The former Attorney General recently took a little trip to inspect SR-520, and made the decision that it needed replacement first, and not the disaster waiting to happen SR-99 Viaduct - even though I highly doubt that she has a structural engineering degree, which would make her 'assessment' a tad more credible, don't you think? - and yet, the Viaduct is still sinking, as reported here, and will need some remedial repair to stabilize the section that has sunk if (really, when) it sinks further. If the Viaduct continues to deteriorate at it's current rate, without an infusion of repair funds, it will collapse. Remember the double deck freeway expanse in Northern California that collapsed during the 1989 earthquake (during the World Series between the A's and Giants), killing several people? I do, and since I do use the Viaduct on occasion, I really don't want to be on it (especially on the lower, south bound, deck), when it collapses. Nor do I want to be on 520 if it were to suddenly sink into Lake Washington, either.

I used to live on the east side of Lake Washington, and work in Seattle, and used 520 to commute back and forth (now I both live and work in Seattle, so that is no longer part of my commute), and if I still lived on the east side, I may feel that - out of 'I need to be able to get back and forth between work and home conveniently' feelings - 520 should be dealt with first, but - and this may be because I live in Seattle now, but I like to think it's for more practical reasons - I believe that the Viaduct should be replaced first, preferably with a tunnel. I won't hash out the 'for' and 'against' arguments here on what replacement method to use, due to time and space constraints, but I am firmly convinced that replacing the Viaduct first will have the greater positive economic impact on the entire region - not just Seattle - than replacing 520 first would. Oh, it would be nice if we could do both at the same time, but since we are talking billions of dollars here, we simply cannot afford it. Heck, we really don't have the money to replace either right now, but we must replace them both, eventually.

The Viaduct was built around 1953, and the 520 floating bridge sometime in the 1960's (don't know the exact date because I wasn't paying attention back then to much of anything except my own insular life, and I don't want to take the time now to research it - if you want to that, please, be my guest, and if I have the time frame wrong, let me know), and 520 has been re-surfaced at least twice in the past 20 years or so (mainly due to studded tire use - another blog post for another time! - creating ruts in the road surface), and I know that the Viaduct has 'worn' better than 520. Why is that? Were the construction standards, materials, and or methods better in the early 1950's, or did 'someone' in the State Legislature of the 1960's 'get stupid', and allow lower standards for the construction of a floating bridge?

Let's not get 'stupid' now, and replace the wrong structure at the wrong time. Replace the Viaduct first, then deal with 520.