The Future
While the many thwarted plans of the 1960s may constitute a warning about prognostication, the city has adopted an official Waterfront Concept Plan. The planning process behind this document began in 2003 and centered on a 300-person Visioning Charrette in February 2004, the largest event of its kind in the city's history. Aside from the city's process, plans are under consideration for major work at the Washington State Ferry terminal and the Seattle Aquarium; the Olympic Sculpture Park has already transformed the northern end of the Central Waterfront.
Some things about the future of the Central Waterfront are clear. The 2001 Nisqually earthquake revealed that the Alaskan Way Viaduct is unsound and the seawall is in very poor condition. Another earthquake could cause liquefaction of the soils, undermining the viaduct and placing massive pressure on the seawall. While there may be much question as to what will happen, there is no doubt that things cannot remain as they are. Elsewhere on the waterfront, the deteriorating Piers 62 and 63 also cannot remain as they are.
As of 2008, the Washington State Department of Transportation is considering eight different scenarios for replacing the viaduct's Central Waterfront section. These include three different surface road options, two viaduct options (one with a park level over the traffic level), a bored tunnel, a cut-and-cover tunnel, and a lidded roadway. The city's Department of Parks and Recreation is considering five different alternatives for replacing Piers 62 and 63, some of them integrated with specific replacement plans for the viaduct. The issue of what will replace the viaduct also figures prominently in the city's own planning process.
Read more about this topic: Central Waterfront, Seattle
Famous quotes containing the words the future and/or future:
“Perfect present has no existence in our consciousness. As I said years ago in Erewhon, it lives but upon the sufferance of past and future. We are like men standing on a narrow footbridge over a railway. We can watch the future hurrying like an express train towards us, and then hurrying into the past, but in the narrow strip of present we cannot see it. Strange that that which is the most essential to our consciousness should be exactly that of which we are least definitely conscious.”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Mothers have as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations, as all other causes combined.”
—John Abbott. The Mother at Home; or the Principles of Maternal Duty, John Abbott, Crocker and Brewster (1833)
“Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows that the Will’s need to will is no less strong than Reason’s need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)