Godzilla meets the Arboretum

Allied Arts threw one of its highly enjoyable Beer and Culture events last week, and the topic was what to do about the expanded 520 bridge as it comes crashing through the Arboretum. There's a design challenge for you. The event, for which I was panel moderator, revealed some interesting developments in this ongoing saga. First, I got the distinct sense that the current leading idea, the Pacific Interchange, has been quietly taken out behind a wall and shot. If so, we are back to square one on this bedeviled project. The Interchange is an idea cooked up by some Montlake residents, and it takes a lot of the traffic of 520 and puts it about 100 feet in the air, hovering like a kind of space station over the Arboretum islands and lagoons. Traffic, instead of threading slowly over the Montlake bridge, gets diverted to the Husky Stadium parking lot and comes crashing through Montlake to the south. This peels the traffic off east of the big snarl at Montlake, and cuts down the number of new lanes you have to build west of Montlake. But it's a huge eyesore, hated by the Arboretum folks as well as the UW. But how to kill it? Mayor Nickels continues to pretend that the issue doesn't exist. Some City Councilmembers, pleased that Montlakers actually proposed a solution (rather than just blocking plans), have liked the Interchange. Microsoft, the big driver for a solution with as many new lanes as possible, also likes the Big Ugly. Given that, the execution had to be done quietly, and it looks as if it has been accomplished. Whodunit? We'll only find out in the last act (20 years from now), but I have the main suspect. Hint: think Siwash. The best idea I heard of what to do next, short of a $12 billion tunnel from Danish diggers, came from Lyle Bicknell, a senior urban designer at City Hall. Make it pretty, he said, noting how lovely is the arched little footpath across Arboretum Drive (carrying a sewer pipe, incidentally). Build a parkway that blends in with nature, Bicknell suggested. Slow down the traffic to 40 mph, to make it quieter, safer, and with narrower lanes. Landscape the parkway, as with the lovely Merritt Parkway in Connecticut, blending it into the Arboretum. Bicknell, noting who designed the Arboretum, said he was guided by this question: "What would Olmsted do?" Sen. Ed Murray was on the panel, and he pleaded with the City to start dealing with the issue by putting resources into planning and helping the affected neighborhoods to get used to the idea of change. As things are now going, Murray predicted, the state is going to get fed up with the usual Seattle dithering, impose a solution, anger everybody, and send the whole mess into 20 years of litigation. Murray is right. City Hall, with the honorable exception of Councilmember Richard Conlin, has been so focused on the Viaduct wars that it has let the far more explosive issue of expanding 520 turn into our next "Afghanistan."