Editorial
Merge left, I-5 needs lots of help

STEVE RINGMAN / THE SEATTLE TIMES Interstate 5, jammed with traffic, looking south across the Lake Washington Ship Canal Bridge to Seattle.

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Thanks to the 5-cent increase in the gas tax, that overpass is coming down, but much more needs to be done, all down this road.

I-5 was built 40 years ago. In downtown Seattle it is pounded by a quarter-million vehicles a day. The concrete is rutted and worn to the aggregate. Major sections need to be replaced.

By any rational standards, it also needs to be expanded. Yet, if there is one absolute of Seattle political culture, it is that a major expansion of I-5 is taboo.

The day will come for challenging that. The priority now, says Transportation Secretary Doug MacDonald, is to rebuild and reconfigure what now exists, and put no extra strain on it by shrinking other roads.

Reconfiguring is needed in downtown Seattle, where only two adjacent I-5 lanes continue through southbound. With some bridge work, that could be made into three. At Mercer Street, both on-ramps merge into the left lanes of I-5; they should merge into the right lanes. A study is under way to consider such changes.

By extra strain, MacDonald refers first to the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The viaduct carries about 45 percent of the number of vehicles I-5 carries.

If the viaduct were replaced by a street with signal lights, as some impractical souls yearn to do, I-5 would be plugged even worse. Even I-405 would be affected.

By any rational standards, any replacement of the viaduct should have more capacity than the current structure, which was built half a century ago. Certainly, it should not have less.

That is only the Seattle piece. The I-5 bridges over the Columbia River are inadequate. The four-lane section through Centralia and Chehalis need to be widened to six lanes. Everett needs attention. Bellingham needs attention.

California and Oregon have their I-5 problems, some of them worse than ours. An effort is being made to join those states to lobby for federal dollars. That is fine, so long as they do not take our share of it.