A City’s Waterfront: A Place for People or Traffic?
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
The New York Times
October 25, 2006
Urban Outlook
A City’s Waterfront: A Place for People or Traffic?
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
SEATTLE
THE din along this city’s waterfront does not come only from the procession of cars and trucks on the Alaskan Way Viaduct, an elevated highway over Elliott Bay that carries more than 105,000 vehicles a day. It also comes from the tumultuous civic dispute over a multibillion-dollar repair project involving the highway and the shoreline.
In February 2001, Seattle was struck by the 6.8-magnitude Nisqually earthquake, which severely damaged the 53-year-old viaduct and the seawall holding it up.
Everybody agrees that the seawall must be rebuilt, at a cost of roughly $1 billion. But in the nearly six years since the earthquake, the debate over what to do about the highway has grown more complex. Assertions by traffic engineers about the highway’s central place in the region’s transportation network — it carries a fifth of Seattle’s north-south traffic — are colliding with new ideas about building a waterfront park above a six-lane tunnel, replacing the viaduct with a new one or building a park and a boulevard with no shoreline highway at all.
The argument reflects the shifts that are occurring as American cities invest in infrastructure to become more economically competitive. Seattle is the latest city to weigh the value of replacing a 20th-century symbol of driving efficiency, designed to serve cars, with parks and boulevards, designed to enrich the human experience.
“Imagine our waterfront without the noise, blight and dirt from a nearby elevated freeway,” wrote Greg Nickels, Seattle’s mayor, in a 2004 article in The Seattle Times. “Imagine walking along the waterfront and actually hearing the words of the person next to you, or hearing the cry of a seagull and the splash of the waves instead of rush hour.”
Essentially, Seattle has three options.
One proposal, preferred by the speaker of the State Legislature, is to build a new and bigger elevated highway for about $3.3 billion.
Another proposal, backed by the mayor and the City Council, is to build a six-lane tunnel, a shoreline boulevard and a waterfront park for about $5.5 billion, a plan supported by several of the city’s most influential business and neighborhood groups.
The population of Seattle, about 573,000, and surrounding King County, about 1.8 million, is growing fast. Demographers and economists expect downtown Seattle to add 56,000 new residents and 69,000 more jobs by 2020. “The city’s proposal for the Alaskan Way Tunnel is a three-for,” said Grace Crunican, director of the city’s Department of Transportation. “The tunnel meets our transportation needs. We get a new seawall. And we get our waterfront back.”
The third idea, pursued by a citizens’ group, the People’s Waterfront Coalition, is to tear down the old highway, build a waterfront park and smaller boulevard, increase transit service and modernize existing streets.
The coalition’s proposal is based to some extent on the success of other cities, particularly San Francisco and Portland, Ore., which have replaced highways with waterfront parks and transit investments, and generated population gains and new economic vitality in neighborhoods once divided by highways. The coalition emphasizes one more point about its proposal — its cost, which is under $1 billion.
“The question before us is, Can an American city voluntarily get rid of a moderately significant link in its transportation grid?” said Clark Williams-Derry, 38, research director at Sightline Institute, a research center in Seattle, who helped the coalition refine its proposal. “Can it be done politically? Can it be done substantively? What’s clear is that it can be done substantively.”
When it was opened in 1953, the 2.2-mile-long viaduct represented the country’s economic development priorities, providing drivers efficient routes from the central city to growing suburbs. Similar shoreline freeways were built in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Cleveland and other cities.
But in the early years of the 21st century, Seattle’s old wall of concrete has come to be viewed as a barrier to the city’s quality of life. The viaduct has been accused of various civic offenses, including separating residents from easy access to natural resources, especially a spectacular shoreline.
“No one in the civilized world would build a double-decker freeway now on their beautiful waterfront if they had a good choice, which we do,” said Sally Bagshaw, a lawyer, downtown resident and co-author of a report describing various plans for replacing the viaduct with a tunnel and waterfront park.
But what Ms. Bagshaw calls a no-brainer is viewed as a potential calamity by many merchants in Pioneer Square, the historic section of Seattle close to the viaduct. “The people I know aren’t ready to swallow a tunnel,” said John Siscoe, who owns the Globe Bookstore, citing cost overruns and delays experienced during Boston’s $14.6 billion tunneling project known as the Big Dig. “Oh, boy, what a mess we would be buying. Of all the options, we should forget the tunnel.”
Yet as city and state leaders argue over whether to build a tunnel or a new viaduct, the idea of doing neither seems to be gaining credence as the experiences of other cities that faced similar turning points are brought into the discussion. Cleveland is replacing the western section of its Memorial Shoreway, along Lake Erie, with a boulevard that is intended to spur development. Buffalo is debating whether to build a boulevard in place of its elevated Skyway along Lake Erie. Washington is considering demolishing its elevated Whitehurst Expressway to link Georgetown to a new park along the Potomac River.
Milwaukee has already done so. The city spent $45 million to tear down the East Park Thruway in 2003, restored the street grid beneath it and freed up nearly 20 acres of land on the north side. “The hardest part was convincing people that the highway wasn’t needed,” said John Norquist, a former mayor of Milwaukee and now president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a design and planning group in Chicago. “What happens is that traffic, for the most part, redistributes. Drivers have brains. They find other ways to get around.”
Cary Moon, an engineer and planner who directs the People’s Waterfront Coalition from her downtown Seattle apartment, said that regardless of what is built, the viaduct would be coming down. For three or four years, there will be no highway at all along the waterfront. Seattle’s traffic management plan calls for new transit service, improving streets, installing street signals and encouraging people to find alternatives. The city’s plan is similar to the one proposed by Ms. Moon’s group. “We’re going to find out that’s all we really need,” she said.
