Highway 520: Bridge of 1,000 sorrows earns its name

We know you so well, Bridge of a Thousand Sorrows.

The backups, the frustrations, the bickering over your future, the closures, the windstorm-lashed center when it looks like a car wash; the grand views of Husky Stadium and Mount Rainier, the soft lake at evening and the rising Cascades in the morning. She is known as the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge, a dog-leg span that links our two largest job centers — Seattle and the Eastside. Bridge of a thousand sighs and late appointments, bridge of a thousand solutions, bridge of road rage and regional breakup.

The fact that the bridge from Montlake to Medina is an antiquated monument to poor planning is obvious. Less obvious is why — after 10 years of discussion and meetings — the Bridge of Sorrows so blatantly illustrates a region with splintered priorities.

For the land of Microsoft and booming Seattle, the uncomfortable fact is that the current span would not be tolerated in modern Western Europe or Asia. World-class cities do not limit themselves to slim corridors of asphalt and paint.

If taken literally, the current plans for the Highway 520 corridor would have a six-lane bridge on the east side of Lake Washington, a four-lane bridge on the Seattle side, lidding of some neighborhoods but not of others, maybe a high span, maybe a low one, maybe mass transit, maybe not, maybe a new ramp to the University of Washington, maybe not.

"No matter what happens, people have to understand a new bridge will be bigger, just because of the basics of bridge design," said state Rep. Ed Murray, D-Seattle. Murray, a neighbor of the bridge and its most vocal advocate, has reached a point of frustration that only frequent bridge riders can match.

"I'm predicting if there is no solution forthcoming," Murray said late last week, "the lack of consensus on the bridge will take down regional solutions for everything."

This is as glum as I have ever heard Murray on the topic.

Yet, reports from Seattle that its government will only support a four-lane replacement bridge tells you of the decline of regionalism in favor of isolated urbanism. At one time, a "preferred alternative" was a six-lane bridge, with room for cyclists, pedestrians, buses and, potentially, high-speed mass-transit trains — what a concept! Proponents of an eight-lane bridge, no matter how logical, could not be expected to win that argument in autophobic Seattle. A six-laner looked like the compromise.

You can't count on that now, because the discussion has quagmired into how many cars can pass through the eye of a needle between 4:30 and 6 p.m. The Washington Department of Transportation Web site on the bridge, www.wsdot.wa.gov/projects, only lists either a four- or six-lane bridge without a preference.

"All we hear is all-tunnel, all the time," Murray said. "That's not the only regional problem out there, and until we get consensus on 520, I think that lack of agreement affects everything."

Murray put into law that a bridge solution has to be inclusive from Interstate 405 to Interstate 5, rather than just shore to shore. The governor has appointed a new panel to study 520 and the Alaskan Way Viaduct and provide her with an unglimmered look at the two problems.

That panel, whose members are also cited on the Web site, appears to be made up of stellar members of the engineering, planning and financial professions.

But we know that the floating bridge is not an engineering problem. It's probably not a financial problem if tolling is thrown into the mix. And it is not a planning problem, otherwise no bridges would be erected anywhere in this wide world.

Instead, it is a political problem and the politicians who have dithered away the past 10 years should be blamed, or at least forced to use the bridge every day of their lives.

James F. Vesely's column appears Sunday on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is: jvesely@seattletimes.com