder of how parks can be transformative that they’re made for and they make for dynamic, democratic cities,” Shigaki said.

It’s been a long road to get here. Shigaki thanked the crowd of dignitaries from leading downtown businesses and nonprofits for bearing with the decade plus of construction impacts that brought forth the park and associated infrastructure. Seattle’s new waterfront park was made possible by tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct, an elevated double-decker highway that carried roughly 100,000 cars per day at its peak. The way the region opted to accomplish this was to dig a nearly two-mile highway megatunnel underneath the city to replace the bulk of the viaduct’s highway capacity, which added to the construction time, especially after a three year delay to extract and repair a busted tunnel boring machine, which had been the world’s largest.

“Nationally, we’re seeing this trend of reclaiming old infrastructure projects, highways, double-decker highways, railroads, to be able to reclaim the beauty of our cities from what they once were,” Shigaki said. “And Waterfront Park is going to be part of that renewal, but it’s going to be part of the revitalization and part of creating a place that everyone sees themselves in and memories to be created.”

While local urbanist leaders like Cary Moon and former Mayor Mike McGinn argued the highway tunnel was not necessary and the focus should be on transit, pedestrian, and park improvements alone, ultimately highway tunnel boosters won out and have sought to frame the tunnel as inevitable and necessary for the park plans since. Of course, Moon, McGinn, and the larger People’s Waterfront Coalition movement against the downtown highway in either an elevated or buried form received no mention at the event.

“This extraordinary, double-decker highway cut across the most beautiful part of our city, like the Embarcadero in San Francisco, like other cities across the nation,” Shigaki said. “It was not about human-centered design. It was about disconnection. But the audacity of the vision after the 2001 Nisqually earthquake, the conversations even before that was what happens when you build a new tunnel.”

Before the viaduct replacement project, the hulking highway polluted downtown with noise and air pollution and interrupted the flow of people from downtown to the waterfront. Now downtown finds itself relatively unobstructed and connected to its unique Elliott Bay waterfront — though the overbuilt Alaskan Way roadway, eight lanes near Colman Dock, isn’t the most welcoming sight to visitors arriving at downtown’s south end.

“Tear it down to reveal what is possible about a new waterfront and a new park to be born,” Shigaki said. “It is a 20-acre park that is in the shadow of the former viaduct. So I’ve met people who actually moved in after the viaduct came down and said, ‘What’s the big deal?’ Like you don’t remember. So part of the storytelling of this place is retelling that story, right? What it took to get here to take that double-decker highway down the political leadership residents advocates, this 20-acre park running from the stadium district all the way to Belltown will be creating this dynamic tapestry of experience of public space, connection to the waterfront, the tendrils back down to Pioneer Square, the 20-block Pike-Pine extension to Capitol Hill and down back to Pike Place Market is part of that vision of reclaiming this extraordinary space. There’s massive economic impact…”

Collectively, all the projects associated with the new waterfront account for more than $1.1 billion in construction work and 6,200 jobs overall, Shigaki said.

The 2001 earthquake damaged the viaduct, which dated to 1953, kicking off a chain of events that lasted over a decade but ultimately led to approval of a four-billion-dollar SR 99 tunnel and a billion-dollar new waterfront. The level of investment is impressive, and in fact the park project, which relied on a public-private partnership, is still shoring up its finances to finish off the remaining 12% of its fundraising campaign. Shigaki made a pitch for the companies and wealthy individuals in the room to chip in.

“We are wrapping up the campaign, Waterfront Park, which is a $170 million effort, and we raised 88% of that goal, which is extraordinary, and we’re in the last stretch to get there,” Shigaki said. “So it’s a real indication to all of you to join us to close this chapter of this campaign and move into how a waterfront park is going to be part of this town in this ecosystem.”

With an eye to the topic du jour, especially in corporate circles, Friends of Waterfront Seattle stressed the safety improvements being paired with the projects. Unlike most park spaces downtown that are operated by Seattle Parks and Recreation, Waterfront Park has been operated since last year by the City’s Seattle Center department, with former Waterfront Seattle director Marshall Foster at the helm — in partnership with Friends of Waterfront Seattle.

“We’re making public safety investments we’ve invested $3 million to date on Pier 62 alone modeling a new model for public safety that’s centered in a humane approach, as [DSA President] Jon [Scholes] talked about, we’re working with Project Reach to provide outreach workers for those who are on housed our staff are the eyes and ears on the park,” Shigaki said. “And a new partnership with Seattle Center is providing public safety officers to be able to be available to address issues to be able to work and enforce Park rules. And then you call the Seattle Police Department when it’s needed. But that unique approach is what we need to solve for some of these more challenging issues.”

Taking a trip down the annals of Seattle history, Koch pointed to the foundational vision of the Olmsted brothers, the acclaimed landscape architects that designed many of Seattle’s major parks and parkways (ditto for most other major American cities). In 1903 a group of civil leaders wanted to make Seattle a beautiful city, she noted, “And they hired the Olmsted brothers. And as we all know, pick a park: Seward Park, Woodland Park, what would Seattle be without the Olmsted designed parks, and the Olmsteds really recognized what makes Seattle unique and gorgeous… 120 years ago, [they said] the primary aim should be to secure and preserve for the use of the people as much as possible in these advantages of water and mountain views.”

The Olmsteds’ vision included a world-class waterfront park for downtown, which has gone unrealized until now. Partially this is due to the lack of major parcel of open space in any prominent section, and also because the connections to the surrounding areas were relatively weak and short on pedestrian friendliness. 1974’s Waterfront Park, funded by the Forward Thrust ballot measure six years earlier, was the first major public park along the waterfront, a park that the waterfront redevelopment is completely rebuilding.

The Elliott Bay Connections effort aims to address that with an infusion of $45 million in philanthropist donations to improve the trail from Interbay all the way to Pier 62 and add more plantings and amenities in Centennial Park and Myrtle Edwards Park, which composes the waterfront through the Queen Anne foothill sections. The plan calls for replacing old waterfront streetcar tracks with a landscaped multi-use trail to help handle the expected walking, rolling, and biking traffic and beautify the street. Those improvements are promised by 2026, in time for the World Cup soccer matches that Seattle will be hosting.

