The Alaskan Way Viaduct

It should come as no surprise that the engineers came to the conclusion that the viaduct cannot be saved by adding some bracing and grouting around the foundations. Afterall, that is the least costly of the alternatives. It is even less surprising that the engineers came to the conclusion that the preferred alternative is to build a tunnel. Afterall, that is the most expensive alternative.

Engineers are paid a percentage of the total cost of any project. It should come as no surprise that they skip the least expensive alternative and endorse the most expensive. To do otherwise, they would have to be saints. Or stupid.

The fix-it alternative has been pooh-poohed from day one and it is the one alternative that makes sense. It makes sense if you realize that the viaduct has been through several fairly severe earthquakes without significant damage (moving a couple of inches is not significant if you are a two mile long, fifty feet high and forty feet wide elevated roadway; these things are designed—if they are designed right—to move a little). If you look at the report that was written BEFORE the 2001 earthquake, the report that predicted that the whole thing would fall down for sure at the next tiny quake, you realize that the structure has withstood what they promised would be fatal. Simply put, the viaduct isn’t falling. Not even close. The fix-it alternative is the cheapest, surest and best alternative.

So let’s assume that it has to come down. Then the next best alternative is to not replace it. Here the proof is in the pudding. Several cities have eliminated their elevated roadways and not one has suffered the predicted dire consequences. Rather, every city that has torn down their elevated roadways report great news. But let us assume that the critics of such an idea are right when they pronounce that ‘those other cities are different; their elevated roadways went through the city’, or that they had ‘alternatives that we don’t’ or some other bullshit excuse why we can’t do the same thing here in Seattle. Seattle has shut down some streets for months, even years and some how, some way the cars found a new way around, they managed to get where they wanted to go and the swallows returned to Capistrano. When they built the West Seattle high bridge, all traffic was routed through a cow pasture path of a street with people predicting hour long commutes to and from West Seattle. But people aren’t that stupid. They adjusted, took new routes, started earlier—or later—and West Seattle is still there. Right now, they are busting up the approaches to and from the Fremont Bridge like its personal, and still the cars, trucks and buses get through. Not perfectly, but they get through.

Before you spend a couple of billions of taxpayer money, you should at least try the ‘no-build’ alternative. I would think it would be criminal not to. I’ve already used the ‘stupid’ word too many times, but it fits here, too.

Even the re-build it alternative is better than the tunnel. Don’t believe the drawings: it doesn’t have to be that big or that ugly. Don’t believe the costs either: it doesn’t have to be so expensive. Look to Sound Transit, believe it or not, if you don’t believe me. Look to what Sound Transit is building from Tukwilla to SeaTac where the light rail will be elevated. It is in these few miles, where they finally agreed to go elevated, that they are saving $200 million (though they are wasting more than $200 million on the tunnels—they are not going to come in under budget) and shaving months off of the construction schedule (though they are going to run into so many problems in the tunnels that they will never really complete the light rail). Sound Transit has put in columns every one hundred yards and then they bring in the roadway in segments which have been poured off-site and lift them into place. They draw wires through the roadway, apply tension and finish a hundred feet every couple of days. The ‘roadway’ is twenty-seven feet wide and that is three lanes of highway. “Hey! Why not build two of these roadways, side-by-side and you end up with a pretty darn graceful and smallish viaduct that can be built in months instead of years!” By separating the two roadways with a couple of feet you avoid really bad head-on collisions and let sunlight to the ground below (think of it as a two mile long skylight). If you got on the stick, you could even use the off-site concrete yard that Sound Transit is using and the forms, but that would be too smart. Even if you don’t do that, you save a lot of money.

Which leaves us with the tunnel. The Worst Alternative.

You should never sink four billion into two miles of roadway. Put it another way: “There is no one mile of your total transportation system that is so damn important that you spend $2 billion per mile.”

Then there is the billion dollar question of how in the hell you get from the Alaskan Way to the south mouth of the Battery Street tunnel? Stand at the foot of the Harbor Steps and look up at the top of the Steps and ask yourself ‘how could a truck, car or bus get from here-to-there in a quarter mile?’ Then, somehow dig a hole about twenty feet deep and then ask the question again. Then, add moisture to the roadway in your tunnel climbing from subterranean Alaskan Way to Battery Street tunnel and you are feeling--well, at the risk of being redundant—stupid. Or if you will, blazingly, totally, George Bushably, stupid.

Now, if you still want a tunnel, go Google “Major tunnel fires” and notice that every major tunnel has a major fire. They will tell you that they will forbid flammable cargo. This ignores the fact that every car, truck and van is carrying flammable cargo—it is called ‘gasoline’. They will tell you that they will have fire suppressants and equipment and blah, blah, blah because by the time that the fire happens, all those guys are dead and someone has forgotten to recharge the foam, the wires have corroded and blah, blah, blah and it’s another major tunnel fire and these things happen. Personally, I don’t want to be in a two and a half mile long tunnel when someone goes sideways and someone smashes into them, setting them on fire and a couple of others catch and explode. And I would sure not like to be the mayor that thought up this tragedy-waiting-to-happen.

