In my role as urban strategies leader for Arup, an international design and consulting company, I have worked around the world on the interplay between cities and their environment. Among my firm's projects is one to design, from scratch, an entirely new, eco-friendly city outside Shanghai for several hundred thousand people.

My experiences have taught me that the competition for jobs and investments is not so much between nations as it is between major metropolitan centers. The winners in this competition are cities that have valuable assets and use them wisely.

So I find it troubling that so many residents of Washington, including many of our leaders in Olympia, resist the Seattle City Council's recommendation to build a tunnel, preferring, instead, the cheaper option to build another viaduct. No other city in the world would consider building an elevated structure on top of its greatest land asset: its approach to the beautiful Puget Sound. So why are we?

One of a city's most valuable attributes is to be sited next to a large body of water. This is true not just for shipping, but for housing, commercial development, cultural facilities and tourism. Great waterfronts - the economic activity they generate and the sense of well-being they foster - help attract capital and stimulate economic activity in the entire region. Great waterfronts make clear to us and to others what we value today and what our hopes are for tomorrow.

Even before the Nisqually Quake damaged the Viaduct, this highway that divides Seattle from its waterfront was at the end of its useful life. Today, it is now more dangerous than ever. It needs to come down, and soon. Part of its road capacity has to be replaced. So does the sea wall. Few people understand that a failure of the sea wall in the event of an earthquake could undermine the foundation of many of our city's biggest buildings. Prompt action is necessary.

Sadly, the urgency of this decision has created blinders for many of those involved in responding to the crisis. In considering whether we should build a tunnel or replace the viaduct, our leaders keep discussing it as a transportation problem. But this confuses ends and means. Transportation facilitates quality of life - it is a means. Forward-thinking leaders, however, should redefine the problem as a development opportunity - an opportunity to continue on our path toward becoming a world-class city capable of competing against the world's other dynamic cities for both capital and talent.

In the course of my work on five continents, I have seen that the cities that are successful are the cities with leaders who have a vision and see that the long-term benefits of the future are derived from taking costly steps today. Cities like Baltimore suffer from having their waterfronts cut off from the urban core by transportation infrastructure. Cities like Sydney, by contrast, have benefited from an active shoreline shared by ferries, bicyclists, pedestrians and cultural facilities as well as housing and commerce.

We in the Pacific Northwest have a propensity to be blind to the future. We assume that many parts of our city will remain low-intensity industrial areas with lots of single-occupant vehicle and freight trips. But as Seattle becomes more urban over the next 20 years, the value of public and private land along the waterfront will soar. There will be a much higher level of residential and commercial development. We should be designing high-capacity transit systems that serve the entire waterfront.