New Plans for Viaduct Replacement Detailed

An elevated highway, a park, shops and offices, a pedestrian-friendly place where cars can bypass downtown Seattle two stories above ground.

According to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, there are currently eight plans to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct.  Prominent amongt them is a goody-bag approach set forth by Speaker of the House Frank Chopp.

Speaker of the House Frank Chopp’s idea for replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct, he said Tuesday, is ” a way of including everybody’s bottom line.”

There have been long arguments over whether to replace the viaduct with a tunnel, another elevated highway or remove it altogether and disperse the traffic to other streets and into buses.

Chopp’s ambitious idea, not yet given a price tag, would replace the viaduct with a mile-long, four-level structure open to retail space on the first level, offices on the second, highway lanes on the third and a park on top.

If anyone knows more about this plan or has links to the plans please let us know and we will post the links.

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One Response to “New Plans for Viaduct Replacement Detailed”

  1. This was a little disingenuous of the paper to describe it as a new proposal. The Stranger broke the news weeks ago, and even then, it wasn’t really new – it was just one of the options we (and others) covered at the last Viaduct briefing a month and a half ago. Here’s the WSB report on that briefing:
    http://westseattleblog.com/blog/?p=10776#more-10776
    Later, we posted the link to the sketches from the briefing:
    http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/43270230-F9BF-42DA-8BC8-7FD6FDE311A5/0/AWV_SAC_IntegratedandTrenchUpdate_Presentation_Sept08.pdf