The issue that won’t go away: The viaduct divides mayoral candidates

(Washington State Department of Transportation)

    It’s one issue people seem to keep talking about.

     Months after the Legislature agreed to replace Seattle’s Alaskan Way Viaduct with a tunnel, more transit service and surface street improvements, the decision is still being debated among candidates for Seattle mayor.

     Most, including Mayor Greg Nickels, City Councilwoman Jan Drago and former Sonic James Donaldson back the project, though Donaldson likes the idea of adding more exits to the tunnel. Sigler said he prefers the surface/transit/I-5 option but is "not going to stand in the way" of the tunnel now that a decision has been made to build it.

     Likewise, mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan, a T-Mobile executive, supports proceeding with the tunnel. “It’s simply not practical to suggest (starting) over,” Mallahan spokeswoman Charla Neuman said.

     However, two candidates, former Sierra Club leader Mike McGinn and Magnolia activist Beth Campbell have made the future of the viaduct the centerpiece of their campaigns.

     If he’s elected mayor, McGinn says, there’d be no way he’d let the tunnel be built in the city.

     Businesses, freight interests and top officials have endorsed the $4.2 billion tunnel project as the best way to get rid of the aging viaduct, which is considered structurally vulnerable and, by some, aesthetically displeasing as it stands along the Elliott Bay waterfront.

    “It’s time to get going with building it,” said Bob Donegan, an executive with Ivar’s Restaurants and part of a 35-member coalition supporting the tunnel. Backers say putting the highway lanes in a tunnel puts them mostly out of sight and allows redevelopment of the waterfront without a major highway on it, and it’s too late to turn back now that that decision has been made.

      “The alternative is eight more years of debate and studies and commissions and process,” said John Scholes, policy director for the Downtown Seattle Association.

      Most state lawmakers, in their session this year, agreed with the decision reached by Gov. Chris Gregoire, Mayor Greg Nickels and former King County Executive Ron Sims. Legislative leaders say they’re not inclined to reverse this session’s decision to build a tunnel. 

      “I don’t think anybody wants to go back and revisit this,” said Rep. Judy Clibborn, D-Mercer Island, and chairwoman of the House Transportation Committee. “It was a long time getting there. It is in Seattle, but it’s a state project.”

     But two mayoral candidates, Michael McGinn and Beth Campbell, oppose the tunnel and have each made it a major piece of their campaigns.

      A group with a Web site called TunnelFacts.com has joined the fray, agreeing with McGinn that it’s better to remove the viaduct and shift the trips onto surface streets, expanded bus service and onto a reconfigured Interstate 5.

     Key for McGinn is that his favored option – removing the viaduct and replacing it with more buses, more traffic on streets and a widened I-5 – would be much cheaper. That money, he says, could be used for other transit improvements.

      Campbell argues for a new elevated highway along the waterfront, saying that would be less costly and maintain traffic capacity. Both say that if they’re elected, they’ll try to undo the tunnel decision.

     For the election campaign, the issue won’t go away “because our leaders keep making the wrong decision,” tunnel opponent Derek Farmer said.

       TUNNEL

      The estimated cost of the tunnel project, $4.24 billion, includes $1.9 billion for drilling the tunnel itself, though engineers estimate the tunnel cost could range from $1.2 billion to $2.2 billion. They think $1.9 billion is based on a conceptual design. A more detailed design is about 5 percent complete.

      A key advantage, for supporters, is that traffic could be maintained on the viaduct while most of the tunnel was being dug below ground to the east, with limited traffic disruptions where the portals are connected to surface streets.

     “It allows the transportation system through the narrow isthmus of downtown Seattle to operate during construction, and by doing so, you avoid the economic cost of disruption,” Donegan said. One study estimated $3.4 billion in lost business and jobs if a waterfront tunnel were dug from the surface downward.

       More than 100,000 vehicles use the viaduct on a typical weekday.

      Tunnel replacements have been discussed as optons for years. A 30-member committee of stakeholders discussed two designs.

      A key to the debate came in December, the city, county and state transportation departments said a twin-tube tunnel would be too costly.

      At that moment, they chose to study two other designs: another elevated highway, thought to cost $3.5 billion, and an “I-5/surface/transit” concept that would remove the viaduct and disperse its trips onto surface streets, added buses and a reconfigured I-5; that option was estimated at the time to cost $3.3 billion.  

    By that time, however, tunnel backers had rallied enough support to get a near-unanimous vote for  the tunnel option among the stakeholder committee members.

    The question among the mayoral candidates now is whether to go with one of those less expensive alternatives, especially because there is no firm finance plan. State legislation calls for city property owners to pay for any cost overruns. The city says that provision is unenforceable. But there is not real plan for what would happen if city property owners refuse to pay.

     The other option is to go ahead with the tunnel plan..

     Supportive committee members formed a coalition made up mostly of businesses that lobbied for the tunnel with Gregoire and the Legislature until a bill passed calling for the tunnel replacement. A key point came when the tunnel advocates at the Seattle-based Cascadia Institute challenged state estimates that a tunnel alone could cost $3.5 billion.

     The institute assembled a group of tunnel experts, who persuaded the state to reduce its cost estimate to the expected $1.9 billion for drilling a single, 54-foot-diameter tunnel. 