Finally, I am not sure where Seattle, this country or this world is heading. But I am pretty sure that ‘transportation’ will change dramatically in the next twenty odd years and I don’t think we ought to be building four billion dollars of anything that is in response to our current problems. Better to fix-it or try to manage it without replacing or if we must replace it, do it with a little better technique than we usually do. Anything would be better than digging up the city and spending every dime we got on a tunnel.

Or maybe I’m stupid, but I doubt it.

No more lanes of traffic

The Seattle PI ended a recent editorial with “…the current assumption is that new road plans will open up new lanes and increase highway capacity.” (4/9/07)

The only thing that new lanes of pavement open is more traffic. Nowhere in the world has new lanes solved the traffic and transit problems. Each new highway, freeway, bridge or roadway is hailed as the one that will ‘solve the problem’. Think “I-90” in the late 1970’s; rebuilding the bridge wider and bigger was the promised solution to cross lake traffic. All it did was get more people to move over to the eastside, drive more and drive longer. The number of cars on I-90, 520 and even going around the lake did not decrease—in fact, they increased. And this is true whenever you increase the lanes available.

Go out and get a tattoo: “More lanes means more traffic.”

Even as a transit advocate, I am not stupid enough to think that transit can solve all of our traffic woes. You will never take a load of leaves to the dump in a bus, nor deliver a bunch of refrigerators in a monorail or rush your aged parent to the doctors in a light rail train. So while we need transit, we need traffic capacity. But rather than building ever more lanes in an ever futile attempt to ‘build our way out of congestion’, we need to understand the problem. Only by understanding the problem can we begin to tackle the issue.

First, the traffic is not as bad as it is made out to be. Traffic makes for very funny Dave Horsey cartoons, but we really are not even close to gridlock. Most of you reading this drive to work; I drive for a living. I drive a tour van. I drive most days from the north end of Seattle to the airport and back into downtown during the morning rush hour. On nearly every day, I am held up for a few minutes—but that is all. I maintain a speed of nearly fifty miles an hour, day-after-day. I listen to the traffic reports on the radio and when I-5 is bad, I take Aurora Avenue. Yes, of course, traffic is bad near Safeco Field after a game, but even then I can get out of there in under fifteen minutes (big hint: stay off the major roadways and use the alleys). Traffic in isolated areas—around the Fremont Bridge, the Husky Stadium and the Spokane Street/I-5 interchange among many—can be bad. But these are momentary, can be avoided easily and no amount of building will change them.

Traffic is simply not that bad.

Second, if you carefully note what the traffic reports tell you, you will know that the largest part—estimates are that it is 60% of the problem—are accidents and breakdowns. Now, accidents and breakdowns are not entirely avoidable (that’s why they are called ‘accidents’). But many accidents are avoidable. Many breakdowns are foreseeable. Imagine if we put the monetary effort into clearing accidents and breakdowns that we propose to building new roads? We need to examine and record all accidents—and then, go there and prevent some of those accidents! We need to see who and what is breaking down—and then, stop a few of those breakdowns!

Third, the absolute key is not building new lanes but traffic management. We have the ability to tie the traffic control system to the true, real-time needs of the cars, trucks and buses. The costs of these computer controlled traffic lights are going down, for the same reason that your personal computer costs are going down. Even at the old prices, it would be far cheaper to computerize our traffic control than to attempt to build enough lanes—and that won’t work anyway.

There is much more to traffic control than just traffic lights. We ought to be investigating, initiating and where appropriate, implementing them.

We should examine and document what is causing accidents and then direct the police to making accident reduction a priority.

Three minutes saved by improved traffic control is the same three minutes saved by clearing the freeway for three miles so that you can go sixty miles per hour.

We can change traffic for the better. I know that we can because we have—and it works. Notice how the traffic reports rarely mention the spur freeway that goes from the Everett plant to I-5? They used to mention it all of the time. Then, Boeing changed their program; every worker in that plant (and there are thousands of them) have a different start and stop time. Every minute, a different worker is let off from work. Result? No big traffic jams.

This is just one example of where a little common sense goes a lot farther than a billion dollar’s worth of new concrete.

Fourth, as a last resort, we can initiate demand management. “Demand management” is just a euphemism for “tolls” and I am opposed to “tolls” as usually done. Usually, tolls are simply charging to use the roads and that means that the poor are denied access and the rich are granted the use of the roads. Frankly, I don’t care if it is a dime: it is wrong to let some use the roads and not let others.

But there is a way: as a last resort, I would advocate for what they did in Singapore decades ago. They did not charge a vehicle for entering the city; they charged you for each empty seat as you entered the city. Full cars, trucks and so on, paid nothing. Most drivers simply carpooled up and drove in free. (Those rich people that wanted to ‘show their wealth’, paid $10 an empty seat and this was enough to pay for the toll booths, enforcement and so on.)

Studies show that nineteen out of twenty vehicles going across the I-90 are single occupant cars, but that other one out of twenty vehicles carry forty percent of the people across the I-90 bridge. We could set up tolls that only charged if you were a single driver (commercial vehicles and transit ‘dead-heading’ would be exempt). I think that very few drivers would choose to ‘drive alone’. If I am right, we would see half of the cars on the road, overnight.

