Despite the tight display of smiles, handshakes and relief among the politicians Tuesday, the proposal to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct with a deep-bore tunnel under downtown Seattle has plenty of loose ends.
Still, nearly eight years after the Nisqually earthquake damaged the aging, elevated span of Highway 99, and after so much bitter political fighting, this solution is worth pursuing.
Some think it has more red flags than a Beijing military review, and we share that concern. It is, on top of other issues, the most expensive option available, at $4.2 billion. The state would cover $2.8 billion, with the city of Seattle, King County and perhaps the Port of Seattle chipping in the rest.
The state already has $2.4 billion dedicated to the project, and the rest of its share could come from tolls, though they mustn’t be so high that they divert much traffic to already congested I-5.
King County would consider a 1 percent car-tab tax to fund increased transit, needed because the tunnel would have less capacity than the current elevated structure. Car-tab taxes rile people like few others, though. Rather than fueling a potential tax revolt, perhaps waterfront property owners, whose views of Elliott Bay will improve substantially with the viaduct gone, should be asked to pay a greater share than appears to be under consideration.
The tunnel idea came back from the dead just a few weeks ago, suggesting that it’s a half-baked compromise. Indeed, the 2-mile-long, 54-foot-wide tunnel is only 1 percent engineered, so it’s hard to have confidence in cost estimates. That’s another reason why tolls — which are not a transportation panacea but do make sense on megaprojects like this one and the Highway 520 bridge — should be part of the funding package.
One huge point in favor of a deep-bore tunnel is that the existing viaduct could stay open during construction, keeping people and commerce flowing. The current span carries more than 100,000 vehicles a day, and billions of dollars of goods each year. Shutting the route down for years while a new viaduct was being built was never an attractive option. Neither was a surface-street alternative, which would have slowed this major north-south corridor to a crawl.
So get the environmental study, soil sampling, engineering and other preliminary work under way. In the meantime, refine the funding formula. But keep moving. The existing viaduct isn’t getting any sturdier, and no one knows when another earthquake might bring it down prematurely — and tragically.
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