Working together ... what a concept

Cynics prattle on about the meaninglessness of it all. The vote on how best to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct was all about nothing, they said. Irrelevance in a bottle, a bad joke on a bad joke.

But in the end it was a referendum on the soul of the city, a snapshot of public sentiment that meant more than where all that asphalt might end up — in a tunnel, a new rebuilt elevated roadway or none of the above.

Roughly 70 percent of voters said no to Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels' beloved tunnel, and 56 percent said no to a rebuilt elevated roadway.

Even that difference tells us a few things. Nickels worked hard for a tunnel to reconnect the city to the waterfront, but voters wisely said, ah, no, not at any cost.

The mayor's tunnel would be good if we were building a city from scratch and had unlimited funds for everyone's great ideas. But there is something unacceptable about reinventing a city that already works quite well at the expense of the average homeowner.

Cost and affordability have much to do with what happened.

The difference between the tunnel and the rebuilt roadway represents a collision between Old and New Seattle, a schism between affordable, middle-class, blue-collar Seattle and yuppified, upscale Seattle.

Consider Seattleites living in North End neighborhoods that don't even have sidewalks. When these people hear all this chatter about vision and a $3.4 billion tunnel, some of them said, Remind me why I should pay for a deluxe downtown tunnel when our own neighborhood could use some basics?

Seattle, like many big cities, is in danger of pricing out the middle class. If we build one of everything new, the cost of housing, taxes, utilities and other bills puts houses out of reach for individuals living on modest or fixed incomes.

Over and over, I heard disgust over the hubris of the tunnel supporters.

"I hate the elitism and arrogance of the 'vision people' who view working-class people as yahoos," said one supporter of the elevated roadway. "I hate the venality of property owners who would see their property values soar and the obscene waste of money."

In the months ahead, we will hear a half-dozen new and not-so-new ideas — the retrofit, the surface-transit option, the 1,000 little things, a smaller elevated roadway, a bridge, transit all day and night — and each will have some steam.

First, the surface option will gain traction because a lot of politicians see it as the safe Plan B. Part of its enormous appeal lies in the fact that we don't know much about it.

Yesterday, in a world-class "Kumbaya" session in Olympia, Gov. Christine Gregoire, Nickels and King County Executive Ron Sims announced they would start working together on steps that easily could lead toward a surface option, though they didn't say it that way.

For example, they plan to proceed post haste with safety and structural changes to the existing viaduct.

The whole working-together thing amounts to a giant "Duh." Nickels and Gregoire both must have dropped 20 points in favorable ratings during their tortured dispute. For Gregoire, this looks like the "Dino Rossi for Governor" election strategy, if ever there were one.

One intriguing idea comes from state Sen. Mary Margaret Haugen, chairwoman of the Senate Transportation Committee, who says, "Tear it down."

No really. Think Kingdome and dynamite. Tear it down.

At first, her proposal sounds so crass, so anti-business, so anti-progress. Gridlock squared, which is precisely the point. It is the tough-love approach.

Haugen believes a teardown would help Seattleites and others see the situation more clearly by proving that the city is very dependent on the viaduct — more than many of us think.

The senator's idea has additional benefit. The rebuilt elevated roadway was to be bigger than the current roadway because transportation planners wanted to reduce the time the viaduct is completely closed. They planned, therefore, to build over and around the current roadway. Hence, the bigger structure.

If we tear the viaduct down first, a smaller, more architecturally pleasing viaduct can be built in its place.

All options are supposedly on the table. When the book called "Viaduct Politics for Dummies" is written, it will say the day the politicians got together was the day progress gained a fighting chance. Together these folks might deliver something. Separated, well, you saw the out-of-control unproductiveness of that.

Joni Balter's e-mail address is jbalter@seattletimes.com