Local governments do it all the time: start popular new projects while ignoring upkeep. This time, Seattle and King County took it to the point of shutting down South Park's vital bridge, shafting a neighborhood that lacks political clout.
The big bus agency has got two big problems: nowhere near enough money to meet goals, and a political system that sabotages wise allocations of service. A task force is meeting, but so far it's more PowerPoint slides than real debate.
The Alaskan Way Viaduct project runs through a part of today's SoDo district, an area radically transformed by early development of Seattle. The conclusion of a two-part series examines how the viaduct and the 520 bridge projects will create engineering problems and rich opportunities to learn about history.
The 520 bridge expansion crosses an Indian burial ground, and the Viaduct replacement in SoDo has dug up artifacts from early boom-town Seattle. Here's a two-part preview of what we could learn from our two transportation mega-projects, and some of the cultural challenges they face.
Tim Burgess is leading the effort to put names on Seattle's unnamed alleys, or at least figure out how to do it and what it will cost. Mossback's head is swelling.
New evidence appears for how costs are escalating and deadlines are stretching way into the future of light rail in the region. And there' a new consumer of the light rail Kool-Aid: Mayor McGinn.
Mayor McGinn is one of the few who grasp that our plans for the Alaskan Way Viaduct and 520 are symptoms of a failure to contend with an underlying regional disease: growth for its own sake.
There is more trouble in the regional sandbox. Seattle Mayor McGinn has weighed in against a long-term transportation plan heavily favored by other municipalities and elected officials.
War, terrorism, the great recession? Sure. But the past decade also taught us a new understanding of the physical systems that support our metropolitan regions.
A relic of the Cold War past lies under I-5, a public haven where Seattleites could wait for the end of the world. With space for only 200 people, the shelter would have had us dying to get in, or at least competing to win at atomic "Survivor."
Mayor McGinn makes his case for changing the planned Highway 520 bridge replacement to accommodate a possible light-rail line from the start. That proposal faces rough going in a region tired of hearing Seattle's concerns.
"When the work's all done, Washington will be left with exactly what it had before: A functionally obsolete, fracture-critical 58-year-old bridge that could come crashing down the next time it gets smacked hard enough in the right place."
HERALD (EVERETT)
City Council rebuffs Mayor McGinn on some transit plans
The battle escalates as an editorial writer takes aim at free bikes. Is the problem here that "members of the modern carriage trade... get annoyed at the proletarian peddlers getting in the way of their chauffeurs"?
Following an analysis for the Center City Connector project, Mayor McGinn said streetcars are the best way to improve north and south travel in the city center. There will be an estimated 8,000 extra commuters downtown by 2030. Streetcars would be a more cost-effective way to transport them, McGinn said.
PUGET SOUND BUSINESS JOURNAL (SEATTLE)
All those Car2Go glitches drive a Portlander crazy
There are seven low-clearance bridges measuring 14 feet 6 inches throughout Washington that are "fracture-critical." This means they could collapse if just a single beam were broken. There is no state law to post bridge clearances unless they're below 14 feet 4 inches.
SEATTLE TIMES
Skagit bridge revives the debate over the transportation bill
Some push for more spending on repair and infrastructure, as opposed to pet new road projects and transit. The new transportation secretary issues an odd email, touting transit.