Re-engineering Transportation
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Abstract
In what sounds like a throwback to the epic freeway boondoggles of the 1960s, Seattle will brutalize one of America’s great urban lakes with a $4.65 billion plan to replace the earthquake-vulnerable Evergreen Point Bridge. The existing bridge never won beauty contests, but its planned replacement is more than twice as wide, running well above the mountain-ringed Lake Washington on much larger, obtrusive pontoons (figure 4.1). It then broadens to the width of an airport runway as it hacks through the arboretum, a crown-jewel park, and paves over a hunk of Portage Bay, a beloved inlet that provides a watery setting for the University of Washington. As it dumps more cars on the overburdened city streets that serve the forty-one-thousand-student university, the plan bowdlerizes a gracefully arching street bridge with a second replica span. The Evergreen bridge, a key link between Seattle and Eastside suburbs, will pour more traffic onto Seattle’s gridlocked I-5 backbone and the Eastside’s jammed I-405 beltway.