The Mayor Who Tried to Stop a Highway
Mike McGinn, executive director of America Walks and former mayor of Seattle, whose campaign focused on his opposition to the proposed tunnel replacement to the Alaskan Way Viaduct. (Source: Wikimedia Commons.)
Opposition to highway and road expansion projects is becoming noticeably mainstream. Where few councilmembers would speak out two decades ago, now several small towns are able to count on a local leader to put their resistance on the record. That’s not to say that objecting to these infrastructure projects is politically safe or popular, but for those who have been opposing highways for decades, the tide is slowly but surely changing.
As such, more and more incensed advocates are entering the engineering profession, the corridors of city hall, and public works departments, eager to make a difference. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law seemingly supported this shift in priorities. Yet, despite the best intentions and efforts of advocates in and out of office, cities and states are doubling down on the highway projects of the past, sinking billions of dollars into bisecting and disenfranchising communities.
Mike McGinn, executive director of America Walks and former mayor of Seattle, is one such advocate who stepped up to fight a highway expansion project in his city. His experiences, which he sat down to share with me, echo the frustration and disappointment that so many freeway fighters across the country go through when doing this important, but undeniably difficult work.
A New Future for Seattle’s Waterfront
McGinn’s story begins in 2001 when the Nisqually earthquake shook up Seattle, Washington, and its Alaskan Way Viaduct, an elevated section of State Highway 99. The highway was built decades earlier when Seattle’s waterfront wasn’t treasured real estate. Though, by the 2001 earthquake, the area around and underneath it was highly coveted land, and the city’s downtown was more popular than ever. For McGinn, the opportunity to reimagine the city’s waterfront had ripened with the earthquake, but “at that point, everyone who was in power was like, ‘we have to replace this thing.’” Neighboring California and its pancaked upper decks were the nightmare Seattle was trying to avoid.
In the ensuing years, the idea of digging a tunnel instead of reconstructing the elevated highway split public opinion. Many businesses along the highway wanted to see the road buried underground to allow for the surface to flourish. It may have been decidedly the more popular option if not for the cost, which was estimated at just north of $10 billion at the time.
Nevertheless, the seed of a different future for the viaduct and the city’s waterfront had been planted and it got Seattlites thinking. The options were put to a vote and the public could either up- or downvote each option, including up- or downvoting both.
“It was perfect for our marketing,” McGinn said. “We went with, ‘no and hell no.’” At the time, he was working with the Sierra Club, which was allied with the People’s Waterfront Coalition and other groups opposing both the elevated and underground option. As the votes poured in, it turned out the double downvote campaign was working. Building neither a surface nor tunnel highway didn’t mean leaving the crumbling viaduct alone. Instead, the highway would be decommissioned and the road restored to a boulevard, with the possibility of transit extensions.
This plan, however, had its opponents. Major industries like Microsoft and Boeing predicted carmageddon, construction unions wanted the work they were promised, and local officials who couldn’t conceive of a Seattle without the highway didn’t want to upset their constituents. The issue dragged on and, by 2009, plans for a marginally cheaper tunnel emerged, winning over the Washington State Legislature.
In the meantime, other than emergency repairs in the aftermath of the earthquake, the highway that caused this panic in the first place remained up and operational, counting a handful of closures and inspections between 2001 and 2009.
“And it’s funny, because the entire narrative around reconstructing it was that this is urgent, it will collapse, it’s dangerous…and yet we were allowing cars to drive on it all hours of the day as we debated the future for the highway,” McGinn said. “If it was so dangerous, why didn’t we just close it?”
Who’s Footing the Bill?
When the cheaper tunnel entered the realm of possibility at the end of 2008 and beginning of 2009, the question of how to finance it was still looming. The state legislature was willing to commit $2.8 billion, stipulating that overruns and repairs to the seawall damaged by the 2001 earthquake would be covered by the city. For McGinn, this was a red flag. Not only did he think the project was unnecessary (“This could just be a surface boulevard like it is elsewhere.”), but it also had the characteristics of a boondoggle, one whose bill the city was likely to foot. And so, he ran for mayor.
“I decided to run because I was disappointed by everybody else at that point,” he said. “We’re talking about rebuilding the waterfront and yet, how can you rebuild the waterfront if you’re rebuilding the highway?”
His platform focused on education, municipal broadband, and achieving the city’s climate goals. “Whenever anybody asked me how I’d pay for those things, I would tell them I know exactly where: the tunnel that shouldn’t be built,” he explained.
The money earmarked for the tunnel could fund a surface boulevard, akin to what exists on either end of the Alaskan Way Viaduct, and transit to actually support future commuter patterns. In fact, the option he was championing, known as “surface/transit,” was a fraction of the cost of the “cheaper tunnel.”
People’s Waterfront Coalition rendering of surface/transit option.
Opposing the tunnel and the cost provision that came with it was core to McGinn’s campaign messaging and among the candidates—including the incumbent running for reelection—he was the only one making noise about it. He made a point to challenge the project at every broadcasted debate and when he ultimately won the election (“it was a close race”), Seattle’s voting public ostensibly didn’t want this project, either. They voted for the only candidate who vocally opposed it into office.
Yet, as mail-in ballots were filtering in weeks before the votes would be counted, the city council put the tunnel to a vote. McGinn recalls all nine members voting in support of the project, without much change to the cost provision, setting the stage for the political landscape he would inherit.
