Floating Bridge and History

The Bellevue City Council has approved the eastern part of the SR 520 Floating Bridge replacement. We call it the Evergreen Point Bridge and sometimes the sinking pontoon bridge.


The Bellevue approved side has six lanes and lots of room. We talked about it last time. Car pools will be able to go from Medina to Redmond.

Seattle has been looking at the other end. The western end of the bridge connects to Montlake. Seattle is concerned. The new mayor has noticed.

The three proposals (see http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/Projects/SR520Bridge ) are A, K, and L. You can watch simulations with the annoying new age music.

All three options include six lanes. Two general purpose and one HOV lane in each direction. Plus shoulders and a bike/pedestrian path. They also include a lid over I-5 and a couple more lids. That means covered roadways with parks on top for all you country folk who are not used to big cities.

The main differences are: Option A has an interchange at Montlake Blvd. with a new drawbridge parallel to the existing one. It’s called a “bascule” or something. It’s a drawbridge. Odd words don’t improve the concept. Option K moves that whole interchange east and uses a tunnel under the Montlake cut. Option L avoids the tunnel but adds a new bascule (drawbridge) over the Montlake cut.

All three options will require quite a bit of work on the north side of the Montlake cut. That’s because there’s a university there with under a dozen sports venues. Everyone has to get to class and/or ball games at certain times so it takes lots of roadway.

In case you don’t know what a Montlake cut is here’s how it came about.

Way back in the old days when Newcastle was a coal mining area Lake Washington ran out at Renton into the Black River, Duwamish, and then into Elliott Bay. Lake Union was inaccessible to ships at the time. Both lakes are remnants of the ice ages and quite deep. However their drainage was not deep enough for commercial navigation even way back then. I remember it well.

Seattle had two major industries back then. One was timber and the other was coal. Both required large capacity shipping to reach lucrative markets such as California. Imagine: California bought our stuff for lots of money. Now they’re broke.

The shipping docks were in Seattle on Elliott Bay. That’s still a major shipping port and one of our challenges even today is moving the goods close enough to the port to load on ships. But that’s another story.

Transporting timber from the hills and coal from the mines to Elliott Bay was a costly proposition. Coal from Newcastle came down to Lake Washington via trams. It was loaded onto barges for the slow trip to Montlake. At Montlake it was again loaded onto trams for the trip to Lake Union. After the barge ride across Lake Union it was loaded onto rail cars for the short trip to Elliott Bay. Then it was loaded onto cargo ships to be distributed to places like San Francisco. All that loading and unloading seemed excessive as well as expensive. At Elliott Bay the cost of a ton of coal had already increased 50%. By 1880 The Washington Standard estimated that more than 500,000 tons of coal had been exported from Seattle in the previous nine years. That’s a lot of loading and unloading.

Traveling out of Lake Washington via the Black River to get to Elliott Bay was a bad option and unreliable. The south end of the lake was shallow and swampy. Kind of set the stage for the Renton we know so well today.

Thomas Mercer proposed a navigable passage between Lake Washington and Puget Sound in 1854. His proposal is the route eventually chosen via Montlake to Shilshole Bay. He even suggested the lake in between be called “Union” as it would be a key link in the proposed waterway. As punishment they named Mercer Island after him.

Around 1860 Harvey Pike dug a ditch through Montlake to permit passage of logs. The Pike Place Market, Pike Place, and Pike Street are named after him. Pike was into logging and naming stuff.

After a many years of back and forth the Ship Canal project was finally approved in 1910. Seattle’s mayors randomly opposed and supported the project somewhat as they do today with major transportation projects. History repeats itself all over again.

The Corps of Engineers built the Ship Canal linking the two lakes to a dam and lock near Shilshole in 1916. It was named after the General in charge, Hiram Ship Canal. No, no, no, the structure was named the Hiram M. Chittenden Locks. Some of us call it the Ballard Locks because frankly Hiram’s name is kind of long.

After construction a temporary dam holding back Lake Washington was breached lowering the water level nine feet. The Black River in Renton nearly dried up.

The Cedar River was changed to empty into Lake Washington and the Green/Duwamish flow was greatly reduced since that water was now going through the Ship Canal. Very few people remember these things but today in Renton the area near the sewage treatment plant is still called the “Black River.” Some people think it’s because of the sewage plant. It’s not. Sometimes history plays its own little jokes.

The big impact was the disruption of salmon runs. That’s another story. Today we’d never be allowed to build anything that would have a major impact on salmon.

OK, so now we have a nice deep shipping channel that allows some fairly large ocean going boats and ships to reach Lakes Union and Washington. In 1963 the highway department builds a floating bridge across Lake Washington south of the Montlake cut. The University of Washington is north of the cut. To get to a Husky game you need to use the Montlake Drawbridge. See the issue? When a big boat requires the bridge to open the football traffic gets backed up to Bellevue.

Now in 2010 we have Option K for replacement of the floating bridge with its UW tunnel that goes under the cut. It comes up near the sports venues. No more backups when the old Montlake bridge opens. The new backups will be because the new light rail station has taken over the parking lot.

Oh, wait. Very few large boats use the cut any more. Mostly its private sailboats with tall masts that require a bridge to open. It takes a lot of moxie for one lone dude to just slide up and require the drawbridge to open and back up traffic for miles in every direction. But tunnels cost more money.

We’re not done. Seattle wants to make the HOV lanes dedicated to transit only. They’re also saying it should include light rail tracks in preparation for future expansion. The point is apparently to discourage more vehicles coming into Seattle. If more people need to get to Seattle they should take transit, is how the argument goes.

Too many cars and too few parking spaces in Seattle. Take the bus. Ride the rails. Bike to work. Free Willy. All slogans trying to get us to leave our personal heaps in our own home parking areas.

OK, done. I got my ORCA pass and downloaded the bus schedule to my iPod so now I should be Good-To-Go. I just don’t have any idea why I’d want to go into downtown Seattle.

Today’s edition took a lot of research and time. Some of the historical stuff came from serious people who actually try to get their facts straight. So I want some appreciation. If you read this you might have learned something you didn’t know. That’s my bonus to you.

Al