One reason why traffic control, accident reduction and removal of breakdowns doesn’t get priority is that the political people don’t get to have a ribbon cutting, contributors to their campaign fund don’t get big contracts and there is something terribly sexy about building the most expensive bridge or roadway or whatever.

If you listen to the radio traffic reports there are a couple of days a year that we hear ‘traffic is light’: the days that the federal workers have off and no one else does. Federal workers are a small, but significant, number of employees in Seattle. I mention this only to demonstrate that we do not need to cut huge numbers from the traffic flow; a few cars, here and there, will do the trick. A couple of fewer accidents and a handful less of cars abandoned in the street will go a long ways. Better traffic management and control will do more than any new bridge, road or highway.

We have paved over twenty-five percent of the city of Seattle with concrete for our cars. More concrete will not solve the problem. Certainly, we can make better use of the vehicles we have on the concrete already poured. Enough with the concrete already.

Lighting the way

Footlights on Burke Gilman Trail

The Burke Gilman bike trail in Seattle’s northend is a major, significant transportation corridor, used by several thousand people a day.

It is a paved, separated biking and walking trail that leads to, and through, the University of Washington. Since it utilizes the old railroad right-of-way, it has no hills and few street crossings.

If proof of its utility is needed, look no further than the fact that the University of Washington has all of its bike parking places taken (in fact, it can’t or won’t build enough bike parking places). Look at the real paucity of bikes at Seattle University or the Seattle Community Colleges. They have the same demographics as the UW and many of the students at these campuses would welcome a chance to bike to school but there are no safe and separated bike trails to those institutions. The Burke Gilman has saved the University from being inundated with cars.

The Burke Gilman bike trail could be even better if it were lighted, especially during the winter months when we get only eight hours of sunlight. I am not talking huge street lights shining down from twenty feet above. I am calling for footlights that would illuminate only the pavement of the trail itself. First, these type of lights would not shine into nearby homes and businesses. Second, it would take far less energy to light near the pavement than to light from high above.

When I proposed this to a friend, he said that the cost would be prohibitive. I said “We light the roads—all of the roads—throughout the night and no one seems to mind the expense”.

What a great way to tell non-car users “We are thinking about you; we want to help make you safe and comfortable.”

Uber traffic circles

In Seattle, there are ‘traffic circles’ in the middle of many ‘uncontolled intersections’ where two non-arterials—side-streets—meet where there are also no stop signs or traffic lights. You must drive around the traffic circle

These traffic circles are very good. Where they have been installed, they reduce accidents by 97%.

Up on Capital Hill, between Fifteenth Avenue East and Nineteenth Avenue East, between Aloha Street and John Street, there are traffic circles, but instead of merely being a landscaped circle in the middle of the intersection, these traffic controlling breaks in the road go from corner to kitty corner, diagonally through the intersection.

These are better.

(For the nervous-nellies reading this, they leave enough room for fire trucks, cops and ambulances to get through, if a bit roughly.)

Not only do these Uber Traffic Circles slow down everyone but they virtually eliminate people driving through the neighborhood as a shortcut---as they used to. The onliest reason for driving here to go here. People can still drive home, deliveries are made, emergency vehicles can get through, but oh, what a change a few curbs, a little dirt and a couple of trees make.

Tolling SOV's

First, let’s make it clear that I am against paying to use the roads.

We paid for these roads with gas money and other taxes; we should be allowed to use them.

Worse, I would hate to see a world in which these gas tax built roads paid for by nearly all of us would be now given to those with the money to pay for access.

But having said that, there is something to be said for getting some vehicles off of the road.

So I think that it would be alright to put a toll on those non-commercial vehicles that have only one person in them—during peak hours. If you have more than one person, no charge. If you are driving during non-peak hours, no charge. No charge for commercial vehicles. Only the single occupant vehicles driving at peak hours would be charged.

Frankly, this is something that I would consider as a last resort measure. I am convinced that there are many things that we can do to relieve congestion but if we have to, we can toll SOV’s. It would work.

Nineteen out of twenty cars on the road at peak hours has only one person. If everyone doubled up, we would take nearly half of the cars off the road. Now that is congestion busting.

Telecommuting

In “Our ability to deal with the traffic could pave the way for future success” (Seattle Times guest column 8/31/07 by Sims and Gregoire points out that the predicted nightmare of traffic gridlock during I-5 construction did not happen. (For twelve days or so, they closed down three of the five lanes on Interstate 5 leading into Seattle for replacement of huge expansion joints.)

Gridlock was not avoided by people taking transit. It was avoided because people commuted smarter.

The Sounder trains may have seen an increase in riders, but even packed, they moved only 2,000 people. The problem is, I-5 has 130,000 cars and trucks a day.

Buses didn’t move many more than the trains and the extra buses became part of the traffic that remained.

Don’t bother mentioning water taxi. They do not carry even 500 people all day long and are nothing more than a boondoogle of the worst sort.

What really happened when they closed down three of five lanes of northbound freeway was that thousands—tens of thousands of drivers—either went at other-than-peak rush hour times or used one of the other ten to fifteen lanes of traffic that lead into downtown Seattle.