“As he was mayor, he encountered the Machine,” said Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn, who is familiar with McGinn’s story. “The machine wasn’t just other elected officials. There was an entire substructure of government, agencies, adjacent governments, connected political leaders—in short, a coalition. This project was just going on for so long that it had all these people invested in it, deeply entrenched momentum within city hall and within the bureaucracy.”
McGinn had the support of the majority of the voting public, the Sierra Club, and the People’s Waterfront Coalition, among other nonprofits, and advocates within and outside of the city. Yet, he describes being completely alone within the chambers of city hall. The state legislature was similarly unfriendly to his platform, especially his proposal that the state cover the costs of the tunnel if its construction was inevitable. He relished in some union support, but the larger ones were skeptical of his plans, unwilling to risk the prospect of construction jobs. Above all, there was no political will to backtrack. For “the machine,” as Marohn put it, the only way was forward, no matter how long it took or how much it cost.
Time played its part in exhausting even his supporters. By the time McGinn helped organize a citizen’s referendum, approval for the tunnel narrowly won, and avenues for opposition had dried up. There was nothing he could do.
By 2013, a deep-boring machine, nicknamed Bertha, began construction on what would become the widest deep-bore tunnel in the world. For McGinn, nervous about the prospect of the city financing cost overruns, the worst happened days later when Bertha broke. The machine was immobilized just a thousand feet in and, with no ability to reverse, Seattle Tunnel Partners had to dig a 120-foot hole to reach Bertha. “It’s pure luck Bertha didn’t get stuck beneath a building, if ‘luck’ is the right word here,” wrote David Roberts, who had been diligently documenting the spectacle at the time.
As faith in Bertha plummeted and the ground above the proposed tunnel was beginning to settle and sink, many Seattlites saw a chance to pull the plug on an increasingly concerning project. Nevertheless, the Washington Department of Transportation (WSDOT) restored Bertha and the boring continued.
How Has the Tunnel Served Seattle?
When it opened to the public in 2019, the tunnel’s first full day saw just over 22,000 vehicle trips. At the time, the media blamed a forthcoming snowstorm in addition to some confusion over how to enter the tunnel for the numbers. Within days, reports of smoke in the tunnel halted operation temporarily, prompting an investigation. Months later, the tunnel would see peak daily traffic volumes of 70,000, still thousands off from the capacity the former viaduct supported, yet an increase from the initial numbers.
Those numbers would drop as soon as WSDOT instituted the toll on November 9, 2019. The agency reported a 26% decline in average weekday volumes since tolling began, with no noticeable spike on the nearby Interstate 5. By contrast, the surface boulevard atop the tunnel, other surface streets, and, notably, other modes of transportation including biking, walking, and transit, appeared to have absorbed the “lost traffic.”
The same was observed when both the viaduct was decommissioned and the tunnel was closed to traffic for a three-week period that same year. “The Alaskan Way Viaduct carried 90,000 cars a day before it was shut down. Where did they all go?” David Gutman, a staff reporter for the Seattle Times, asked. It appeared public transit picked up some of the slack, he noted, with water taxis reporting a jump in ridership and the city noting a visible uptick in bike and foot traffic in some neighborhoods. However, those increases and the diverted traffic patterns failed to total the 90,000 average daily ridership that defined the roadway 10 years earlier. Moreover, they fell short of all WSDOT predictions.
“For lack of a better term, the cars just disappeared,” Mark Burfeind, a spokesman for a Kirkland-based traffic analytics company told Gutman. “Lane reduction is causing decreases in overall travel in the region. It’s pretty standard.”
“Nowadays, it carries as many vehicles as a moderately busy arterial,” McGinn added. Billions were spent on what he considers a failure, even by the standards of WSDOT. Not only has the tunnel sealed a more auto-centric future for the coastal city, at its price tag and the cost of ongoing maintenance needed, it’s a financial burden for a city that can’t even recoup the loss via tolls.
You Don’t Have To Finish What You Started
Overpasses, interchanges, bridges, tunnels, and virtually every type of highway has a lifespan. All over the country, roads constructed in the 1960s and 70s are nearing the end of their useful life, prompting conversations about their reconstruction. For McGinn, it’s in these moments that a city should reflect on whether the commitments of the past should chart the path of the future.
A compelling analogy for him is found in the decommissioning of dams across the country. “When we built these dams, they were legitimately a good idea at the time in terms of producing power and storing water,” he explained. “By the time the dams neared the end of their useful life and the question of rebuilding came up, both the passage of time and new innovations showed us that it’s ultimately better to have a free-flowing river. In some cases they shrank, in others they were decommissioned. Across the country, we learned that they’re simply not worth rebuilding.”
The approaching expiration date of many of our highways offer the same opportunity. As McGinn put it: “It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but we get to choose a different future now.”
Asia (pronounced “ah-sha”) Mieleszko serves as a Staff Writer for Strong Towns. A dilettante urbanist since adolescence, she's excited to convert a lifetime of ad-hoc volunteerism into a career. Her unconventional background includes directing a Ukrainian folk choir, pioneering synaesthetic performances, photographing festivals, designing websites, teaching, and ghostwriting. She can be found wherever Wi-Fi is reliable, typically along Amtrak's Northeast Corridor.