You know those jokes about construction workers just standing around? Washington’s Department of Transportation just put up a timelapse video on YouTube of what they did over the weekend that will make you feel pretty lazy in comparison. SR 520 was closed from 11 p.m. Friday night until 5 a.m. Monday morning, and one of the projects WSDOT worked into the bridge inspection was the installation of an 11-foot-diameter culvert beneath all lanes of SR 520 just west of I-405. (The fish say thank you.)
The weekend passes in one minute, forty-eight seconds, and the action is non-stop. I give it five stars, even if the race-against-time setup feels a little predictable.
U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo Martinez, who, before vilification begins, it must be noted kept the Sonics lease-breaking argument out of arbitration, dismissed yesterday a lawsuit brought against Washington State’s construction of a new SR 520 bridge. The lawsuit claimed that Washington’s Department of Transportation hadn’t conducted adequate review of alternatives before settling on a 6-lane expansion of the floating part of the bridge (growing to 12 lanes, counting on- and off-ramps, at Montlake).
“Our analysis was thorough and exhaustive, and we hope that the ruling by Judge Martinez puts an end to the debate about mobility improvements to this vital corridor,” said state Transportation Secretary Paula Hammond. With the court’s decision, WSDOT can continue with construction of SR 520 improvements as planned and funded.
Small caveat: all the SR 520 improvements aren’t funded. The state is still searching for more than $2 billion of the $4.65-billion project, so that the floating bridge portion can connect to Montlake. So, financially at least, a huge caveat.
The verdict was not particularly surprising: WSDOT has been aggressive with its timeline for the bridge construction, which has the effect of creating a sunk investment if the project is delayed or halted. Opponents of the bridge’s expansion have had difficulty bending any “ears of power.” In this economic climate, few are interested in taking the political hit sinking the mega-bridge would require. Besides, beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars already spent, many voters still believe extra lanes necessarily equal improvements in traffic flow.
Still, this is a sobering finding for anyone who thinks that an environmental impact review would lead to outcomes that impact the environment less. The Coalition for a Sustainable 520 had plenty of arguments to make on that score (the Montlaker blog summarizes a few of them for you), not least the much-remarked-upon improvement in traffic flow that has come from tolling the existing 4-lane bridge, and the mostly-ignored requirement to define how an expansion would fit with state’s goals to reduce greenhouse gases.
In Judge Martinez’s view, the option of a tolled, 4-lane, “transit-optimized” bridge deserved consideration didn’t come into the question of “improving the mobility of people and goods across Lake Washington in the SR 520 corridor.” (Here is where Sightline’s now-29-part series on the decade-long plateau (and actual decline) in traffic volumes around the state makes good reading.) Thus, the final environmental impact statement could compare WSDOT’s 6-lane preferred alternative to doing nothing at all–and nothing else–and still present the “reasonable alternatives.”
The conclusion, that there are no reasonable alternatives to the preferred alternative, has a strikingly Politburo-esque tone. As does the rationale used to eliminate the tolled 4-lane option: The toll cost would impact the poor, and divert traffic to I-90. (WSDOT argues that it is fine to do both of these things if you are funding a megaproject.) Sound reasonable?
You know who doesn’t care about the new SR 520 tolls? Microsoft Connector passengers. Or, rather, they no longer have to care. When I asked Microsoft’s Lou Gellos if the Redmond-based company anticipated a boost in ridership of their private transit system, now that the 520 bridge is being tolled, he chuckled and said they’d already seen an increase: back in April, when the tolls were originally planned to go into effect.
Actually, I was displaying my own ignorance by asking the question. I was wondering if Microsoft Connector was prepared for a big ridership bump, but after consulting the Connector’s latest fact sheet, I found that the private transit system is nothing but ridership bumps. The number of routes provided has grown almost 500 percent in its three years of existence.
Established in September of 2007, Microsoft Connector had five routes and was expected to carry up to 1,000 passengers per day. By 2009, it was “one of the largest company-owned employee bus services in the U.S.” Fast forward to October 2011, and there are 22 routes driven by 65 buses, with capacity for just about 6,000. The express bus service is only for full-time Microsoft employees, who can ride it for free.
