Some Facts:
There are really two trains of thought regarding the construction of additional freeway lanes to ease congestion in the Seattle/Metro area. One is that congestion will get so bad that people will be forced to use the mass-transit system. The other is that we construct more lanes, ease congestion, and then face the same problems X years from now. There are intricacies to both strategies, but those are the basics.

With the average automobile operating at it's highest efficiency at around 45 mph, one could argue that the addition of more lanes would help reduce pollutant loading to recieving waters adjacent to roadways. Plus, productivity would go up because as products and goods would be much more easily transported to and fro. The addition of these extra lanes, though, would cause further fragmentation of what remaining habitats and wetlands are left, and increase the amount of impervious surface area that is already causing a major problem in the Puget Sound Basin. Traffic and the impervious surfaces associated with it being the single, greatest contributor to residential stormwater contamination.

So, we can mitigate for the loss of habitats and wetlands, right? Yes, we can, but the verdict is still out on whether man-made wetlands are as effective at detaining and removing pollutants from stormwater, and the verdict is leaning towards "no". And, with recent Federal regulations calling for "no net loss of wetlands", mitigation is becoming less and less of an option.

So, traffic becomes unbearable, road rage runs rampant, and people are forced to use a combination light rail/bus system to get to work, drop the kids off at the pool, run chores, tow their driftboat, etc. People will get sick of sitting in traffic and use the system, right? This sounds great and in theory should work, but in most cases it doesn't, and is in fact a massive tax burden. As of 1994, only two commuter rail systems in the entire United States operated in the "black" (Chicago and St. Louis). For an example of a MASSIVE tax burden, one must only look at the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) system in the Bay area. Has traffic eased in the Bay area? Not in the slightest. Much like the communities sorrounding the Seattle area, the Bay area is fragmented by water, making transportation planning a veritable nightmare. A cost/benefit analysis can only touch on this conundrum.

So, how does impervious surface contribute to stormwater contamination? Vehicles discharge fine particulates ranging from dust and sediment attached to underbodies and fragments from tire and brake wear, to by-products of incomplete combustion and catalytic muffler residues. Exposed moving parts shed metal fragments and fuel and other lubricants often leak from vehicles.

A model was derived for this loading in 1982 and concluded that approximately 6.4 pounds of Total Suspended Solid Load (stuff in water) could be counted for every 1000 vehicles per mile of curbed roadway, per rain event. If your neighborhood street is .5 miles long and has approximately 5400 cars per day, and there's 141 measurable storms in a year, there would be more than a ton of TSSL deposited in it's recieving waters. YIKES!

You can count some of this out due to increases in vehicle efficiency over the last 18 years, but we still have a major problem. With even the most efficient treatment system only able to remove approximately 80% of this material, it's still a problem. What's attached to this sediment? Zinc, Copper, Magnesium, Benzene, Toluene, Xylene, and on, and on, and on. Bad, carcinogenic stuff.

Hard to say how an initiative such as I-745 will actually help gridlock, since more than 50% of construction money will actually go to design/build of stormwater systems associated with any new construction. Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention the fact that new stormwater regulations have gone "retroactive", meaning if you want to construct/reconstruct something you have to fix prior screw-ups.

Time for Robbo to move to the wilderness and hole up in a cabin.







[This message has been edited by robbo (edited 10-31-2000).]