TCC, Feet First, and Cascade’s Letter on the Waterfront Alternatives

Tiffany Von Arnim (Flickr)

BY FEET FIRST, TRANSPORTATION CHOICES COALITION, AND CASCADE BICYCLE CLUB

Together, we believe that a waterfront rebuilt postviaduct is an opportunity to shape the city into a more sustainable, safe, vibrant, accessible, and connected destination for people of all ages and abilities.

While we stand by our original comments on the previously published DEIS, we would like to respond to new information in the SDEIS. Our earlier comments commended the City for its work towards the creation of new public space and easy walking and biking access between downtown and the waterfront. At the same time, we collectively urged the City to maximize transit reliability along the southern portion of Alaskan Way while exploring ways to reduce the excessive number of lanes in this area, helping provide a safe and pleasant experiences for people walking and biking.

Although initial analysis in the DEIS projects less congestion on the newly designed Alaskan Way corridor, research suggests that expanding the number lanes on Alaskan Way could inherently stimulate travel demand, resulting in the same amount of congestion. We understand your model forecasts demand and travel time, suggesting additional lanes to theoretically improve congestion. However, widening roads typically leads to immediate growth of vehicle miles traveled on a corridor. This induced demand has the potential to negate all planned benefits of additional roadway capacity, which eventually will not accommodate the entirety of predicted increased travel demand. We cannot build our way out of congestion. Instead, the city should build for the waterfront experience we want today, investing in proven travel demand management initiatives to increase the number of people who take the bus, walk, and bike. We again urge the City to use multimodal LOS standards to measure the success of a corridor, prioritizing the movement of people and goods instead of only the movement of vehicles alone.

The SDEIS presents a new alternative for the southern portion of Alaskan Way Corridor that reduces pedestrian crossing distances at several crosswalks. While we appreciate the City's responsiveness to requests to reduce rightofway width and improve nonmotorized connections between downtown and the waterfront, we are disappointed that this alternative sacrificed transit reliability to do so.

We believe that the Alaskan Way Corridor should provide safe, reliable, comfortable, and pleasant transportation options for all users. Crossings in this area should be designed to encourage easy travel between the newly developed waterfront and Pioneer Square, one of the fastest growing neighborhoods in Seattle. At the same time, the limited road space that we have should be allocated to modes that move the most people in the most efficient way possible, helping the City meet its climate and sustainability goals. Rather than analyze two alternatives that pit transit against walking and biking, we urge the City to develop an alternative that maintains transit priority and commits to Vision Zero safety standards.

Transit Priority in this Corridor is Essential

• After the SR 99 tunnel project is complete, Metro will need a fast, reliable transit pathway for buses to and from downtown Seattle to replace the connection provided by the Viaduct.
  • As of 2016, approximately 600 daily bus trips carrying about 24,000 weekday transit riders from Burien and West Seattle neighborhoods use the Alaskan Way Viaduct and the Columbia Street and Seneca Street ramps.
  • Use of the RapidRide C and D Lines continues to grow significantly each year. Since extending the C Line to South Lake Union and the D Line to Pioneer Square on March 26, ridership has jumped again (26 percent and 21 percent respectively) compared to the same period last year.
  • With more than 200 stadium events each year (and perhaps more in the future), transit reliability could be greatly affected without priority through this corridor.
  • Delays and congestion through this corridor would deteriorate service reliability, not just for southwest Seattle riders, but also for those also traveling on connected bus corridors to northwest Seattle communities such as Ballard, Queen Anne, and Interbay.

• Vision Zero commits Seattle to design streets emphasizing safety, predictability, and reducing the potential for human error
  • A goal in Seattle's Vision Zero plan is to transform the waterfront by ensuring safe travel for people walking, biking, and driving. The mixing of vehicular traffic, transit, pedestrians, and bicyclists on Alaskan Way will be significant. Many pedestrian collisions occur downtown. With the investments being made to the Waterfront, this will become a regional destination and the number of people in this area will significantly increase. We therefore recommend the following design changes:
    • Data driven pedestrian safety enhancements like leading or lagging pedestrian intervals, protected turn phases, elimination of dual turn lanes, signal improvements, and no turns on red are needed.
    • Reduce Alaskan Way speed limits to 25 mph.
    • Pair speed limit reductions with tools like radar speed signs and street design changes.
    • As mentioned above, access for transit through lane allocation and signal timing is critical throughout the corridor. However, transit spot improvements must also increase pedestrian safety with careful attention to transit stop and nearby station access.

We believe that the City can and should develop an additional corridor alternative that prioritizes the safety of people walking and biking, while maintaining reliable trip times for transit. Therefore, the FEIS should include the following:

• Reduced speed limits to 25 mph, and related safety suggestions listed above (for all alternatives)
• Reduced lane widths to 10 ft for general purpose lanes and 11 ft for regional transit lanes (for all alternatives). NACTO design guidelines, which have been endorsed by WSDOT, state that general purpose lane widths of 10 ft are appropriate in urban areas and have a positive impact on a street's safety without impacting traffic operations. For designated truck routes, one travel lane of 11 ft may be used in each direction. This alone could help reduce crossing width.
• An evaluation of at least one additional alternative that addresses both transit reliability and pedestrian comfort and safety. This means a commitment to working with the Port to achieve freight access, mobility and movement objectives in the Alaskan Way corridor set out in the memoranda of agreement, without compromising transit speeds or pedestrian needs between King and Yesler. This could involve the removal of a General Purpose lane in each direction and one of the ferry queuing lanes, using the money saved instead on demand management tools or a shared freight/transit lane during peak periods only.

While we also appreciate recent proposals to "futureproof" design so that the rightofway can be narrowed later to reflect reduced future demand, we prefer to do the right thing now making efficient use of our infrastructure, by focusing efforts on reducing the demand on our transportation system. Any transportation project of this scale should inherently be "futureproofed" during the planning and design phases of project development. We believe it makes little sense to build a $300 million rightofway only to retrofit the street at a later date because we designed and built based on outdated policies.

This historic project should set an example of how the City invests in safe, accessible, and inviting places for the people who live, work, visit, and play in Seattle.

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Shefali Ranganathan, Executive Director Transportation Choices

Elizabeth Kiker, Executive Director Cascade Bicycle Club

Lisa Quinn, Executive Director Feet First