Kemper’s law suit has been submitted to the State Supreme Court on Olympia. Sounds all “Temple of the Gods” right? Anyway, that’s where the state government hangs out.
The main gist of the suit is that laying tracks on Interstate 90 is unconstitutional. That’s the favorite position when people don’t want something – claim it’s unconstitutional.
Let me outline the situation because I like to do outlines and this one is kind of fun. Streetcars came to Seattle over 100 years ago when the city was growing and people worked farther from home. It became difficult to ride the family mule to work every day. Roads were horrid and nobody could afford a car yet. So modern thinkers laid rails and put streetcars on them. People could hike down to the streetcar stop and ride to work.
Over the years the system was modernized and upgraded. Streets were improved and the public transportation system was reliable and kept getting faster. The whole experience was not that bad. They had newsboys at the stops so you could get the morning paper to read on the way to work. No TV so that’s how they got the news.
Things were changing, however. After WWII Americans could actually get cars that were reliable enough to drive every day. You had to be a part time mechanic to keep the older ones going. In addition many streets and roads had been paved. Cities had long since banned mules and horses from streets and had instituted such conveniences as signs and lights at intersections. People could drive to work, even in the big city.
Seattle was much larger after WWII because of a big wartime manufacturing establishment. A great many of the workers imported from rural America remained in the city where they could work and own a house and a car. Result: riding the streetcar got to be a bother. Ridership dropped and the city found other uses for the space taken up by the tracks. Eventually all city rail transit was removed. They still had busses that used those same paved roads as the cars.
OK, as time went on we got the Interstate Highway System. The great thinkers decided it was a good idea to run I-5 right through Seattle. Cool. They also added I-405 as a bypass on the east side of that big lake. I-90 came from Boston and finally banged right into I-5. Ribbons were cut and bands played.
Then came something that only a few people had foreseen; the oil crisis. “Gosh, what if we can’t get to work,” people began to say. So we passed some transportation proposals and we got stuff like Metro and Sound Transit.
Then came the big one: light rail. This was supposed to relieve traffic in every direction as far as the eye could see. Some people pointed out that we had a rail transit system in the past and we tore it up. Well this is better, it’s “light” rail so you won’t gain weight. Clever.
They drew big maps of where all the tracks would go and said it would take millions of cars off the roads. Great, everyone thought, I’ll have the roads to myself. So we voted YES and built the first line from the center of Seattle to the airport.
Now we’ve also started work on a line to the University north of the city and to Bellevue east of the city. The grand plan is to have a spider web of light rail eliminating the need for automobiles. Hooray, no more oil crisis.
But, wait, how do we get tracks across that big lake. It’s not a river that can be crossed by ordinary bridges. It’s very wide. It’s also very deep so you can’t build a causeway by dumping dirt into it. That’s how we got Mercer Island and as you can plainly see it didn’t work. The most feasible way to get over the lake is a floating bridge. It’s made up of a number of cement pontoons that are anchored to the bottom and hooked together with super glue.
That way you can have one pontoon that moves to let a big boat through, if you want to. Or you can just say “No big boats” and let it go at that.
But the point is we have this floating bridge with 6 general purpose lanes and 2 HOV lanes over the lake. Nobody wants to add another floating span next to it for light rail. So the plan is to use the HOV lanes for the light rail into Bellevue. Then add an extra lane to each direction and make it the HOV lane.
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| I-90 Floating Bridge with Link Light Rail and HOV Lanes |
Kemper, who has come out against the light rail plan from the beginning, says the State Constitution won’t allow the rails on the roadway. He says the bridge was built with gas tax money and the constitution says you can’t use gas tax money for anything but roads. So it’s gone to the Supreme Court for a decision.
That should be an interesting decision. Based on some of the past decisions from this group we could be looking at almost anything. They could say yes you can build tracks on the bridge but you have to remove them every night.
Al
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