Let us count the lanes:

--East Marginal Way (and even West Marginal Way to Spokane Street) has two and even three lanes that are almost never full.

--First Avenue South and Fourth Avernue South both are major, four lane arterials with hardly a light or traffic.

--Airport Way South (a personal favorite of mine) is a road that you can assume there is almost never another car on it.

When I was learning to be a cab driver in Seattle (back in the days when they actually trained cab drivers to get somewhere fast and the shortest way possible) they told us not to use the freeways. They are nearly always full, may trap you in a major jam and are almost never the best way to get anywhere.

Better, a lot of commuters simply put off driving into work between 7:00 and 9:00. Some hardy souls actually came in earlier.

But this November, the voters are being asked to tax themselves to build more roads, bigger transit, extra buses, light rail to the Husky Stadium and more roads. Most of the $17 billion is for transit that will carry almost no one.

What we need to do is take care of what we have. We don’t need to build new roads; we need to repair what we have. We need to realize that we have paved 25% of the city and within all of that concrete we have more than enough for our cars, trucks and vehicles.

We cannot spend every dime we have and ever will have on trying to build our way out of congestion. We can commute smarter, drive smarter and even haul freight smarter. New York, Chicago and LA have tried to build their way out of congestion and failed. Let’s try something different. Let’s try something smarter.

Smarter commuting

In “Our ability to deal with the traffic could pave the way for future success” (Seattle Times guest column 8/31/07 by Sims and Gregoire points out that the predicted nightmare of traffic gridlock during I-5 construction did not happen. (For twelve days or so, they closed down three of the five lanes on Interstate 5 leading into Seattle for replacement of huge expansion joints.)

Gridlock was not avoided by people taking transit. It was avoided because people commuted smarter.

The Sounder trains may have seen an increase in riders, but even packed, they moved only 2,000 people. The problem is, I-5 has 130,000 cars and trucks a day.

Buses didn’t move many more than the trains and the extra buses became part of the traffic that remained.

Don’t bother mentioning water taxi. They do not carry even 500 people all day long and are nothing more than a boondoogle of the worst sort.

What really happened when they closed down three of five lanes of northbound freeway was that thousands—tens of thousands of drivers—either went at other-than-peak rush hour times or used one of the other ten to fifteen lanes of traffic that lead into downtown Seattle.

Let us count the lanes:

--East Marginal Way (and even West Marginal Way to Spokane Street) has two and even three lanes that are almost never full.

--First Avenue South and Fourth Avernue South both are major, four lane arterials with hardly a light or traffic.

--Airport Way South (a personal favorite of mine) is a road that you can assume there is almost never another car on it.

When I was learning to be a cab driver in Seattle (back in the days when they actually trained cab drivers to get somewhere fast and the shortest way possible) they told us not to use the freeways. They are nearly always full, may trap you in a major jam and are almost never the best way to get anywhere.

Better, a lot of commuters simply put off driving into work between 7:00 and 9:00. Some hardy souls actually came in earlier.

But this November, the voters are being asked to tax themselves to build more roads, bigger transit, extra buses, light rail to the Husky Stadium and more roads. Most of the $17 billion is for transit that will carry almost no one.

What we need to do is take care of what we have. We don’t need to build new roads; we need to repair what we have. We need to realize that we have paved 25% of the city and within all of that concrete we have more than enough for our cars, trucks and vehicles.

We cannot spend every dime we have and ever will have on trying to build our way out of congestion. We can commute smarter, drive smarter and even haul freight smarter. New York, Chicago and LA have tried to build their way out of congestion and failed. Let’s try something different. Let’s try something smarter.

Slogans won the war

If you ever needed a perfect example of what is wrong with local government, look no further than the Washington State Department of Transportation.

With much fanfare, they recently announced a contest. They wanted suggestions for how to do their job better. Their job, as I see it, is to move people and goods through and throughout the state. I’m sure that some consultant can come up with a better way of putting it, but their job is transportation, transit, transing in general and in particular. Moving people and things. Moving them here and there. Up and down. Across and between, without dropping anything.

I was assuming that the winning idea might be a new and more competitive bidding process. Maybe a new way of tying computers to traffic information and signaling so that we wouldn’t spend three minutes at a red light when absolutely no cars are approaching from the cross street. Or perhaps a better business model for the Ferry System, one that might produce enough revenue from twenty-two million users to pay for the boats.

But instead, the winning entry was—get ready for it—a slogan.

Why bother with delivering service or goods when you can talk your way out of it? Didn’t we beat the Germans in World War II with a really snappy slogan? Hell, if only the builders of the intercontinental railroad had had a good slogan, they could have built a train track across the country. I would have had a pretty tasty dinner, but those stupid farmers still are trying to grow things instead of coming up with a good ten word phrase that would deliver food to my table.

While it’s been five years since the quake that shook the viaduct, the Washington State Department of Transportation has done almost nothing—except pine for a slogan. The 520 bridge has developed cracks, but the DOT hasn’t developed a slogan—small wonder that they can’t move on the bridge.