      The rest of the $4.24 billion estmate includes outlays for street improvements, utility relocation, a new interchange near the stadiums, a new waterfront promenade, city replacement of part of the sea wall along Alaskan Way and expanded transit service to handle part of the trips; the tunnel will have two fewer lanes than the viaduct does now.

     THE SURFACE/I-5 OPTION

       As described in December, this would relocate the six-lane highway into a couplet with bicycle lanes using Alaskan Way and Western Avenue and connecting to the Battery Street Tunnel. Transit lanes would have been added to four downtown streets. The plan included creating a new northbound I-5 lane by using a shoulder and closing the Cherry Street onramp at night and letting general traffic use southbound car pool lanes during peak hours.

      It also envisioned expanded Metro bus service in Ballard, Queen Anne, Aurora Avenue, West Seattle, Madison Park and Beacon Hill; replacing the waterfront streetcar with a new line on First Avenue; and expanding park and ride facilities in Burien.

      At the time, officials of the three departments said a tunnel was not being immediately considered “due to its high cost.” They said they’d continue investigating tunnel costs as a future project “that could be constructed if the I-5/surface transit hybrid is agreed upon.”

        It was dropped when the tunnel backers won out. Tunnel opponents, however, think it should be reconsidered, given the high cost of the tunnel package and the finding that the surface option would reduce use of single-occupant cars. That, backers say, means fewer vehicle miles traveled and less pollution and lower amounts of greenhouse gases produced by vehicles.

     The surface/I-5 option is “the best long-term solution for our overall mobility need,” said Brice Maryman, a Seattle landscape architect and a sponsor of the new TunnelFacts.com Web site that argues against the tunnel project. 

      “People will be able to live in places that allow for a diversity of mobility options. We need to make communities that do not rely on hopping in the car as the path of least resistance,” Maryman said.

        Tunnel opponents say the three executives, picking a tunnel, selected something city voters rejected in an advisory vote in early 2007, along with a proposed new elevated replacement. Nickels at the time said the vote showed city residents didn’t want a new highway on the waterfront, “and here we are two years later, getting just that,” Maryman said.

     Tunnel supporters say the tunnel that voters rejected in 2007 was of a more intrusive cut-and-cover variety that would have badly disrupted businesses along Alaskan Way. The new tunnel will be bored underground, avoiding that effect, proponents say. “They are drastically different proposals,” Scholes said.

      Nickels’ point after the 2007 vote was that people wanted to see the noisy elevated highway removed so the waterfront could be redeveloped for greater public use, said Sandeep Kaushik, the mayor’s re-election campaign spokesman. The tunnel “will allow for freight traffic to move through the city, but at the same time, the waterfront will be opened up to public use and enjoyment, and we’ll see significant transit improvements as well,” he said.

      Tunnel critics also say the tunnel’s north portal could cause traffic problems by routing vehicles onto Aurora Avenue near a turn to the Mercer Mess.  State officials contend that won’t be a problem because they plan to reconnect other streets across Aurora, re-creating spaces for drivers to go.

       “You can still get off 99 and go to Denny, John, Thomas or Harrison (streets), so we’re not directing traffic onto Mercer,” state spokeswoman Amy Grotefendt said.

      Several sponsors of TunnelFacts.com are supporting mayoral candidate and tunnel opponent McGinn, who also supports the “surface/I-5’’ option to replace the viaduct. Farmer, one sponsor, said several are not working on McGinn’s behalf, however, and McGinn said he did not set up the Web site.

     McGinn said if he’s elected mayor, he’ll try to persuade the Legislature to reverse its decision to build a tunnel.

CABLE BRIDGE

     State engineers four years ago considered a cable-supported bridge as a replacement for the viaduct, a design that would put its deck 100 feet above ground.

      Campbell has opposed the tunnel because of its cost and fewer vehicle lanes but supports replacing the viaduct with the bridge. She said the new bridge could have the same traffic capacity as the viaduct with six lanes. A 2005 memo estimated the cost at $425 million. She said that, if elected mayor, she’ll try to get the city out of the tunnel agreement with the state “by whatever means were at our disposal.”

     The bridge “would be a signature structure, the same as the Space Needle,” Campbell says, and with the bridge, “they can still (re-)develop the waterfront.”  She thinks it can be built for $2 billion, half the cost of the complete tunnel project.

       State officials couldn’t confirm that number but said the bridge would have formed another massive presence on the waterfront.

1. Because the towers would need to be high and massive – more than 50 feet wide at the base –  “there is a shading effect along the waterfront and blockage of existing city view corridors, inconsistent with the city of Seattle plans, policies and regulations for shorelines and the central waterfront area,” Grotefendt said.

     She said the 2005 cost figure “was a rough estimate ... that just covers the structure costs and is not an apples-to-apples comparison to the $1.9 billion estimate for the SR 99 bored tunnel. For example, it does not include inflation, right of way or design. There is no up-to-date cost estimate.”

        The elevated highway briefly considered in December also would have blocked views and cast shadows. Grotefendt said, however, that it would have had a far smaller footprint, standing at a fraction of the height of the cable bridge an with fewer vertical columns. The two structures could have been staggered to reduce view blockage, and would have cost less to build than the cable span, Grotefendt said.

Larry Lange was formerly the transportation reporter for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.