“What people don’t recognize, perhaps, is that the Olmsted brothers also had a vision for a waterfront park on the other side of the lake on Elliott Bay that was never realized. So when we think about the inspiration and vision for reclaiming the waterfront for all of us, it actually goes back that long, and then as we looked ahead from 1903, there were many generations of civic activists in this community who advocated for the removal of the viaduct, and taking the waterfront back for the people.”

The Olmsted vision will take another big step forward in 2025, and Seattle will be better for it.

The post Seattle Waterfront Park Project Finally Enters Its Home Stretch first appeared on The Urbanist.

Richter didn’t sugar coat the outlook for the toll facility remaining in the black. “I think it’s important to note that there’s been a permanent shift in the projected use of this corridor, which is going to have a pretty substantial negative impact on our revenues over the projection period” which extends to 2052, he said. “We’ve just got a sea of red…we’ve got insufficient revenues in every year during the projection period essentially, and a lot of them are pretty substantial.” He provided the commission a balance sheet that by 2052 showed a cumulative negative balance of $236 million dollars.

“There’s going to need to be some additional toll increases, but I’m suspicious that that’s not going to be sufficient to cover the entirety of this issue, given that the shortfall in a lot of years is equal to roughly a third of the revenue coming in,” he said. “There’s likely going to be a need for some legislative assistance on this…all of the potential actions will be needed to remedy this particular problem.” Raising toll rates to make up for declining revenues is a standard practice, but it can’t work if those toll increases drive people away, and the SR 99 is a route that’s pretty easy to avoid for a lot of people.

Overall traffic volumes in the SR 99 tunnel are not looking good compared to the forecasts that WSDOT prepared over a decade ago as part of the environmental review for the Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement program. That documentation projected that with tolling in place, by 2030 over 57,000 vehicles per day would use the facility, a substantial decline compared to the number that would use it if it weren’t tolled.

That 2030 forecast is lower than the actual volumes the highway saw in 2019, before tolling was implemented and prior to the impact of the pandemic on traffic volumes. But now traffic volumes are well below 40,000 per day: numbers from last year show slightly more than 32,000 vehicles per day, and WSDOT’s volume dashboard shows that volumes on the corridor have been consistently 30-40% below their pre-pandemic levels even as other state highways are essentially back to pre-pandemic traffic volumes.

But that 2030 forecast comes with a big caveat: it assumed much higher tolls than are currently in place. Southbound PM peak tolls of $5.00 in 2015 dollars, or $6.25 today, were used to project those volumes. With a Good To Go pass, the highest tolls get today is $2.70. Raising tolls would likely push additional users out of the tunnel, not helping the revenue spiral.

Between 2019 and 2022, the legislature loaned the SR 99 toll program several million dollars to keep the program stable following the dip in traffic volumes during the pandemic. But payments on the debt issued to pay for the tunnel and costs to operate and maintain the tunnel are gobbling up a larger and larger share of the projected revenues generated from tolling. In 2020, with the substantial decline in usage of the tunnel, the program did not have enough revenue to cover costs; that’s projected to also be true in 2022. And those loans from the legislature will ultimately be repaid, of which Richter said “there’s not a solid plan in place for when that’s to be.”

This year, the legislature contemplated spending nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars removing all tolls from the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, where toll revenues had been assumed to pay for an abnormally high share of the overall project when it was built. Ultimately, a much less dramatic fix was passed that is intended to lower toll rates quite modestly. But the entire episode illustrates just how volatile WSDOT’s tolled corridors, most of which are used by the state as revenue generators and not demand management tools, are. The Tacoma Narrows Bridge, which has few alternatives, has essentially fully recovered from its pandemic volume lull and that associated revenue hit. Things don’t look anywhere near as rosy for SR 99.

In addition to the latest forecast, the long-term traffic volume trends in the SR 99 tunnel could be even less stable than they appear now. Within a year, the new Elliott Way roadway will open, providing a new direct route between the 15th Ave W corridor through Ballard and the waterfront, creating an attractive alternative for a lot of drivers who may currently be using the tunnel. Of course, the 99 tunnel always becomes more attractive when alternate routes become congested, which may happen over time.

Contacted about the new dire revenue forecast, WSDOT spokesperson Christopher Foster didn’t provide much additional information. “The traffic and revenue information shared at [Wednesday’s] Washington State Transportation Commission (WSTC) meeting is based on current traffic and revenue forecasts. These forecasts are updated on a quarterly basis and are subject to further changes. We’ll continue to work with our partners at the Washington State Transportation Commission and the Office of the State Treasurer (OST) to evaluate the pandemic’s effect on traffic in the SR 99 tunnel, and strategies for meeting financial needs for the facility,” he said.

Setting the SR 99 toll program up to pay back the bonds that were issued to pay for the tunnel itself may not be that uncommon of a practice for transportation departments, but it is the exactly sort of thing that tunnel skeptics were raising alarms about back when the future of the Alaskan Way Viaduct was being debated. In 2009, Mayoral candidate Mike McGinn raised concerns about Seattle residents being on the hook for any cost overruns from the project, concerns he brought into the Mayor’s office when elected even as he ultimately proved unable to stop the project. Now, shortfalls in the tolling program could ultimately end up making all Washington residents pay, if the tunnel needs a bailout.

The post SR 99 Tunnel is Bleeding Money as Toll Revenue Forecasts Plunge first appeared on The Urbanist.

Sound Transit’s preferred alternative would put an underground station at Harrison Street and SR-99. Since this location is right where SR-99 enters a tunnel, it means the light rail station has to be quite deep to clear the car tunnel — 120 feet deep in the agency’s plan. This depth could add nearly five minutes to a transit trip just in navigating the cavernous station and dealing with long escalators or elevators that could have significant queues at a station projected to get 10,500 daily boardings. It will also make the transit station more expensive to build for a transit agency already facing major cost escalation issues.