Now that they have a slogan, they can really begin.

Oh, the winning slogan? I think it’s something like “The Washington State Department of Transportation: sure we’re slow and wasteful, but not as slow and not as wasteful as Sound Transit!”

Cell phones

It’s going to be pretty hard to make it a law not to drive while on the cellphone when all the cops do it. Worse, they are sometimes typing on their keyboard while driving.

The problem is, the cellphone has become an integral part of our everyday lives. Some of us can hardly function without them. Admittedly, some of the calls go like this:

“What are you doing? Yeah, I’m just chilling. Driving and chilling. Well, see you later.”

But some of the calls are actually important or even useful.

So let’s take a page from the laws already on the books. It is illegal to drink and drive, of course. What you may not know is that if you get in an accident and you are driving under the influence, you must prove that you are innocent. In other words, you are automatically assumed to be guilty until you prove otherwise.

We should expand this law to include ‘talking on the cellphone, dialing a call or text messaging.’ If you get into an accident while on the phone, you must prove that you didn’t cause the problem.

Here’s what would happen. You get a call in traffic. If it is Norm checking to see if you are indeed chilling, you either ignore it or say “Yeah, I’m chilling but I have to drive. Later” and hang-up. Or if it is something that you need to know, like your appointment has canceled or something in your schedule has changed, you have the person give you the information fast and hang-up. Or you say, “I’m in traffic. I’ll pull over in a minute and call you back.”

But it is unrealistic to think that we will ban cellphones while driving.

It is also a law that bicycles have to have a light on for night driving, but the bike cops don’t have any lights.

Fewer laws, better enforcement.

Driving less: city employee division

I finally saw a Parking Enforcement Officer—meter maid—riding a bike instead of one of those little three wheeled Cushmans. Now this is great, but let’s get more of the city employees to agree to not use cars and other motor vehicles. There is one sure way of making that happen: pay them.

The Parking Enforcement Officer that chooses to ride a bike rather than drive a Cushman or other motor vehicle, they should get a bonus at the end of the year. I would think that two thousand dollars would be a nice number. The bonus has to be high enough to amount to something and not so high as to break the city’s bank.

Are there other examples where city employees could forego the use of vehicles? You bet.

Out on Aurora, the city has posted two old-fashioned beat cops, walking between 85^th and 95^th. These cops drive over from the cop shop a few miles away at the beginning of their shifts, park the car and then walk their beats. They could catch a ride from any of the dozens of cops leaving at the same time and get another ride back at the end of the shift. (There is the added bonus that by not using a cop car to go a mile in each direction, the city would save about five thousand a year on insurance.)

Speaking of cops, the Seattle Center security boys have a cop car of their own. From the middle of the Center to the edge is about 250 yards. Why they need a car of their own is anyone’s guess. My guess? It keeps them warm in the winter.

If I see another landscaping truck driving around the Seattle Center grounds with a single garbage can in it, I am going to scream.

I would bet if you gave out Metro passes, a few judicious taxi charges—for those times when the bus just won’t do—and that two thousand dollar bonus, I bet we could really see some significant reductions in the number of vehicles driven.

Ban pay-per-ride trucking

If you are a logging truck and get a hundred bucks for every load that you deliver to the yard in Tacoma, what are you going to do?

Drive like a bat out of hell, of course.

If you get down to Tacoma fifteen minutes faster on every run, you may be able to squeeze in another run into the day. Another hundred bucks for you.

We need to outlaw ‘pay-per-run’ trucking.

There needs to be a word invented for a conviction that you know something without one shred of evidence to back it up. I am convinced that some of the worst accidents on the freeway are these truckers racing to squeeze one more run into the day. I am also convinced that even if there are no accidents attributable to truckers trying to squeeze in one more, the practice of paying per run for truckers must be abolished by law.

Closing neighborhood side streets (in one direction)

Out in Seattle’s Northgate district, they have made some of the side streets one-way. Where the side street used to lead on-to and off-of the arterial, it now goes only onto the busy street. As with the traffic circles on Capital Hill, it effectively stops people from using the side streets as shortcuts through the neighborhood and still allows for circulation.

It is cheap to install these types of changes. It is cheap to un-do the changes if it turns out that it doesn’t work. You could probably try it out with temporary signs for even less investment.

We should be trying this all over town; maybe a hundred streets. If it works, a hundred more. And if it doesn’t work, take down some of the signs. No big whoop.

rewarding non ownership of cars

Take a deep breath. Give people money for not owning a car. OK, that might be too much.

How about giving them a bus pass? Or at least a reduced price bus pass. Maybe some taxi script. Or even a coupon good for the first hundred bucks on a bike.

But let’s give something to those that take a car off the road by not owning a car.

Jackknifed trucks

I was talking with a truck driver about trucks. “We could build a truck that moved the cargo box up snug against the tractor. That would mean that there would be no more jack-knifing.”

The trucker laughed and said “A good trucker should never jack knife. I never have and never will.”

The tractor truck is attached to the cargo box with a couple of feet of room between the two so that you can make a sharp turn. But on the freeway, you never need to make a sharp turn. The truck can have a system that pulls the cargo box up snug or at least ‘snugger’ when they are on the freeway and lets the gap get bigger when you are off the freeway and need to turn sharply.

