Ten years after Seattle’s Ash Wednesday earthquake damaged the highway, the 1950s-era double-decker Alaskan Way Viaduct still carries 110,000 cars per day along Elliot Bay.
In the wake of Japan’s Sendai quake, Mayor Mike McGinn has called for the highway to be closed. McGinn has long opposed a tunnel planned to replace the viaduct, which, after a decade’s worth of often contentious wrangling, wouldn’t be complete until 2016.