As part of the big megaproject to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the City wants to redevelop the pedestrian areas of Seattle’s central waterfront. Four competing proposals for this will be publicly unveiled this week.

My onetime housemate Steve “Fnarf” Thornton hasn’t seen all these proposals yet, but he suspects he’ll hate them all.

In an essay at the Seattle Transit Blog, he persuasively explains what downtown doesn’t need—more windswept plazas and cavernous boulevards.

And he delineates what downtown does need—more places like the Pike Place Market, places alive with the cacophony of commerce and the bustling mix of human activities.

In the case of the waterfront, this means more piers, more stuff going on on the piers, more vendors and food carts, and (in a big duh) more boats. The waterfront’s original purpose, Thornton knows, will never be reclaimed in an age of containerized cargo. But other water-based uses wait to be put in there.

I agree with most everything in Thornton’s premise.

To paraphrase an old slogan for a sea-originated product, we don’t need a waterfront with good taste.

We need a waterfront that tastes good.