Doing Away with the Alaskan Way

The Governor has said the Alaskan Way Viaduct must be gone by 2012. The DOT is whittling ten options down to three. From those, the governor will give her "recommendation" from the short list, and then it will, presumably, go to a vote.

This new article shows some travel time data for the different options. Interesting within this is that a range of travel times, from short to long are provided for the tunnel and boulevard options, but only one time given for the new viaduct option (presumably the shortest.) (Does CNU smell some bias?) Either way the differences they site amount to little more than ten minutes, from 35 to 45 minutes. Whats ten minutes to the airport when compared to an accessible waterfront and a more transit oriented city?

On that note, another interesting feature of this article is the other predictions for the different options. Notably, "daily transit trips to, from and within the city center will dramatically increase, from 196,000 to as many as 305,000 by 2015 if one surface option replaces the viaduct."