Not all truck drivers are as good as the one I was talking to. Make the trucks better, reduce the jack-knifed incidents and the freeways will be that much clearer.

Added bonus! By ‘snuging’ the tractor up to the front of the box, you would see significant gas savings—less wind resistance equals less gas. It just might be enough to get the drivers and tractor truck owners to adopt this idea.

Insurance by the day or the mile

OK, so you own a car. Fine; so do I. Let’s say that you want to cut back on how much you drive. Great; so do I. It saves gas, wear-and-tear on the vehicle and some other costs.

But there are two areas where it makes no difference.

Your insurance is largely a yearly price, with only a small reduction if you drive less. But what if it was based entirely on your mileage? Rather than paying for the year, you would pay by the mile. Every time that you start up the car, it would cost you more. Now, maybe you would think twice of driving to work or be more willing to carpool, knowing that it could save you a couple of bucks—the cost of public transit or your share of the gas money in the carpool. Maybe you would join Flexcar and use their service.

Imagine if the state tax on your vehicle was tied, not to the value of your car, but to the number of miles actually driven. Or at least, some part of the tax could be tied to the miles. Or perhaps, a penalty would be assessed for truly excessive driving of personal cars.

There are obvious problems with such a plan; it would take a while to work out the bugs But if we are serious about reducing traffic and smog and all of the rest, we have to start somewhere and probably try a couple of different fronts.

Drunk driving

The problem with laws aimed at preventing drunk driving is that they are written by sober people. If Mothers Against Drunk Drivers (MADD) thinks that installing alcohol sensors will prevent drunks from driving, they simply are not aware of the lengths that drunks will go to drive; they will simply get a sober person to ‘blow’ for them—I know, I’ve seen it when I was a cab driver sitting on Ballard Avenue at the 2:00 AM bar rush.

MADD has worked to make the penalties more severe and to some extent this worked. But now that is acknowledged to have limits. If you have lost your job, your spouse and maybe your children, jail and financial penalties are not that big of a deal. In fact, that ‘one day in jail’ is really nothing but a source of a couple of good stories. Guys at the bar will buy you a drink to hear again about your night in jail. Again, as a cab driver I used to pick up the guys from jail and they were laughing about it.

Making the penalties worse won’t work. First, juries will balk at putting people away for long periods for doing something that many of them have done on occasion. Second, as a taxpayer, I am not too thrilled with paying to incarcerate anyone for too long.

But there is a solution: take the vehicle. First offense, six months; second, a year and the third, forever. Locking up a vehicle is not very expensive for the taxpayer but very expensive for most drunks.

There are numerous arguments against such an approach and they are all bogus:

Many families have more than one car (actually, most do.); the convicted drunk will merely switch to another car. Try explaining to your spouse why they have to carpool and are greatly inconvenienced. Right after finishing reading this letter, try calmly walking into the living room and announce that you think that the family ought to ‘give up a car’.

The drunk will go out and buy another junker car. True, but that will get old real fast. And frankly, I doubt if most people would finance you if, the next time, the vehicle may be seized forever.

Drunks will borrow someone else’s car. That’s why we seize the vehicle. The law should apply whoever owns the vehicle whether it is yours, your mother’s, or a cab, bus or delivery van. You’re drunk, the vehicle is ours. I have been a professional driver for twenty years and in all of that time, I never saw a breathalyzer in any shop that I drove out of.

By confiscating the vehicles, we will have a law—not aimed at drunks (alcohol first effects your judgment)—but aimed at the people that can actually do some good. Sober friends, bartenders and others will take your keys. The drinker will argue about it, fight it but the next morning they will come and thank the person who took the keys. They saved their car.

While we are at it, we need to video tape the arrest. When this was done in one Midwest state, and the conviction rate went up to over 90%.

We need to become serious in this effort to stop drunk driving. Confiscation is aimed at the one person that can stop the drunk driving—the sober friend. Losing a car is enough of an incentive that anyone would step in and stop the drunk from driving.

Mistakes: regular, unleaded and high octane

Let’s say that you buy a house.

Let’s say that you want to change some things about the house.

Some things are easy to do and not terribly expensive. Almost as important, some decisions are easy to reverse. Some things are very expensive and once taken, would be very expensive to reverse –and in some cases, it would be impossible to reverse.

Let’s say that the lawn has been left to grow high and thick. You mow in down to a golfing green perfection. It is now shorter than a Brittany Spear commitment to soberity—and you hate it. You can wait a couple of weeks and it will be back to it higher glory and the mistake is a memory. Very little cost and no permanent problem.

Let’s say that you want a house the color of a Farwest cab but without the subtlety. You paint it a green not-found-in-nature with a red trim that clashes with it with the violence that you normally associate with some of the major battles of World War I. Now, you have shelled out at least several thousands of dollars and maybe more, and if you want to rectify the mistake, you have to bring that and more to the plate. But it is not the end of the world. It costs you money, time and you have to live with the hideous paint job but it can be undone.