To add insult to injury, it also puts a station entrance right next to the car pollution venting out of the tunnel, including the four yellow tubes that vent out smoke in case of a fire in the tunnel — hardly a pleasant environment for riders accessing the long station escalators or 11-story deep elevators. Nor is it an ideal location for transit-oriented development. Who wants to live sandwiched next to a busy highway trench and a smokestack?

As co-founder of the People’s Waterfront Coalition, Cary Moon pushed the Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) to abandon its tunnel plan and support surface transit alternative instead. Unfortunately, WSDOT and other tunnel boosters were relentless and eventually forced through the controversial project despite the fierce opposition from transit advocates and Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn. The tunnel failed a public advisory vote in 2007, but tunnel boosters kept pushing and spinning the project.

False transit promises from highway tunnel boosters

The promise of transit upgrades from highway tunnel boosters, who branded their campaign as “tunnel plus transit,” was intended to outmaneuver and undercut the surface transit alternative that tunnel opponents were pushing. “What does this ‘surface option’ mean for you? More traffic, more delay, buses and freight caught in gridlock,” the pro-tunnel crowd wrote in their 2011 referendum statement. Why back the surface transit alternative when boosters promised Seattle could have a highway tunnel and transit upgrades too?

Unfortunately for riders, the tunnel’s transit plan was built on a hill of lies. Moon and advocates hit the nail on the head when it came to the transit implications, and she points out that the City should have seen this coming.

“The City knew back in 2005, when the proposed monorail expansion project was killed, that we would need another approach for rapid grade separated transit to Ballard and West Seattle,” Moon said in a text. “We realized then we’d need another transit tunnel downtown.”

The opportunity cost was enormous.

“What if our region had prioritized Sound Transit as our future then instead of building WSDOT’s four-billion-dollar car tunnel?” Moon asked. “We wasted much time and money and precious underground terrain on perpetuating car culture. We could be choosing a shallower, lower cost, and more accessible second transit tunnel now if we hadn’t.”

The issue of the tunnel has been a wedge in Seattle politics for more than a decade. During his administration from 2009 to 2013, McGinn fought to block the tunnel, but was defeated in his reelection bid by Ed Murray, a major tunnel supporter with robust backing from both the corporate and state Democratic party establishment, who also backed the tunnel. Cary Moon ran against Murray’s successor, Jenny Durkan, and she again took up the cause of transit, climate action, and safe streets for people walking, rolling, and biking over car-focused megaprojects, earning The Urbanist Elections Committee’s endorsement. But Durkan rode a wave of establishment support and bludgeoned her opponent on the issue of homelessness, including hitting her for suggesting the City should build shelter for every homeless person in its borders — a position pretty similar to that held by Durkan’s successor Mayor Bruce Harrell. Harrell, another highway tunnel supporter, now seeks to address a homelessness crisis that worsened under Durkan’s watch despite her campaign pledges to address it.

Governor Jay Inslee called the highway tunnel the “eighth wonder of the world” at its ribbon-cutting ceremony back in 2019 — three years later than promised after the world’s largest tunnel boring machine broke down trying to chew through 1,000 feet of sloppy Seattle soil. The project’s cost overruns were significant even before toll revenue came in far under projections due to WSDOT’s unrealistic and exaggerated traffic modeling — a persistent problem for the agency and the industry. Now, this gift that keeps on giving is driving up Sound Transit 3 costs and worsening future outcomes for riders.

“They told us they were burying the highway through the city, but in fact what they were doing is burying it for part of the city and putting a lot of car infrastructure right into the middle of the city right there in South Lake Union,” McGinn said in an interview. “All of the infrastructure to move cars fast through the neighborhood are inconsistent with what we need to move people in transit in and out of the neighborhood.”

The lack of bus lanes and traffic-clogged bus weave to exit Aurora Avenue is one legacy of that planning mistake, as is the difficulty in moving the bus stop to be next to Sound Transit’s planned light rail station. Like Moon, former Mayor McGinn said the looming issues were obvious.

“We knew that from the start. It’s just that the highway builders really wanted their highway and they didn’t really care that much about the transit users,” McGinn said. “A big highway interchange in the middle of a city is bad urban design. It doesn’t take any particular genius from the planners to see that.”

To McGinn, it all goes back to a flawed philosophy undergirding the deluxe underground highway bypass of Downtown Seattle.

“Why did we build something to skip Seattle instead of to make Seattle better?” McGinn lamented. “The thing about a nice fine-grained street grid is that it supports so many things. It supports buses. It supports walking. It support biking. It supports small local businesses. It can support housing,” McGinn said. “That big [tunnel] portal, what does that support? It supports people who want to miss, in my opinion, the best part of whole damn state and Pacific Northwest. To skip Seattle.”

Mercer station alternative also ruined by car tunnel

Unfortunately, the only alternative that Sound Transit is still officially considering was also sabotaged by the highway tunnel project. The other option puts the station at Mercer Street and Aurora Avenue; on the plus side, since it’s north of the tunnel it’s shallower at about 85 feet deep, which should shave a minute or two from the time to surface. However, the bus transfer environment is much worse and the car tunnel project is largely to blame.

With the viaduct replacement project, WSDOT redesigned Aurora Avenue to have a left exit for traffic not entering the car tunnel under Seattle. This traffic included buses weaving over from the right-hand bus lanes on Aurora. Because they’d be in the process of weaving and exiting the off-ramp, there’s no good place for southbound Aurora buses to stop near the Mercer Street station. The weave has also slowed buses down, especially during peak times, which is exacerbated by the fact WSDOT provided no bus lanes on the new off-ramp and no transit priority on the widened 7th Avenue. Needless to say, this was not a transit-oriented project. And there’s not an easy or cheap way to fix it since the left-hand exit is baked into the street design now, barring a complete overhaul.

Salvaging the situation

What’s done is done, but hopefully we learn our lessons from it and adapt the best we can.

The station may have to go at Harrison since getting the bus transfers right is important, but we can mitigate the ill effects of the highway tunnel. WSDOT could help pay the additional cost of excavating the station deeper since it was their project that caused the issue, failing to make good on promises to improve transit. WSDOT could also fund a sound wall to deaden the sound of the highway emanating up to Harrison Street, which would make for a more pleasant station area.

