AVW thoughts and a question

I would guess that the overwhelming majority of working West Seattle residents leave that part of the city each day to go to their job. Many of them take Metro buses that use the Alaskan Way Viaduct to get there - the most environmentally friendly option short of cycling. With the demolition of the AWV under the Boulevard solution (I'll go along with the euphemism for now), these commuters would be forced into an even longer commute. These are the good-faith, do-the-right-thing, ride-the-bus folks (along with the folks who can't afford cars or who don't want to pay to park), who will be adding hours to their commute each day. These are citizens of Seattle from an area that gave the monorail its strongest support at the polls.

Can you please provide me with a better reason for purposely reducing highway throughput than the "I told you so about the monorail" explanation? This is dishonest - the people most affected by the loss of this road are the people (folks in Ballard and West Seattle) who supported the monorail the most. I agree that less automobile trips in the city is an important goal, but a realistic alternative needs to be in place for commuters before their current method is destroyed. Drivers will "look for alternatives to cars" and find nothing that doesn't get stuck in Seattle traffic.

The monorail was a great idea, but it is now dead. There is not any rail-based solution on the table for the western side of the city that I know of. The solution most often mentioned is bus rapid transit, which is road-based. Relocating all routes that currently use the AWV to access First through Sixth Avenues (main workplace destinations) onto Alaskan Way means that bus commuters will need to add another ten to twenty minutes of walking time each direction, unless this boulevard highway is going to have exits and clear bus access up the hill to downtown.

It is often mentioned that the destruction of the AWV and replacement with a surface road will open up the city and reconnect downtown to the waterfront. I smell a rat and condo developers, but I am willing to concede that -- since nobody will rebuild a double decker highway in the city -- there are interesting possibilities for the reclaimed urban space, and it could really improve the waterfront area. However, this space will only come alive if it is truly accessible to pedestrians. The four lane truck and trailer thoroughfare you speak of sure sounds nasty, and if I were a tourist (or even a Seattleite who worked downtown and thought about popping down to the waterfront for lunch), I sure would be put off by the highway that I had to cross to get there. I'm picturing Aurora north of the Battery Street Tunnel. I also cannot imagine what it would be like to access the car ferry terminal if Alaskan Way suddenly became the highway.