Hominid Views

My vacation plans take me to Albany, NY later this week. It seems that the area has suffered something of a catastrophe a few of days ago when the Dunn Memorial Bridge, that connects Rensselaer County to Interstate 787 and the Empire State Plaza in Albany, partially collapsed. Here is a picture from a local TV station:

Needless to say, the highway has been closed, and there are no estimates on when the bridge will be reopened. The closure is expected to cause major traffic snarls in the Albany area, particularly for State employees, many of whom rely on the bridge for their commute to the Empire State Plaza, the main State government campus. There is talk of staggering work times for State employees.

The relevance to the Seattle area is obvious. The Dunn Memorial Bridge was built in 1971; the Alaska Way Viaduct (AWV) was built in the late 1950s. Dunn was inspected a couple of years ago and rated a 5 out of 7 for safety. The AWV has had widely recognized safety problems since the Nisqually earthquake of 2001. The Albany area rarely has earthquakes. . . .

The one bright spot in this is that nobody was injured or killed in the Albany incident. If the upper section had fallen, it my well have brought down several lower sections of the spiraling structure (three such sections are visible in the photo), and ultimately fallen into the Hudson River. Alas, one section “just” shifted by several feet.

Will Seattle be so lucky when (not, if) the AWV fails? Let’s hope so, because the Viaduct is a double-decker structure, a collapse of one section could result in a chain reaction, leading to the deaths of hundreds of people. Even a partial collapse similar to that in Albany would result in traffic mayhem in Seattle. Interstate 5 would pick up the majority of the 100,000 plus vehicles that use the roadway on a daily basis, contributing to what is already one of the worse traffic problems in the nation.

There is good news and bad news for the AWV. The good news is that the Legislature finally showed some courage and passed a transportation package that included major repairs to Washington’s transportation infrastructure. Additional good news is that the Federal government just kicked in $220 million to help replace the aging structure.

The bad news is that the biggest chunk of the transportation legislation is under attack by the initiative process. Initiative 912, in particular, would repeal the gas tax increase, leaving an enormous hole in the Washington State transportation budget. If this happens, Washington will likely lose the federal dollars, as well. As a worse case scenario, passage of I912 will result in the needless deaths of hundreds of motorists.

Perhaps I am being slightly alarmist about the AWV. What is undeniably true, but less “concrete”, are the other hundreds or thousands of deaths that will result if I912 passes. The prioirty for the new gas tax revenue is safety improvements all over the state. Without that revenue, many of the safety improvements will not be made.

People will die if I912 passes—people whose deaths otherwise would have been averted through safety improvements.

Keep that in mind, as well as the Dunn Memorial Bridge, this fall when you vote on Initiative 912.