Sound Transit should also do everything possible at other station sites to ensure stations are user-friendly and closer to the surface. South Lake Union Station may need to be 120-feet-deep to clear the SR-99 tunnel, but perhaps the agency will engineer a way for the new Westlake Station to be shallower than the 135 feet planned and find a way to make the 80-foot-deep option at Chinatown-International District work instead of alternatives ranging as deep as 190 feet. The Westlake and Chinatown stations will be essential to get right as the busiest stations and the only ones providing transfers between all three future light rail lines.

The zoning in this part of South Lake Union already allows for 240-foot residential towers, while 160-foot towers are allowed on the Uptown side (west of Aurora). These height limits could be doubled or tripled to allow for a double or tripling of the Mandatory Housing Affordability (MHA) requirements in the area. A doubling could take the mandatory affordability requirement from its current 3.9% of units or a fee of $11.59 per square foot to 8% or $24 per square foot. A tripling could take it to 12% of units or $35 per square foot — a highrise project might pay something like $20 million under such a fee. This would aid in a dense mixed-income neighborhood growing around the station, overcoming the obstacle that the nearby highway presents.

Eventually with more electric vehicles on the road, the tunnel exhaust tubes in the neighborhood would stop belching out as much pollution, although the tire dust from electric cars will still be a significant source of pollution threatening salmon runs. Electric cars would still be noisy at high speeds and remain a drawback on the section of Harrison Street near the station, but a sound wall could mitigate the situation a bit. Transit-oriented development will still arrive near the station, including a social housing tower above the Sound Transit site.

The Gates Foundation is planning an expansion of its campus situated northwest of the station site, which breaks up Taylor Avenue due to a dubious street vacation from decades past. While the Gates Foundation operates a closed campus — it’s literally fenced off from the rest of the city — a pedestrian pathway through the large superblock would improve the walkshed to the station.

Long before the City sold the site to the Gates Foundation for its headquarters, it hosted a trolley barn for the Seattle Electric Company’s extensive streetcar network. Those streetcars were phased out and tracks were ripped out or paved over in the 1940s — although some of the routes were converted to electric trolley buses using the overhead wire for the former trams. Now in the 2020s, we find ourselves trying to shoehorn rapid transit back into a neighborhood that used to be at the nexus of Seattle’s transit network.

The central artery of the neighborhood will likely be Thomas Street, just one block south. Thomas Street is designated a greenway and has been envisioned as a pedestrianized corridor. The City backed off from developing a fully pedestrianized street and closing it to cars, but it did add flexpost protected bike lanes from the Seattle Center to Cascade, providing some street calming. Another plus: Thomas Street isn’t directly adjacent to a highway trench, which confers a basic urban ambiance lacking one block over. Along the street is a mix of recently added or planned mid-rise and older low-rise building that could great transit-oriented redevelopment opportunities. Seattle City Light has a large site that includes a substation. Some of it may have to remain, but perhaps a TOD site could be carved off the campus to add social housing on a city-owned property.

The whole situation would be more favorable without a busy highway next door, but that is the mess we find ourselves in. A whole generation of political leaders assured us Seattle could have a downtown highway tunnel, great transit, and high quality public spaces too. Plans to add a light station in South Lake Union and connect it to pedestrian corridors and Aurora buses will put those assurances to the test.

Correction: An earlier version incorrectly stated the exhaust tubes on Harrison regularly vented car exhaust. In fact, they’re only used in emergency situations like fires. Most of the car pollution vents out the tunnel portals due to “piston action” which still leaves the South Lake Union Station site getting a heavy dose of car pollution.

The post SR-99 Tunnel Threatens South Lake Union’s Light Rail Future first appeared on The Urbanist.

Aaron Asis, a founding member of Recharge the Battery, said the design of the future Battery Portal Park will be completed in conjunction with the Bell Street Park Extension, offering opportunity for two projects to tie into each other. During the coming year, the City of Seattle and landscape architecture firm GGN will work with Recharge the Battery to hold public events that encourage community engagement with the design planning process. Additionally, a citizen advisory committee made up of delegates who represent different Belltown neighborhood interests will also be convened.

For Asis, relationship and trust building among Belltown neighbors will be key to successful a community engagement process. “The part that is important to us is to not intimate the public,” Asis said. “Our goal is to dig a little deeper and continue to get to know people in the neighborhood.”

A bold vision for a greener Belltown

Recharge the Battery first attracted the Seattle’s attention with their plans to convert the Battery Street Tunnel into a subterranean open space. When the high cost of preserving the tunnel proved an insurmountable barrier for attracting the political support necessary to move the project forward, the campaign restyled itself as Recharge the Battery 2.0, with the Battery Portal Park topping the campaign’s wishlist for improvements within and near the Battery Street Corridor.

Recharge the Battery is thrilled to have GGN landscape architects as project partners, welcoming the “opportunity to explore options with professional firepower” brought by GGN’s design team.

At the same time, Asis has been also careful to emphasize the important role the Belltown community will play in determining the park’s future. “We want to stress that this whole thing came about of the spirit of Belltown,” Asis said “We have been making friends and looking at ways to make things better. Because we now have professionals and city on our side, we don’t want to turn our backs on what got us here.”

While many details about Battery Portal Park’s future design remain to be decided, some promising concepts have already arisen during Recharge the Battery’s community engagement sessions. Among these include ensuring the site has a community component such as a shared planting operation, maintaining the historic integrity of the site, and possibly building a Seattle Public Utilities demonstration site that would offer interpretative exhibits on stormwater collection in collaboration with Growing Vine Street, a Belltown neighborhood initiative which has worked toward transforming eight blocks of nearby Vine Street into an urban watershed and street park.

Those who have been keeping tabs on this story might be familiar with the fact the Battery Portal Site has been floated as a potential location for a future Downtown Seattle public school. While there are currently no plans to locate a public school at the site, the possibility has not been ruled out. In the meantime, outdoor classroom space is another design feature that is up for consideration in the future Battery Portal Park.