Microsoft says it’s had 14,000 unique riders–they know because employees make reservations for their trips, which helps Microsoft achieve a 43-percent-full rate across all its routes. (The company has some 40,000 employees in the Puget Sound region.) More importantly for congestion, 10,000 of those 14,000 took the Connector as an alternative to their single-occupancy vehicle. That’s over 2.1 million trips saved over three years, says Microsoft, understandably proudly, with fuel savings of $4.2 million.
Besides their very attractive “free” pricing, the coaches double as mobile workstations, coming with plugins and WiFi, and by all accounts conversation often takes a back seat to the tapping of laptop keys.
Microsoft employees are also offered free ORCA passes, and van pools, and car pools. (Registered van pools are also exempt from tolling.) There’s even a bike shuttle that will take bicycles across the bridge, 12 at a time, more than will fit on the front of a bus.
The only thing I can manage to be critical of, in all this, is that left out of the Connector equation, still, are contract employees. There are no contract bridges to Redmond, so they get there the same way as anyone else. As it becomes clearer that Connector is much more than a perk, but also a productivity driver and environmental low-impact statement, you hope that Microsoft will revisit the question of who rides, even if it’s not for free.
Comparison of old and new bridge footprints (Image: WSDOT)
There are two substantially different rationales that Washington’s Department of Transportation has advanced for its choice of a new, larger 520 bridge across Lake Washington. First, the existing bridge is unsafe, vulnerable to earthquake and wind. Secondly, the 1963 bridge was designed to carry a maximum of 65,000 vehicles per day, and today carries up to 115,000 (but not speedily.)
While I don’t think anyone is arguing the first point, it’s jarring then to see WSDOT’s projections for the new bridge show vehicle traffic not reaching 100,000 per day again until 2032, and topping out around 118,000 by 2052. This is not to disregard time savings, but at a cost of $4.65 billion, to wonder if there might be a better way of achieving them.
Why would so much traffic divert? Tolls. As Mike Lindblom reports for the Seattle Times, WSDOT’s financial projections call for some 48 percent of existing traffic to seek other routes, thanks to $3.50 Good to Go tolls on the bridge during peak hours (that’s $5.00 if you haven’t signed up with Good to Go). The tolls are supposed to increase 2.5 percent annually until 2017, at which time they will increase 15 percent.
WSDOT has to be hard-nosed with these projections, which differ from previous estimates, because they are being used to secure investment funding. It makes sense for them to reassure conservative investors by saying, essentially, “Look, even if only half the people who currently use the bridge pay the tolls, we still raise enough money to pay you back.” (Mention of Tim Eyman’s Initiative 1125, which would likely sink tolling plans completely is absent from the financial study.)
That said, as they define the space of possibility to include such a drastic diversion, it does make you wonder what the bridge-driving taxpayers’ return on investment will be.
As every story on the bridge’s construction will tell you, $4.65 billion is so much money that the project is still missing $2 billion. Back in 2010, the Legislature authorized funding of up to $2.62 billion for the 6-lane bridge, and a 6-lane connector to I-405 at its east end. The bridge is supposed to open in 2014.
Seattlepi.com summarizes the incremental-build result for you: “That means a six lane bridge would link up with the same four-lane configuration that exists now between the lake and I-5, which some fear will only add to bottlenecks west of the shoreline.” (“Some,” I think in this case means anyone who has spent more than five minutes thinking about it.)
People in that latter group are the Coalition for a Sustainable 520, and their attorney David Bricklin. The group filed suit in U.S. District Court in Seattle on September 2, naming WSDOT and the Federal Highway Administration, and declaring that the project’s Final Environmental Impact Statement includes:
…a failure to include all reasonable alternatives in detail; a failure to adequately describe the existing environment; a failure to adequately describe the significant adverse environmental impacts of the project; a failure to adequately analyze measures to mitigates the project’s significant adverse environmental impacts; and a failure to describe the project’s unavoidable significant adverse environmental impacts.
An email from the group adds:
The state has applied for shoreline permits for the entire 520 project, not just the partial bridge that has been approved for construction. These permits cover the areas near us: Portage Bay, Union Bay, the Montlake cut area, and near Madison Park/Laurelhurst. In general, the state plans to harm these areas, and to provide compensating mitigation further away…on the Cedar River, in Magnuson Park, uplands near Union Bay.
We believe that the environment near us should not be damaged this way. It is already quite stressed enough, and further stresses could tip it over the edge. So we want mitigation to be right in the area.
