Is Seattle the odd man out?

Last week’s news was a bit of a shocker in the region, as Washington State went through its primary election. Voters seemed to be bludgeoning incumbents, from rural port commissioners through to mayors of significant municipalities. As Jeff Mapes put it, it was a bad day for incumbents. The biggest upset, however, was the defeat of Seattle mayor Greg Nickels. Nickels came in third behind two challengers, neither of which have significant histories of political leadership. Seattle Transit has an interesting piece on how this might effect transit issues.

More interesting, however, is the take from outside the region, especially this one from Richard Layman:

“From the perspective of generally doing good things, such as with transportation and green policies, he’s been at the forefront of “goodness” nationally, although there were occasional failures during his tenure. And is the Alaskan Viaduct issue the #1 matter that got him “fired”? (I’d say yes, the reality is that as much as people talk about public transportation in Seattle, the reality is that most people who can drive, because of the distances involved–it is a spread out region–and because for the most part the transit system is based on buses, which aren’t that comfortable a ride, especially for long distances.)”

For those who have not been following the drama, Alaskan Way is a double deck highway viaduct along Seattle’s waterfront, carrying old Highway 99 through the center of town. It is similar in many respects to the old Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco. The structure is aging, and is seismically questionable. For the last couple of years, Seattleites have been arguing over what to do about the situation, with proposals ranging from replacement, conversion to surface street running, or tunneling it. The latter is now the preferred option of the Washington State Department of Transportation. Despite protestations that the matter is now settled, however, the public is not necessarily done voicing their opinions on the matter. If Layman is right, they may have just voiced it in the ultimate way, to Greg Nickel’s expense.

Seattle is bookended in the region by two metropolitan areas whose commitment to transit is significant. Here in Portland, we will have over 65 miles of high capacity transit when the MAX Green Line opens on September 12th. To Seattle’s north, Vancouver just opened up 12 more miles of SkyTrain, bringing their rapid transit system to 43 miles. Seattle? Seattle just opened its first light rail line, making it twenty or more years behind either of its neighbors. The city has a notorious reputation for conflating bigger with better; as writer Stewart Holbrook put it,

“The idea is always a Bigger and Better Seattle. I think the two adjectives have merged in the Seattle mind, and now mean the same thing.”

If Holbrook is right, then why has Seattle taken so long to get into the transit groove?

When Portland had to face the future of it’s waterfront expressway, it didn’t replace it with a new road, viaduct or tunnel… it replaced it with a park.

The answer may, perhaps, lie with the Alaskan Way viaduct, and how Seattle is dealing with it’s aging. The notable cultural phenomenon that both Vancouver and Portland share (but Seattle does not) is a rejection of freeways.

In Vancouver, with the exception of a short segment of the Trans-Canada Highway, no freeway passes through the city, and absolutely none run into or through downtown. Instead, the freeways terminate in the suburbs. The result, as author Douglas Coupland notes in City of Glass, is that Vancouver is “a weird city… where getting from anywhere to anywhere involves complex routes and many stoplights.” To address transportation needs, the city instead started building SkyTrain, an elevated heavy rail transit system, with the first line opened in 1985.

In Portland, meanwhile, the city famously rejected the Mount Hood Freeway in 1974, and utilized funds leftover from the cancelled project to alter I-84 and make room for the construction of the Pacific Northwest’s first light rail line, opened in 1986. Just as notable, the city removed the waterfront Harbor Drive expressway in the late 1970s, and replaced it not with a new alignment or a tunnel (though both were considered), but with a park.

In Seattle, however, the debate continues to be what to replace Alaskan Way with, not whether it is needed at all. When Portland was faced with this conundrum, it turned its back on the freeway concept entirely; it was a watershed moment in the city’s history of embracing public transit. Today, Seattle has an opportunity to have it’s own watershed moment. Is Bigger, Better Seattle finally mature enough to embrace the modern, transit city concept? Or is Seattle still, despite its size, living in the 20th century? What the city does with Alaskan Way may be a litmus test on the matter.