For now construction staging will continue dominate the Battery Portal Site

While Belltown residents have a future park to look forward to in 2022, for now the Battery Portal Site will continue to be filled with noise and commotion resulting from decommissioning of the former Battery Street Tunnel.

At this point most, if not all, of the rubble from the Alaskan Way Viaduct has been deposited into the tunnel. However, additional work such as removing the tunnel’s utility and mechanical systems and removing hazardous materials from the tunnel remain to be completed. The final step will be to fill the remainder of the tunnel with approximately 4,000 truck loads of low-density cellular concrete, which will be pumped into the tunnel through surface vents along Battery Street.

Once this work is completed, the land that occupies the site of the future Battery Portal Park will be returned from WSDOT’s ownership to the City of Seattle, honoring an easement agreement that was made decades ago and making way for a new, greener future for Belltown.

The post Battery Portal: A New Park for Belltown first appeared on The Urbanist.

For the widen highways crowd, the opening of the Alaskan Way boulevard (in the footprint of the mercifully dismantled highway viaduct) is the light at the end of the tunnel. But that surface megaboulevard–eight lanes at its widest–isn’t likely to solve congestion either. Traffic tends to fill the vessel it is given–more a gas than a liquid.

This is counterintuitive. Motorists–many of armchair traffic engineers themselves–often assume wider roads mean less traffic congestion. Billion of dollars have been wasted on this folk wisdom–often with transportation departments aiding its dissemination. The problem is there is no practical evidence for this belief. In fact, a 2011 study by economists Matthew Turner of the University of Toronto and Gilles Duranton of University of Pennsylvania demonstrated traffic and road capacity have a perfect one-to-one relationship. Add lanes and they fill as fast as you add them. This means expensive highway expansion projects historically have ended with overall congestion just as bad as when the project was initiated.

This is the principle of induced demand. Make it cheap and easy to drive and motorists will drive more. Unfortunately this well established though often ignored principle means that Tim Eyman’s Initiative 976 will worsen traffic congestion: $30 car tabs will encourage more people to drive and more often. Cheap car tabs will create more traffic at the same time that transportation agencies face decimated budgets due to the sudden loss of car tab revenue. This underscores the need to backfill I-976 transit cuts.

Moreover, the law of induced demand suggests a particularly effective way to raise revenue would be with fees that hit motorists like car tabs did. The commercial parking tax would serve this purpose, as would congestion pricing, or decongestion pricing as we would call it. Induced demand also suggests that establishing dedicated bus lanes by simply painting over general purpose lanes wouldn’t create traffic Armageddon. In fact, it would improve matters by offering a scalable climate-friendly alternative while leaving road congestion largely unchanged.

The relationship between road capacity and congestion really is that persistent. Adam Mann with Wired talked to the authors of that 2011 road congestion study, explaining their findings.

[Turner and Duranton] decided to compare the amount of new roads and highways built in different U.S. cities between 1980 and 2000, and the total number of miles driven in those cities over the same period.

“We found that there’s this perfect one-to-one relationship,” said Turner.

If a city had increased its road capacity by 10 percent between 1980 and 1990, then the amount of driving in that city went up by 10 percent. If the amount of roads in the same city then went up by 11 percent between 1990 and 2000, the total number of miles driven also went up by 11 percent. It’s like the two figures were moving in perfect lockstep, changing at the same exact rate.

The law of induced demand cuts both ways. Transit might get some motorists off the road, but others rise to take their place. But unlike highway widening, transit scales. Adding transit may not lower congestion, but overall capacity to move people goes up as service increases, especially if that transit is reliable and efficient thanks to dedicated lanes. The same can be said of protected bike lanes, which can fit more people per square foot of road space.

The passage of I-976 puts us in a bind, but the solution is right before us. Progressively taxing and investing in transit can reverse our losses and put us back marching forward and seizing our role as a national leader in transit and breaking car dependence.

Almost 60% of King County voters rejected I-976–and an even greater share of Seattle voters. And, as I noted last week, King County passed Sound Transit 3 with 58% of the vote and approved the ultimately doomed I-1631 carbon fee initiative with 58%. King County is ready to embrace the future rather than cling to childish notions that roads can be free, driving cheap, and congestion nonexistent.

The post The Law of Induced Demand: Road Widening (and I-976) Invites Congestion first appeared on The Urbanist.

Tolls will range from $1 to $2.25 for drivers with a Good To Go pass, depending on time of day. Drivers without a Good To Go pass will pay $2 more, meaning a range of $3 to $4.25. Vehicles with additional axles will pay more. The Washington State Transportation Commission set the toll rates in October 2018, after a five-month-long public input process. WSDOT has been seeking to educate motorists with an advertising blitz building of its earlier “It’s A Thing” campaign that sought to entice people to drive in the SR-99 tunnel.

The Washington State Legislature’s financing plan for the viaduct replacement project relied on tolling to cover $200 million worth of the construction bonds and all of the upkeep and maintenance costs. Thus, removing tolling isn’t a viable option without coming up with a major new funding source. Especially since the State (or even the City) could be on the hook for all or some of the project’s considerable cost overruns after the Bertha breakdown saga.

Weaker Demand for 99 Tunnel than Predicted

In our earlier coverage, we’ve raised the issue of whether SR-99 traffic volumes will be sufficient to cover the costs, given that the highway has underperformed projections thus far, particularly in its first few months.

WSDOT is reporting that traffic volumes are up considerably now, but still below predicted levels of nearly 7,000 vehicles per hour. “75,000-80,000 vehicles use the tunnel on any given weekday,” WSDOT spokesperson Laura Newborn said. “Also, approximately 25,000 vehicles use the exits to city streets at either end of the tunnel on any given weekday. This means more than 100,000 vehicles use the SR 99 to/through Seattle daily.”

Traffic volumes peak at the 4pm hour according to WSDOT data, but still don’t exceed 6,000 vehicles even then. Overall peak periods in the SR-99 tunnel are averaging 5,352 vehicles per hour in the latest data we saw.

Diverting Traffic to City Streets

Even below projections, traffic volumes are high enough that thousands of motorists are likely to be diverted to city streets to avoid tolls–at least at first in reaction to the sticker shock of tolls.

