By: Robert Cruickshank, Sierra Club Seattle Group
The Sierra Club is part of the Move All Seattle Sustainably (MASS) Coalition, a coalition of multimodal transportation and climate advocates dedicated to creating a carbon-neutral, equitable, and livable city for all. These changes are often seen as too big or too hard for Seattle to undertake. But “Viadoom” showed that it is not only possible, it may also not even be that difficult.
The closure of the Alaskan Way Viaduct was hyped as a potential traffic disaster that Seattle would have to endure for three weeks. Instead we saw more people on transit and bikes, and a blessedly quiet downtown. The twenty buses Metro added turned out to be much nicer than the 90,000 cars that formerly streamed across our waterfront and up Aurora Avenue.
We could take this all as a pleasant surprise, and not look back. But that would mean missing critical insights about what our policy-makers often fail to consider. Viadoom turned out to be a wildly successful experiment in how to reduce emissions, improve mobility, and better our quality of life.
The facts are clear. Ninety thousand cars “disappeared”, and overall traffic volumes fell throughout the region. Those disappearing cars represent real people who chose to change their behavior— not just for a couple of days, but for the full duration of the viaduct closure. The predicted traffic nightmare on freeways did not materialize.
More people used buses, thanks to temporary bus lanes, additional bus service, and extra water-taxi service from West Seattle, where use tripled. It is likely that bus delays remained relatively stable or may even have improved on certain routes. The number of people walking and biking to work increased dramatically.
Viadoom just gave us the blueprint on how to reduce climate emissions from transportation. Right now, emissions from transportation account for more than half of Seattle’s greenhouse gas emissions, and those emissions are growing. Although Seattle’s transit use has grown dramatically, overall traffic volumes have been increasing over the last few years. With this highway shutdown, we saw a real reduction in regional traffic, which translates into a real reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Expanding transit, biking, walking and rolling infrastructure while reducing the number of traffic lanes is not only necessary, but also viable.
But the major lesson of Viadoom is that we should not fear making dramatic changes. People are flexible and will use the infrastructure provided, even on short notice. The MASS Coalition calls on the City of Seattle to swiftly implement policies that would make these changes happen and make them last.
Imagine how many people we could get to work efficiently if downtown commuters all knew they had fast, dedicated bus lanes and safe and complete bike routes to work. Viadoom showed us that—if policy-makers can muster the will to lead us there—we can have cleaner air, quieter and more pleasant streets, a safe climate, and all get where we want to go.
Photo by Adam Miller on Unsplash