October 25, 2006
Urban Outlook
A City’s Waterfront: A Place for People or Traffic?
By KEITH SCHNEIDER
SEATTLE
THE din along this city’s waterfront does not come only from the procession of cars and trucks on the Alaskan Way Viaduct, an elevated highway over Elliott Bay that carries more than 105,000 vehicles a day. It also comes from the tumultuous civic dispute over a multibillion-dollar repair project involving the highway and the shoreline.
In February 2001, Seattle was struck by the 6.8-magnitude Nisqually earthquake, which severely damaged the 53-year-old viaduct and the seawall holding it up.
Everybody agrees that the seawall must be rebuilt, at a cost of roughly $1 billion. But in the nearly six years since the earthquake, the debate over what to do about the highway has grown more complex. Assertions by traffic engineers about the highway’s central place in the region’s transportation network — it carries a fifth of Seattle’s north-south traffic — are colliding with new ideas about building a waterfront park above a six-lane tunnel, replacing the viaduct with a new one or building a park and a boulevard with no shoreline highway at all.
The argument reflects the shifts that are occurring as American cities invest in infrastructure to become more economically competitive. Seattle is the latest city to weigh the value of replacing a 20th-century symbol of driving efficiency, designed to serve cars, with parks and boulevards, designed to enrich the human experience.
“Imagine our waterfront without the noise, blight and dirt from a nearby elevated freeway,” wrote Greg Nickels, Seattle’s mayor, in a 2004 article in The Seattle Times. “Imagine walking along the waterfront and actually hearing the words of the person next to you, or hearing the cry of a seagull and the splash of the waves instead of rush hour.”
Essentially, Seattle has three options.
One proposal, preferred by the speaker of the State Legislature, is to build a new and bigger elevated highway for about $3.3 billion.
Another proposal, backed by the mayor and the City Council, is to build a six-lane tunnel, a shoreline boulevard and a waterfront park for about $5.5 billion, a plan supported by several of the city’s most influential business and neighborhood groups.
The population of Seattle, about 573,000, and surrounding King County, about 1.8 million, is growing fast. Demographers and economists expect downtown Seattle to add 56,000 new residents and 69,000 more jobs by 2020. “The city’s proposal for the Alaskan Way Tunnel is a three-for,” said Grace Crunican, director of the city’s Department of Transportation. “The tunnel meets our transportation needs. We get a new seawall. And we get our waterfront back.”
The third idea, pursued by a citizens’ group, the People’s Waterfront Coalition, is to tear down the old highway, build a waterfront park and smaller boulevard, increase transit service and modernize existing streets.
The coalition’s proposal is based to some extent on the success of other cities, particularly San Francisco and Portland, Ore., which have replaced highways with waterfront parks and transit investments, and generated population gains and new economic vitality in neighborhoods once divided by highways. The coalition emphasizes one more point about its proposal — its cost, which is under $1 billion.
“The question before us is, Can an American city voluntarily get rid of a moderately significant link in its transportation grid?” said Clark Williams-Derry, 38, research director at Sightline Institute, a research center in Seattle, who helped the coalition refine its proposal. “Can it be done politically? Can it be done substantively? What’s clear is that it can be done substantively.”
When it was opened in 1953, the 2.2-mile-long viaduct represented the country’s economic development priorities, providing drivers efficient routes from the central city to growing suburbs. Similar shoreline freeways were built in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Portland, Cleveland and other cities.
But in the early years of the 21st century, Seattle’s old wall of concrete has come to be viewed as a barrier to the city’s quality of life. The viaduct has been accused of various civic offenses, including separating residents from easy access to natural resources, especially a spectacular shoreline.
“No one in the civilized world would build a double-decker freeway now on their beautiful waterfront if they had a good choice, which we do,” said Sally Bagshaw, a lawyer, downtown resident and co-author of a report describing various plans for replacing the viaduct with a tunnel and waterfront park.
But what Ms. Bagshaw calls a no-brainer is viewed as a potential calamity by many merchants in Pioneer Square, the historic section of Seattle close to the viaduct. “The people I know aren’t ready to swallow a tunnel,” said John Siscoe, who owns the Globe Bookstore, citing cost overruns and delays experienced during Boston’s $14.6 billion tunneling project known as the Big Dig. “Oh, boy, what a mess we would be buying. Of all the options, we should forget the tunnel.”
Yet as city and state leaders argue over whether to build a tunnel or a new viaduct, the idea of doing neither seems to be gaining credence as the experiences of other cities that faced similar turning points are brought into the discussion. Cleveland is replacing the western section of its Memorial Shoreway, along Lake Erie, with a boulevard that is intended to spur development. Buffalo is debating whether to build a boulevard in place of its elevated Skyway along Lake Erie. Washington is considering demolishing its elevated Whitehurst Expressway to link Georgetown to a new park along the Potomac River.
Milwaukee has already done so. The city spent $45 million to tear down the East Park Thruway in 2003, restored the street grid beneath it and freed up nearly 20 acres of land on the north side. “The hardest part was convincing people that the highway wasn’t needed,” said John Norquist, a former mayor of Milwaukee and now president of the Congress for the New Urbanism, a design and planning group in Chicago. “What happens is that traffic, for the most part, redistributes. Drivers have brains. They find other ways to get around.”
Cary Moon, an engineer and planner who directs the People’s Waterfront Coalition from her downtown Seattle apartment, said that regardless of what is built, the viaduct would be coming down. For three or four years, there will be no highway at all along the waterfront. Seattle’s traffic management plan calls for new transit service, improving streets, installing street signals and encouraging people to find alternatives. The city’s plan is similar to the one proposed by Ms. Moon’s group. “We’re going to find out that’s all we really need,” she said.
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