“Our forecast suggests diversion could be as high as 35% to 40% during peak periods,” Newborn said. “However, we want to stress that forecasts are not certainties. When tolling began on 520, drivers initially diverted to other routes, but many returned to 520 over time. We expect to see something similar with the 99 tunnel. Some percentage of drivers will initially try other routes and return to the tunnel as they weigh the cost-vs-time saved in using the tunnel to get through Seattle.”

WSDOT also advised their diversion forecasts were conservative–in other words they predicted a lot of diversion in case that came to pass–for the sake of securing bonds.

“WSDOT’s forecast of tunnel volumes with tolling were part of a revenue study to make sure we were able to generate enough toll revenue to pay back $200 million in construction bonds used to build the tunnel,” Newborn said. “It’s important to note that our diversion forecasts were conservative for the bond market.”

We asked why the projections were off, and WSDOT admitted predicting vehicle demand is not an exact science.

“The forecast model over-projected the number of vehicles per hour in peak periods using the tunnel,” Newborn said. “Again, traffic modeling is not an exact science. Exits/entrances in the tunnel are different than the viaduct, but 75,000-80,000 roughly mirrors the last viaduct usage study conducted in 2014.”

WSDOT appears to be hoping that diversion is a lot less than the 40% worst case scenario so that tolling revenue is sufficient for its bond repayment and maintenance needs. Since volumes started lower than projections, there’s less wiggle room. But on the other hand, there are a few options to cover the shortfalls such as raising tunel toll rates and/or tolling city streets to drive more traffic back into the tunnel.

Could Congestion Pricing Help Balance Demand?

In fact, SR-99 tunnel tolling studies launched Seattle’s exploration of congestion pricing (or decongestion pricing if you prefer) since Councilmember Mike O’Brien and others worried tolling the tunnel could drive motorists onto City streets and worsen transit gridlock, pedestrian collisions, and pollution. Councilmember O’Brien asked for congestion pricing, and Mayor Jenny Durkan later picked up the idea as a sort of centerpiece to her climate action plan. Though she ordered a study–and Uber joined in on the act hoping to influence policy–it doesn’t appear that Mayor Durkan will meet her goal of enacting the policy in her first term at the rate we’re going.

On the other hand, if Tim Eyman’s Initiative 976 stands without the Washington State Legislature stepping in to backfill the transit cuts, there could be a stronger appetite for new revenue and an opportunity to move congestion pricing policy forward. Never waste a crisis, they say.

Ryan Packer contributed to this article.

The post Seattle Squeeze 2.0? SR-99 Tolling Could Divert Traffic to City Streets first appeared on The Urbanist.

“The closure of the Alaskan Way Viaduct was hyped as a potential traffic disaster that Seattle would have to endure for three weeks,” MASS stated in its press release. “Instead we saw more people on transit and bikes, and a blessedly quiet downtown. The twenty buses Metro added turned out to be much nicer than the 90,000 cars that formerly streamed across our waterfront and up Aurora Ave.”

The three-week exercise doesn’t mean the fight to lower car dependency is over. In fact, traffic actually seemed to be worse this week with the tunnel open, foreshadowing plenty of work ahead.

“‘Viadoom’ is over but the Seattle Squeeze is not. We hope the experience of these three weeks will embolden Mayor Durkan and SDOT to move forward with dramatic improvements to transit, biking, walking and rolling infrastructure, as recommended by the MASS Coalition,” said Katie Wilson, General Secretary of the Transit Riders Union, a MASS coalition member. “‘Build it and they will come’–all the evidence points in this direction.”

SDOT Tries to Explain Lack of Viadoom

That same day, Heather Marx, who is the director of downtown mobility for the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT), briefed the transportation committee of the Seattle City Council on data from the closure and what the agency learned from it. She admitted she underestimated the potential of bikes to move people, referring to when she called getting more people to bike in January “a heavy lift.”

“I’ve never been so happy to be so wrong,” Marx said, pointing to bike counts that jumped big time, even doubling at the West Seattle Bridge.

Marx also said the water taxi saw ridership triple on its West Seattle route after doubling service. She credited teleworking as fueling the shift that made it seem like 90,000 cars disappeared that normally used the viaduct.

Designing a Doom-Proof System

MASS emphasized that the viaduct closure should be a learning experience and help us avoid future mistakes like expanding highway capacity in an urban environment and gumming up bus routes, bike routes and pedestrian crossings.

“Viadoom turned out to be a wildly successful experiment in how to reduce emissions, improve mobility, and better our quality of life,” MASS stated. “Understanding why Viadoom didn’t happen can help us make future transportation policy decisions with equally happy results.”

MASS wants bus lanes, a complete safe biking network, a safe pedestrian network, and signal priority geared toward people walking, rolling, biking, and in transit. So far SDOT has taken an wait-and-see approach, promising it’s ready to add temporary bus lanes or signal changes as necessary.

Bus lanes seem increasingly necessary. Just this morning this reporter had the joy of a riding a jam-packed Route 62 into a Dexter traffic jam exacerbated by the new SR-99 tunnel off-ramp. The Mercer Mess is messier with a new traffic funnel feeding into it, as it should have been easy to predict if traffic engineers didn’t have their heads in the sand.

With the closure behind us, it seems our government’s priorities have swung sharply back to cars. The Washington State Department of Transportation (WSDOT) is back to begging people to drive and apparently closing a bus-only lane serving one of the busiest bus stops in Seattle.

Why did we go back to a car-first mentality? Even asking commuters not to drive in a concerted way (when so often we tip-toe around the issue) seemed to have an effect during the closure.

“Preceding the Seattle Squeeze, our leaders provided some additional transportation infrastructure in the form of added buses, water taxis, and bus lanes, and prevailed on people to do the right thing,” said Alice Lockhart, with 350 Seattle’s transportation team. “The response was great, with bike counters up, water taxi use tripling, and more people on buses. This gives me hope that the Mayor’s office, SDOT, and Metro can bravely lead to build and also promote the transit, bike lanes, and pedestrian/rolling infrastructure that will let us all get to work without high-carbon commutes.”

