Residents of Ballard would be best advised to support local businesses and forget about going downtown on any but the most important trips because it soon may become too expensive and take far too long to go there.

As we all know the Sword of Damocles hangs over our heads because the governor said she will order her Washington State Department of Transportation to rip down the Alaskan Way Viaduct in 2012, less than four years from today.

The squabbling and studies and lobbying continue unabated. There are those who say a bored tunnel is best and damned the cost because best is best. Others want the entire 50-year-old viaduct retrofitted, strengthened to last another 20-plus years and hope some magic formula will whisk away the replacement problem then.

Still other say rips the thing down and use only surface streets and hang the inconvenience, what we have dubbed the Let Them Eat Cake theory of transportation.

In between are cut and cover tunnels that combine a roadway with broad esplanades and shopping malls with parks over the whizzing vehicles.

The real problem remains, no matter which alternative is finally decided upon on high: How to pay for whatever? You can be sure that we will eventually be faced with city and state officials presenting us with a big bill, in the multi-billions.

There was created (for those who just returned from a South Seas desert island) an Alaskan Way Viaduct Stakeholders Committee, a collection of leaders from around the city, to study the alternatives. Of course, the state is the whiphand here because Highway 99 is a state highway and the state gets to decide whatever is done. The decision, in some minds, has already been made by the political leaders that it should be a tunnel (Imagine: "The Gregory J. Nickels Alaskan Way Tunnel").

Last week, after some delays to fiddle with computer models, came the first shot over the bow.

It will take twice as long to drive downtown from our homes in Ballard to downtown. What is more, it will also take twice as long to get downtown by bus.

The bad news: "A commute from 22nd Avenue Northwest and Southwest Market Street to the Sodo District, which today takes 14 minutes, could nearly double to 27 minutes via a one-way southbound Alaskan Way."

When you eventually do get downtown, parking will be so expensive that only those who still have an SUV will have enough spendable income to afford parking downtown. We expect, in time, there will pay parking kiosks for bicycles so we can afford the budget whipped up by our mayor and virtually rubberstamped by our City Council.

Transit won't help either, says Miller's report:

"All drive times, and some transit times, worsen. Only transit to the airport improves because Sound Transit's light rail will be open from downtown, and from the University District in 2016."

The story also notes, "Regardless of what replaces the viaduct, the models show increased use of transit as driving takes longer, and more people walk and bike especially by the anticipated increase in downtown residents."

In this economically challenged time we urge people to remember and support businesses here in Ballard, because they say it is not far off when it will take too long and cost too much to go downtown to buy those presents or to buy the necessities. Shop locally, or on line, because our city is becoming like some of those insurance companies and banks, to big to fail, so we will be asked to continue the bailout with ever more tax dollars.

Is it too late to return to being the independent City of Ballard?

- Jack Mayne

jmayne@robinsonnews.com