What’s wrong with this picture?
Digitally manipulated photo showing what light-rail trains might look like crossing I-90.
A couple of things struck me about the above photo, found in today’s Seattle Times, as I peered closely at its details. First, those electrical power poles are really ugly. It had never occurred to me before that power poles with cable strung between them would be necessary to get light rail trains across Lake Washington, and now that I see the reality of the situation, I don’t like it. The low profile of the floating bridge is one of its best features; it distracts from the otherwise magnificent view only slightly. Adding power poles and cabling across the lake will add an unsightly grid to the horizon, no doubt spoiling the view from, say, Stan Sayres Park looking north, as well as the view south looking at beautiful Mount Rainier from Madrona. Perhaps someone with design sense will find a way to camoflague or otherwise beautify these structures.
Second, the digital artist has squeezed four lanes of westbound traffic into a space that currently only has room for three, not by magically adding concrete where there is none, but by eliminating entirely the right shoulder. Isn’t that convenient? However, there is a problem with this clever solution: cars break down on the bridge. In fact, cars break down on the bridge and pull into the right shoulder every week of the year. I’ve seen it. I’ve been driving this route for almost 18 years. If you take that shoulder away, you might as well kiss goodbye any hope of a trouble-free car commute. And from the looks of things there isn’t a full left shoulder, which means there really isn’t room to have four full lanes and a shoulder on the existing bridge.
So take this picture with a huge grain of salt.
And one more thing: I met I guy at a party recently who happened to be an engineer working on the structural retrofit of the bridge for the light rail expansion and it occurred to me to ask him, “Where else in the world are they running light rail over a floating bridge.” And he just grinned and answered, “Nowhere. No one’s done it. It hasn’t been done before.” Because, you see, there’s the problem of the expansion joints that connect the floating part to the not-floating part, and trains have real problems running over dips and such since that could throw them off their tracks. So the joints need to be redesigned. This engineer seemed pretty confident that it could be done and his firm has the designs to do it, he said. They were testing those designs already. The testing will take approximately three years.
And so it goes.