Snow Spoils Tunnel Launch

Meanwhile in car land, a winter storm wreaked havoc on Seattle streets and spoiled WSDOT’s rollout of its $4 billion new tunnel, with traffic volumes down sharply from the 90,000 cars per day that used to use the Alaskan Way Viaduct. By the way, WSDOT predicts SR-99 traffic volumes will actually increase about 35% before tunnel tolling starts this summer.

With driving conditions improving on Wednesday, KIRO reported a four-mile backup “nearly to the West Bridge” formed in the tunnel as the exits on the South Lake Union side of the tunnel couldn’t empty fast enough. Turns out the Mercer Mess isn’t the best place to put more cars.

To further dampen the grand opening, the exhaust fans in the tunnel don’t seem to be operating properly yet, and the tunnel filled with “smoke and haze,” according to KIRO. WSDOT manually triggered the giant yellow exhaust fans, but motorists were not happy to be breathing their own fumes. Cars, after all, are externalizing machines and bearing the full social costs of driving them isn’t part of the equation–even if it should be.

The post Viadoom Never Came but Squeeze Tightens Its Grip on Seattle Post-Tunnel first appeared on The Urbanist.

Greetings, friends! We’ve gathered here
to cut the ribbon, give a cheer-
it’s time to open, rise and shine
the buried tunnel ninety-nine.

Oh, the group is large and grand
but we must know who to raise our hand
with thankful gesture, sing it loud
the highway-funding political crowd?

There’s Washdot Secretary Millar,
Sam Zimbabwe, new transportation czar,
there’s noted transit booster Dow,
and Chris Gregoire who’d decided how
to build this tunnel, years ago.
There’s Peter Steinbrueck, that old pro.
Councilmember Bagshaw’s here
Wrapping up her final year.
Oh look, it’s Governor Inslee
and Ed Murray, hiding behind a tree.
Oh and you thought I’d forgot
King County Councilmember Joe McDermott.

So many leaders gathered ’round
while speeches and big smiles abound
what’s left unsaid is so damn large…
I’d hoped the people put in charge
of all our futures wouldn’t trade
a highway tunnel clearly made
to keep cars moving with no delay
for the health of kids born on this day.

The post An Elegy for a Tunnel Ribbon Cutting first appeared on The Urbanist.

Viaduct is closed? 
On the bus, nose in a book 
I hadn’t noticed

— A Vaiku, by @140noStephen on October 27, 2011

This haiku was written back in 2011 after the first Viadoom turned out to be a big disappointment for people who were craving for a post-apocalyptic traffic nightmare to play out on the city streets of Seattle’s downtown.

Now we have almost reached the end of the second Viadoom, the one that was supposed to be so big and so bad that Seattleites would be left clawing at gates of the new deep bore tunnel SR-99 tunnel, desperate to pay $1 billion in tolls to order escape the 90,000 vehicles clogging the streets above.

But that did not happen. Somehow the 90,000 vehicles that had been using the Alaskan Way Viaduct daily disappeared, and traffic proceeded on more or less as usual.

Transit advocates, like former Mayor McGinn, have stated that there is a lesson to be learned. Chiefly that people are adaptable and can change their habits and modes of transportation.

“It turns out,” said McGinn, in an interview on KUOW’s The Record, “that a lot of car trips aren’t that important. You can go into neighborhood to buy things instead of driving across town or you can pick a different time of day.”

However, current Mayor Jenny Durkan does not share McGinn’s perspective. In fact instead of staying out of the old tunnel debate (which took place, after all, far before Durkan’s time in elected office), the Mayor jumped right in–with a vigorous defense of the tunnel.

No SR-99 Tunnel. No Waterfront Park.

Mayor Durkan’s defense of the tunnel came directly after host Bill Radke asked if we could learn something from our experience with the viaduct closure and then played a clip from former Mayor McGinn.

[To hear the complete interview, click on the link here. The segment begins at 5:50.]

After making the joke that McGinn’s continued criticism of the tunnel demonstrated that “people can’t change their habits because [McGinn] just can’t quit fighting or trying to prove he was right,” Durkan went on to suggest that the current traffic patterns would not be sustainable because they were the result of “a concerted effort by a whole host of users, employers, and others trying to both change their behavior on when they work and how they get to work.”

And of course the word “vacation” was thrown out as a possible explanation for the lighter than expected traffic, bringing up images of Seattleites speckled across beaches from Santa Barbara to Cabo, sipping fruity cocktails during the long wait for the SR-99 tunnel.

But then something even stranger happened. After applauding Seattleites’ warm feelings toward transit, and even suggesting that certain transit improvements, such as more frequent Alki Water Taxi service connecting West Seattle to downtown, could become permanent, Durkan went on to make an oddly declarative statement.

It’s clear. Without that tunnel we would not be getting that 20 acre Waterfront Park that is going to [change] Seattle. So, you know, I’m glad that the voters finally decided what they decided and to move ahead with the tunnel.

Why Mayor Durkan would be so adamant about defending the tunnel decision may have to do with who her political allies are, such as tunnel champions former Governor Chris Gregoire and former Mayor Ed Murray.

Fact Check: Did We Need a Tunnel to Get a Park?

A review of the evidence makes it clear that Mayor Durkan’s statement was either dishonest or based on deeply flawed logic. Plans to build a park on the waterfront date back as far as the Forward Thrust in 1968, in which voters approved $5 million for the development of a waterfront park.

What is amazing is that people were already calling from the removal of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, which was then less than a decade old.

But after it was revealed that viaduct removal would cost about $100 million, critics backed off. A plan for a waterfront park developed by Rockrise & Associates, a San Francisco-based consulting team, was tossed around in various iterations during the early 1970’s. Eventually a scaled-back version of the plan was implemented in 1974 with the creation of a waterfront park at Pier 58. However, because it lacked the planned waterside esplanade and improved connections to downtown, the park had a “poor circulation pattern” which led to it being quickly deemed a failure, and at times liability.

