Editorial
Doing something about the "Mercer Mess"

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Seattle has an intriguing idea for fixing the "Mercer mess" and should move ahead with it. This has been a vehicular knot for some 40 years, and the time has come to unravel it.

For decades, the traffic between the Seattle Center and Interstate 5 has flowed in a kind of figure eight, with the westbound traffic veering north, diving under the eastbound traffic and looping to the south. It does work. But for the South Lake Union neighborhood, it is a river of steel that cuts them off from South Lake Union Park. It also ruins the real estate in the medians and tends to blight all the land around it.

Decades ago, Seattle voters rejected the idea of replacing Mercer with the Bay Freeway. Such a freeway would have made sense had it connected to a through route, like the Viaduct does. Mercer doesn't. It melts into the city grid. What's needed is not a swirl of concrete ramps but an avenue that can handle a lot of cars and trucks.

The city envisions Mercer with three through lanes in each direction. It would have additional lanes for parking, a median strip in the middle, sidewalks and sidewalk trees, and pedestrian crossings at lights. On either side would be new, mid-rise buildings for biotech labs, offices and apartment dwellers, creating the center of a 21st-century central-city neighborhood.

Clearly, Paul Allen, the area's largest landowner through the development firm Vulcan, would benefit. For that reason, he and other property owners that measurably benefit should be asked to chip in some land or money for the new, wider street.

But the city would also benefit by getting a new neighborhood and attracting hundreds of millions of dollars in private investment.

The cost for the first phase, the part east of Aurora Avenue, is $50 million to $75 million. That's not cheap, but it's far less than a freeway.

The city believes it can raise the money from city taxpayers, the state, the federal government and, it hopes, from a future regional transportation tax.

That is a question for the future. The question now is whether to finish the study and environmental work for the plan described here. The answer to that is yes.