Now let’s say that you come under the influence of an Evil Remodeler or worse, an average architect. They convince you that your Craftsman Bunglelow would be much better if it looked like something really cool. So you tear down the house and build something ultra modern with more glass than the sidewalk on the Aurora Bridge. This is not only expensive but nearly impossible to reverse. (You may inherit a bunch of money and rebuild the Craftsman but it will never look like an original house.)

Small stuff can be better signs (not the ones over the freeway—they’re ridiculously expensive). Even changing the timing of the traffic lights shouldn’t cost a fortune (and if it does, look into why it costs so much). If you make a mistake, it can be changed back

Stuff in the middle includes better-designed traffic circles and closing side streets that lead onto and off Aurora Avenue. It might include computerizing the whole traffic light system or putting footlights on the Burke Gilman bike trail.

I’m not sure where I would draw a line but maybe a million dollars a mile is a good number. Keep in mind that a sidewalk costs two million dollars a mile. I guess that we are looking at things that aren’t concrete.

But when you do get to the big ticket items you are talking concrete. And concrete is rarely cheap and almost never torn up and replaced with greenery. It is sometimes replaced with more concrete and more expensive concrete at that but mostly it stays there.

There are things that we can do cheaply and if they don’t work, work badly or turn out to be wrong, they can be changed back without too much pain.

There are things that we can do, pay for them with what we have in gas tax in hand and if they don’t work, we can reverse them or remove them and move on. It is never pleasant to make a mistake but it has been done and been done by better people than what we have now and we have survived. (Think of the Woodland Park Zoo: it was built in the Thirties and became one of the world’s worst zoos. The animals were in tiny, inhumane cages and miserable. It made the list of the World’s Ten Worst Zoos Then, in the Seventies, it was rebuilt and now it is one of the World’s Ten Best Zoos.)

If we build a bunch of roads, dig a bunch of tunnels, lay a bunch of track, we will spend every thing that we have—and more. If it is a mistake, we can’t undo it, we won’t have any money left to do the right thing. Worse of all, we will try to make it work.

Let’s try controlling the traffic rather than letting traffic control us.

Build bike trails

Go to the University of Washington campus and you see bikes everywhere. All of the bike racks are full. Bikes are chained to trees, railings and to each other. There are bikes in front of nearly every building.

Now, go out to Seattle Community College sites or even the Seattle University campus and you see really very few bikes. Colleges have largely the same demographic no matter what. They are populated by young people with limited incomes—Perfect Bike Riding demographic. So why all the bikes at the University of Washington and so few at the other colleges?

The answer is the Burke-Gilman Bike Trail. The U has a safe, separated and segregated bike trail and the other campuses have none.

A city will never have many bike riders until you can provide a safe and separated bike trail. They need to be several miles long, they need to go where you want to go and they need to be safe. Then you need to start connecting the trails into a system.

Painting lines and signs on the road is a cruel hoax telling people that it is safe to ride in the street. Build separate and safe trails or nothing at all. Better to be honest and just tell bikers “you’re riding in the streets and good luck to you” rather then thinking a line on the pavement is going to stop a one ton car from crushing you like a squirrel crossing the street.

Times they are a changin'

If you go to the urban planning textbooks of 1907, they are filled with horse-shit. Not bad writing or ideas, but literally horseshit. New York City had over a million horses dropping an astonishing amount of poop on the streets. All major cities hired men to pick it up, put it in wagons and dump it into the nearest water—usually the nearest river. Everyone knew that they had a problem, everyone knew that dumping it in the river wasn’t the solution and they saw no choice but to continue doing so. Afterall, they needed horses and horses needed to do what horses do. They saw no solution.

Maybe we are at the same place—sort of.

We look out on the urban landscape and we see traffic. It seems that the only thing to do is to build more roads, bridges and even mass transit. But especially more roads, parking lots and generally cover the land with concrete from end-to-end, side-to-side, up-and-down. Maybe there is another answer.

There are changes in play, coming into being and over the horizon that may allow us to not pave the world with concrete (that won’t work anyway; never has and never will).

Let’s start with the cars and trucks themselves. Even a decade ago, you expected even a new car to break down every once in a while. General Motors is now offering a ‘lifetime guarantee’; as long as you own the car, they pay for repairs. They wouldn’t be doing this if they weren’t pretty sure that the cars and trucks that they make won’t need repair very often. Expect the other makers to follow suit. Cars and trucks are just better built than even a decade ago. A used car salesman once told me that the turning point was the year 2000. Car makers simply stopped building crummy cars. (Yes, every once in a while one gets built, but on the whole, no more lemons.)

While Hummers still are far too numerous (‘one’ is ‘too numerous’), some people are buying smaller cars like the Mini Cooper, the Smart Car and even smaller vehicles. (If every car was a Smart Car, we wouldn’t be having this conversation—of at the very least, it would be very different.)

Airbags are becoming commonplace and will soon be on nearly every vehicle and then, fatal accidents will not be so commonplace. Fatal accidents cause a lot of congestion. Some fatal accident investigations close the road for five hours.

Anti-locking Brake Systems (ABS) are becoming more standard and accidents are less frequent.

