Geoff Carter 3 August 2009 Seattle 2,303 views One Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

There is a magnet on my refrigerator that was furnished to me by representatives of the now-defunct Seattle Monorail Project in 2003. It’s a “free ride ticket,” good for one trip on the Ballard-to-West Seattle Green Line on “opening day: December 15, 2007.”

Part of me believes that the ticket still valid. Part of me believes that if I were to take it off the fridge and walk the five blocks to the corner of NW Market St. and 15^th Ave. NW, I would find a glistening elevated train station straight out of some “Fifth Element”-like alternate reality. There, I could redeem my ticket for a high-speed trip through Queen Anne and downtown, and ultimately over the new eight-lane surface street that had long since replaced the decaying Alaskan Way Viaduct. And in this dream-state I’m wearing a suit made of thousand-dollar bills, and I’m sitting next to Seattle mayor and burlesque superstar Miss Indigo Blue, who’s about to be granted a lifetime term by popular acclaim.

But the depressing reality is that the monorail never came close to being built, a Viaduct replacement is still years away, and the powers-that-belittle have just laid down a proposal that effectively guarantees that I’ll never visit West Seattle again. The same milquetoasts that allowed downtown real-estate interests to kill the Green Line – including Greg Nickels, who continues to be Seattle’s mayor despite a passel of viable burlesque-dancer candidates – have graciously rolled over for those interests again, this time signing off on a bored-tunnel Viaduct replacement that will remove Highway 99 access from the Elliot /Western corridor. Come 2015, the only way that Ballardites will be able to access Highway 99 is by trudging up the two-lane 46^th St., by cutting through Fremont to 39^th, or by making an unconscionable run on the Red Rover line that is the Mercer Mess.

The plans for the viaduct tunnel, recently published by the newly paperless Seattle PI, are science fiction at its most extraordinary. They call for a bored tunnel 200 feet under Belltown, and crossed fingers that the next major earthquake won’t occur until the digging is done. They are dependent upon mass transit systems that don’t yet exist, in particular the RapidRide bus transit service that’s somehow supposed to get full funding while Metro faces one of the worst economic shortfalls in its history. And the plans boldly claim that the Viaduct can continue to operate without disruption for the next seven years, which is … well, it’s Vegas, isn’t it? An unstable, earthquake-damaged piece of infrastructure can remain in use for another seven fate-tempting years, while tunnel-boring machines 54 feet in diameter poke along the Seattle Fault Zone under tons of buildings, vehicles and people. I would take those odds if the very idea didn’t scare the hell out of me.

But really, this is all about Seattle sticking it to Ballard, once again. What did we ever do to those ten-dollar martini-swilling, empty streetcar-building ingrates? Does Seattle envy our abundance of rough-and-tumble bars, our private waterfront stretch of the Burke-Gilman trail and our intoxicating lutefisk aroma? It’s impossible to say. All I know for sure is that once more, the City of Seattle has engineered Ballard into isolation – which makes me wonder why they wanted Ballard to be part of its political gridlock in the first place. All in favor of electing a burlesque dancer as Ballard’s new mayor and starting over, say aye.

- Geoff Carter