Jan 05, 2009 06:08 pm
by Scott Schrantz
Photo from Flickr user vision63
Most people that advocate tearing down the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and leaving it torn down, point to one example as why that’s the best thing to do: the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco. The Embarcadero was a big ugly concrete wall that ran along part of San Francisco’s waterfront, a double-decker monster that almost looks like it was forged from the same blueprint as the Viaduct. After the structure was damaged in the 1989 earthquake, the city made the decision to tear the freeway down and replace it with a wide boulevard. Now the city’s waterfront is opened up, with no barrier separating it from downtown.
Sounds a lot like what the proponent of the “surface” option for the Viaduct are talking about, with all the same benefits. That’s why the comparison is brought up so much, like again this week in James F. Vesely’s opinion column, and at the Seattle Transit Blog. But one thing they always overlook, or fail to point out, is that the Embarcadero was a turkey not only because it was so ugly, but because it didn’t go anywhere. It was part of an aborted plan in the 1950s to criss-cross the city with freeways, a plan that was killed shortly after construction started. This plan would have had three major freeways cutting through downtown, and the Embarcadero was supposed to have connected the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate all the way along the waterfront. This never happened. The Freeway Revolt made sure that project was cancelled, but not before concrete had been poured on a one-mile section of the road. When the rest of the freeway was killed, the builders just built a couple of ramps and dumped traffic off the Embarcadero and onto city streets, effectively creating a dead end freeway.
For the next 30 years this freeway to nowhere existed, useful only to a handful of people. Through the 80s proposals were put forth to demolish it just because it wasn’t needed, but that handful was very vocal, so it wasn’t until after the earthquake, and the costs of repairing it versus demolishing it were weighed, that a decision could be made.
The difference between that and the Viaduct is that the Embarcadero only moved cars from one part of downtown to the other. One commenter called it an on-ramp for the Bay Bridge. The Viaduct moves cars through town, cars that have no intention of having anything to do with downtown. So it’s a lazy comparison, one that’s easy to make an emotional argument out of (“Look how much prettier San Francisco is now!”). But Highway 99 is a bypass, a road that removes through traffic from the city and puts it somewhere out of the way. Bypasses are important in keeping traffic moving. In a lot of towns in the West, these bypasses can be on the outskirts and go around town. Carson City is finally building its bypass after 50 years of planning, and it skirts around downtown far to the east. Seattle doesn’t have that luxury, because of the water and the hills, so the bypass has to go over town. And Seattle, like most major cities, needs two bypasses to effectively funnel all the traffic. Removing one of them can’t be an option.
How is an on-ramp to the bay bridge – which takes cars out of the city – not a bypass?
You don’t make a lot of sense.
Not only was the embarcadero a bypass – it was meant to take people from north of the city to the bay bridge without routing them downtown- it connected to marina and bay street.
Any attempt that can be made to break the comparison is misguided. You can come up with a thousand reasons why the viaduct is special but you’re wrong on each one.
The Embarcadero took a larger state road and pared it down as a localized bypass to get beyond downtown. It has its analog in the elevated portion (compare with AWV), high capacity avenue (compare with Aurora) and links to the state road system (compare 101 with SR99). It also included a link to I-80, similar to the southend links to 90/5. Traffic volume was similar as well, 100k+ a day.
The “bypass” argument falls flat, especially considering the lack of priority people give it. It’s sufficient if used to keep the AWV up through downtown for the 2-5min savings, but if we promoted an actual bypass in the form of a bridge or tunnel from West Seattle to Magnolia (doable, easily, and not all that expensive, considering), people would scream and whine about it.
I agree with Andrew on this one. There are other examples of freeways that were torn town without the predicted traffic nightmares ever coming to fruition. But the Embarcadero is special because it really is almost identical to the AWV.