Mercedes Benz is working on a car that simply steers-and-brakes itself to avoid all accidents. It will not take over the process of driving the car—unless you are heading into an accident. Benz engineers report that the test drivers hate it: “they try to hit each other and the cars won’t let them. They get very frustrated.”

This is not to say that there won’t be any accidents; their numbers are going up. But soon the number of accidents, their severity and consequences will be going down.

Figure that nearly every car will have a camera recording your driving in five years. Insurance companies will demand it. It will stop thieves and end the legal wrangling over ‘who hit John?’ Ever-present cameras will simply force some of the really bad, horrible drivers off of the road—they won’t be able to get anyone to insure them.

At the same time, Global Positioning Systems (GPS) will be on every car. (Hell, GPS will be installed on practically every thing you own that is worth more than a few thousand dollars.) The GPS will take all of the fun out of being an auto thief. Better for traffic control, it will mean that you will never be truly lost again. More important, when traffic does get bad, it will offer meaningful options. Not merely alternative roads and routes, but the average speed, real time estimates on time saved and so on. Even if you have never driven in Orange County, you would be given a real alternative to the freeway to get you through.

Meanwhile, our transportation needs are changing.

Finally, some bosses, a few companies and even a union or two are coming to the understanding that not all of us work best from precisely 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. A few brave souls are—gasp—letting their workers set their own start-and-stop times. Some people work best if they are at their desk when the sun comes up. A few are better if they sleep in and work later. Some even work best at night. A few bosses are beginning to understand that it is best to let people set their own hours.

Boeing has a huge plant in Everett. Each and every worker has a different start-and-stop minute. No more traffic jams, no more traffic and Boeing loses no down time as one shift leaves and another comes in. As each person arrives, they blend in with the team already at work.

Newsweek reports that by 2009, 27% of us will be telecommuting. Some us arrive at work at 9:00 and spend the first hour answering phone messages and emails and so on. You could do that from home and drive into work at 10:00 when there is hardly any traffic.

Even on the construction side, things are changing. High Performance Concrete costs a lot more (basically concrete with a more precise mix of materials) but is twenty percent lighter and forty percent stronger. Fiber carbons may be incorporated into construction. Measurements are more accurate and that means that the road can be better and last longer. Most importantly, some engineers are beginning to understand that we need to do a lot more pre-cast of concrete parts, brought to the site and snapped together. In Vancouver, they built an eleven mile elevated concrete trackway for the light rail in fourteen months using pre-cast methods. Here in Seattle, Sound Transit saved $40 million per mile by building pre-cast elevated track between Boeing Field and SeaTac over the old pour-the-road-on-the-ground old school.

Even mass transit is undergoing changes.

Everywhere there are thinking people, there are people who understand that in order to move at any kind of speed worth talking about, your mass transit vehicle must be up-and-off the ground. Magnetic levitation (maglev) can move at something like 350 mph, but it must be on an elevated track. They have built one in Shanghai that goes to the airport and they may extend it. The monorail is successful where it has been built. There is a monorail built from Haneda Airport to Tokyo and several years ago they moved their one billionth passenger with no accidents, no fatalities and not one unscheduled stop on the tracks in over forty years of operation. And reportedly, they make a profit. Even buses can be elevated and automated as VAL has done in Lille France.

If you get up-and-out of traffic, you can beat the car. You can also automate, which in turn means that you can make money (drivers are seventy-five percent of the cost of operating any system).

There is a growing understanding that the farebox is one of the least profitable parts of any mass transit. I used to drive a bus from downtown to the airport. The bus company contracted with an advertising firm to ‘wrap’ the bus with ads. Those ads brought in five thousand dollars a month. That one ad paid the bus drivers’ salaries.

King County here in Seattle has one hundred million riders per year and anyone who has attended business school in the past ten years will tell you that you should be selling these captive people something. Someone, somewhere in some mass transit agency will figure this out. Seattle Tacoma International Airport has 35 million visitors a year and they sell them $350 million of food, drinks and services.

New York City got all new bus shelters by letting someone sell ads on the side of the shelters—and the advertising company cleans them, too.

You can make money moving millions of people; you just have to want to do it, is all.

Back in the 1970’s, there was a cry of “Infrastructure Crisis!”. The greatest concern were the pipes—pipes that bring water to us and pipes that carry sewage away. The cost of digging up al of those pipes, replacing them and reburying them was astronomical. Then someone remembered that the Navy had come up with a solution to their old pipes on their ships. What they did was insert a plastic-like lining into the old pipe. The new sleeve adhered to the inside of the pipe, water or sewage flowed through and it was like a new pipe.

I am wondering if we might make some small changes that accumulatively would allow us to travel but without the staggering bill.

I am beginning to wonder if Seattle and the rest of America isn’t making a mistake spending a couple of trillion dollars of tax money on an infrastructure that was built for a different time and a different way of living, working and traveling. It would surely be worth looking at before we committed everything we have in an attempt to build us out of congestion when the entire picture may change while we are working on the problem. The problem is, when we get done—and it will never truly be done—we just may stand back and ask ourselves just why we spent all of this money. And our children will have to pay the bill.