But people continued to press for a park. In 2002, after the Nisqually Earthquake, Allied Arts, led by then Executive Director David Yeaworth, began its “Waterfront For All” campaign, igniting a civic conversation about what the public wanted for their future waterfront.

As conversation continued to muddle over the future of SR-99, the theme of creating a Waterfront Park that would operate as a “front porch” for the city and the “next great civic space” remained a constant.

In 2007, Seattle voters voted “No and Hell No” to two different plans for installing a new freeway on the waterfront. More than 55% of voters opposed a new elevated highway (e.g., Viaduct 2.0), and interestingly, more than 70% opposed the four lane cut and cover tunnel championed by then Mayor Greg Nickels.

It was clear that Seattleites wanted a better future for their downtown waterfront.

So when activists like Cary Moon’s People’s Waterfront Coalition began advocating for a surface street solution in lieu of a replacement viaduct or tunnel, creating a beautiful public waterfront was at the forefront of their plans.

Moon, along with activist Grant Cogswell, developed a concept called the “Seattle Strand.” The design was a runner up in a 2004 competition by Metropolis, and focused creating a dynamic public space that would remove the viaduct and restore connections to the water’s edge, while improving habitat along the seawall.

“We are a city that remembers its recent wilderness, a city in love with our watery terrain,” the proposal stated.

Controversy did continue over whether or not improvements to surface streets and transit could handle the amount carried by the viaduct, with opposing sides presenting different data.

Even so, there was never a serious plan to abandon the waterfront park. Even ill-fated efforts, such as State Rep. Frank Chopp’s plan to replace the viaduct with a “Megaduct” and the Initiative 123 plan to convert the viaduct into a High Line-style elevated park, paid heed to Seattleite’s desire to convert their waterfront into a great public space.

What’s Going to Happen When All Those Cars Come Back?

WSDOT is spending $4.4 million on a campaign to convince people to drive use the SR-99 tunnel. Current projections from WSDOT estimate that thousands more vehicle trips will be made through the tunnel during peak hours than were made on the former viaduct.

However, because the tunnel will not have downtown exits and will have tolls starting this summer, estimates from state transportation officials have suggested that daily trips in the tunnel will be about a third less than were made on the viaduct resulting in roughly 30,000 more cars on downtown surface streets.

Because of induced demand, which posits that traffic congestion actually worsens after bigger roads are built because increasing the amount and size of roads encourages more people to drive, we can expect that amount of vehicle trips in and out of downtown will increase when the tunnel (and the new Alaskan Way mega-boulevard planned for the surface) opens, thus worsening congestion and carbon emissions.

Such a development would fly in the face of the progress Seattle has made in recent year toward reducing the amount of vehicle trips made in the city. At the same our population has boomed, the number of vehicle trips has decreased while public transportation use has increased.

Data from the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) along with more recent data acquired since the closure of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, suggests that Seattleites transportation habits have been changing, calling into question if it really was necessary to spend billions of dollars on new car infrastructure.

In 2011, voters did vote to move ahead with the tunnel. But like the vote to reject $900 million in grants from the federal government for rapid transit in 1978, it is very possible that the tunnel vote was a big mistake.

In order to move forward, Seattle’s leaders need to have to both the knowledge to understand our past, as well as the courage to question decisions that were made.

Was it wise for Mayor Durkan to come immediately to the defense of the SR-99 tunnel, despite the mounting evidence that investment in transit could have more positive impact on Seattle’s mobility and the health of the natural environment? No.

And was it fair for Mayor Durkan to use the Waterfront Park as an excuse for why we needed to invest billions of dollars into a tunnel intended to increase vehicle trips, thus increasing carbon emissions at a time in which we need to be taking dramatic actions to curb climate change? Hell no.

The post Durkan Tries for Last Word on SR-99 Tunnel Controversy first appeared on The Urbanist.

If you’re traveling northbound through the SR-99 tunnel and want to go downtown, drivers will find themselves on Republican Street making a right turn to get onto Dexter Avenue N. Dexter is a very heavily used bike route between Downtown and North Seattle: the route that saw a 40% increase in bike traffic during the first few weeks of a post-viaduct Seattle.

The hundreds of people per day who rely on Dexter to get to work do not have an easy time of it. After years of construction along Dexter, the bike lane is still not fully protected along the street, with blocks where only a painted line separates people on bikes from traffic.

On Twitter, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) responded to a question about whether drivers making the turn from Republican to Dexter from the off-ramp would be prohibited from doing so when the light is red and cyclists have the right of way: “We’ll be monitoring this location closely to ensure that it is safe for people on bikes and on foot. There won’t be a right turn on red restriction when the tunnel opens, but if we see safety concerns we will be ready to make adjustments.”

Unfortunately, the City has been slow to respond when the lives of cyclists are put at risk, and even when they are lost.

In July of 2011, Mike Wang was cycling south on Dexter Ave N when he was struck and killed by a driver making a left turn across the bike lane. The driver left the scene, and was later sentenced to a hefty prison term, but the underlying action that he took–turning left across a bike lane–was a perfectly legal way to use the street. The design of the intersection afforded little margin for error.

Two years later, Brandon Blake was seriously injured at another intersection on Dexter, by a driver turning left. Two years after that, a helmet-mounted camera captures another collision that thankfully only results in minor injuries but which was caused by the same dangerous turn.

The city’s track record on failing to take action to remedy unsafe situations quickly after collisions occur is pretty clear, even just looking at the single example of Dexter Avenue, but there are many others.

The safety implications of allowing free-right-on-red from a freeway onto one of the busiest bike routes in the city are obvious to most, but they should be most obvious to the Seattle Department of Transportation. However, the message of Vision Zero design–building a margin of error into all transportation infrastructure so that if the road user fails–is still not permeating into the entire department judging by this design. When longtime transportation reporters like Mike Lindblom are pointing out the “safety hazard” that the department of transportation is apparently unconcerned about, there is a problem.

Now we can only hope that no one is seriously injured before the department changes its mind.

The post Coming Tunnel Off-Ramp Adds to Danger for People Biking on Dexter Avenue first appeared on The Urbanist.