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Nobody seems to want to talk about the real problem with the Viaduct,
which is that it leads on the north to a dead-end freeway at Green
Lake and on the south to a dead-end freeway at Burien. In short, you
can't get to it except by a maze of surface streets that keep most
North-South travellers (most of us) from trying. Today the Viaduct serves only those fortunate few who live on the feeder streets of Aurora from NE 95th St to downtown. If you're lucky enough to live in Magnolia, Green Lake, Phinney Ridge, Queen Anne, or Ballard -- most of the wealthier neighborhoods in Seattle -- then you love the Viaduct, because it zips you to or past downtown and back without having to actually deal with any traffic, while the rest of us sweating proletarians stress it out on I-5. It seems like the whole idea of the Seattle road system is to keep I-5 traffic away from the 99 corridor, without any convenient way to get across and really share the roads. So I-5 gets sclerosis, while 99 users enjoy a free way home and to work. Snobs like Cary Moon argue that complete sclerosis is the best solution to our traffic problems: everyone must be forced to simply get off the roads, because they are impassable, the more so the better. That doesn't work for most of us, who lose a significant fraction of our lives commuting through inefficient highways. In fact it is offensive, if my children have to give up quality time with their father for your snobbery. Up yours, rich white pig. My message is that there is a better way. Imagine that God Himself came to the Seattle City Council and said, granted, you have the worst traffic problems in the universe, but now I'm going to give you a brand new freeway from where your congestion starts on the north all the way out of town to the south. If that happened, wouldn't you begin to believe? I am not God, but I have a realistic, affordable, and democratic alternative, which recognizes that the problem with the Viaduct is not its existence, or its altitude, but its inaccessibility. If the 99 corridor could be made an equal-access corridor to I-5 travellers, not just for the few who live in the right place to have their own private freeway to downtown, then wouldn't that be the greatest good for all of us? Minimal changes could gain us a huge improvement in the system's capacity through improved accessibility and therefore full utilization of the 99 corridor. What are those changes? The changes I think are minimal are mostly on the North, because as it turns out, Seattle already has the necessary freeway system on the south end. This extra freeway even has the right name: 99. If you have taken 99 southbound from downtown, then 99 crosses the Duwamish River on the 1st Avenue Bridge, you may have noticed that 99 suddenly (surprise!) changes its name to 509 (Where did 99 go?!...) and if you just keep going like everyone does, you end up in Burien, or past it on another dead end freeway, still miles and miles away from I-5 and wherever you were going. On the other hand, if you exit after the 1st Avenue Bridge on the Duwamish River, and loop around underneath, you will find yourself at the entrance of a whole, entire, beautiful, gorgeous, and almost completely unknown and unused Four Lane Freeway, which travels south-southeast along the river and conveniently merges back to I-5 just before Southcenter. The people who know about this mystery freeway are mostly truck drivers at the Port and a few people in West Seattle. It is always empty. In both directions, even at the most snarled traffic hours of the day. I want to see a transition overpass and a sign labelled "99 Thisaway" between 99-509 and 99-along-the-river, but what we have is already better than nothing. Our problem on the South end is mostly already solved. We also already have the problem solved from Green Lake all the way through downtown and to the south. It's also called 99. Duh. Can you imagine, building six or eight lanes of added new freeway for through-travellers to get through downtown Seattle? What it would cost? The political headaches, the nightmares? The monorail which recently failed was nothing compared to this. If you had to create the 99 freeway and the Viaduct from scratch today, it would be hopeless. But it is a gift to us from our forefathers, and it is our job is to conserve their achievement and to make it better for our children. What is left to achieve this, what I think we really need, folks, is simply a connection for I-5 travellers from the North to reach 99 and the Viaduct, from the beginning of the snarls (which start most often around the NE 85th/NE 80th St. exits from I-5). We can do it easily. We can simply re-purpose about 1.5 miles of roadway, making a four to six lane connecting route, following the course of the present surface streets of NE 80th St. from I-5 to Aurora, and from there on Aurora Ave to NE 74th St. Fancy ideas from tunnels to viaducts, regular ideas like a normal freeway, and minimalist ideas like converting the crossing roads into one-ways while disabling crossing traffic, can all hugely improve the efficiency of this route, making the north end of freeway-99 directly accessible. The minimalist approach is to simply make NE 85th St into a westbound one-way road, and NE 80th St. into an eastbound one-way road, with stop lights removed and crossing disabled from the local cross streets. Small cost, big impact. Then once everyone can really use the Viaduct, we'll see then whether everyone likes the idea of tearing it down. I think the snobs whose property values will be enhanced, whose condos were built overlooking it, or whose fancy neighborhoods are inconvenienced by easier access from the south, will certainly continue to stand up for Cory Moon's bad, snobby, terrible idea. And they'll work to stop this idea too, especially once they figure out that accessibility (the idea you must remember) and rebuilding (what everyone Else is talking about) are related like dominos. But the rest of us will love it, and use it, like it was meant to be, a freeway system built for all of us.
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