Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Rebuild the Viaduct?

So the powers that B currently argue about replacing the highway equivalent to the Kingdome: the Alask Way Viaduct. The state says: we'll give you money, but only if you promise to replace it with a road of the same or greater capacity. But is this wise? Should we encourage more traffic or less? Should we construct another $millions/mile stretch of road that promotes air and water pollution (through ever-increasing toxic storm water runoff)? One that would further block views of the water?

Shouldn't we have enough knowledge and courage to determine that building more roads does not solve the problem of demand? Is rebuilding the viaduct, even one that is a tunnel, just more of the same? Or will we suffer without one?

Your thoughts?

1 comment:

The Red Queen said...

I say knock the whole damn thing down. Building new roads does not decrease traffic, but increases it. They had a similiar problem in SF a few years back and decided to just remove it and not rbuild. What they got was more traffic dispersement but not more congestion.