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Poor Mayor Nickels. The news isn't good for him these days. His plan to replace the crumbling Viaduct with a Big Dig-style tunnel is going the same way as the Seattle Monorail Project he helped kill. The Washington State Department of Transportation released estimates that showed Nickels' $2.8 billion price tag climbing to $4.6 billion. And now, according to articles in The Seattle Times and The Seattle P-I, Nickels is taking the choice out of the voters' hands this November.
Nickels told the Times that, "It had been my preference to go to the voters, but it's not the kind of question that ought to go on the ballot." But City Council president Nick Licata thinks, "He doesn't want a vote because the tunnel is going to go down in flames."
Fair enough. But to be fair to the voters, we have to point out that the mayor's plan is the scaled-back, "affordable" version of the tunnel project; it doesn't much look like the the fancy CGI'd video of a clean waterfront tunnel the city made and the local TV stations have been playing endlessly. To be clear: the tunnel concept is less a tunnel than it is a trench with a lid: no subterranean digging involved. (Consequently, this was the same process as the Big Dig in Boston.) The $2.8 billion (now $4.6 billion) project cut a few billion dollars off the original price tag by excluding the cost of completing the lid. If the complete project--lid and manicured street-level parks--were to be increased by the same factor as the the rest of the project, the overall price tag climbs as high as $7.7 billion. And that's excluding the cost of replacing the equally damaged seawall, one of the original justifications for the tunnel project.
So no big surprise that Nickels doesn't want the voters to touch it.
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Boston's Big Dig was underwater, though. Cut & cover would be more like Mercer Island.
Dunno, Jeremy (and welcome!, by the way). Seems to me that we elect a council and mayor to make decisions like this.
I stil ask the question: if there were no viaduct, would we build one? (Hell, no.) So tear it down & be done with it. Period. Clean up Alaskan Way a bit and we're home almost free.
If not, I predict the next disaster will be the Battery St Tunnel.
I'm not completely familiar with the extent of what constitutes the Big Dig, but it is a covered trench that runs through the middle of Boston with a topside greenway park named after Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy, so while part of what you say may be true, fundamentally a large part of the Big Dig is as I described: a trench with a lid.
Cary Moon of the People’s Waterfront Coalition is not only incredibly smart she is pretty cute.
http://www.realchangenews.org/2006/2006_06_07/cultureshift.html
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/Content?oid=20044
I think the mayor is in danger of having a Woodrow Wilson/League of Nations moment with this tunnel crap.
I think it already is, and what's most fascinating to me is why he would want to risk everything on this tunnel. After all, it's always been a bit out of reach financially, and the people of Seattle never seem to have the wherewithal to bring expensive transit plans to fruition, particularly what with the NIMBY neighborhood associations always trying to flex their muscle.
The best explanation I've ever come across, never having had a full conversation with the man, is from a good piece Dan Savage wrote in The Stranger last year:
Ha, no Chicago transplant in Seattle has forgotten that passage - Thanks Dan S.
The tunnel does seem like an odd project to hang himself on, doesn't it? It's expensive and kind of solves a problem that doesn't really exist. When you're trying to pin your mayoral legacy on a huge project it doesn't really matter how practical it is, but the tunnel isn't very imaginative either.
Of all the major roads we have that are due to plummet into the water, Alaskan Way has always seemed like the one that we could do without fairly handily.
Also, in Boston's defense, while the big dig is already collapsing they've got a decent rail system that makes more than two stops.
the people's wanterfront coalition is made up of short-sighted hippies trying to turn this city into a provincial backwater. they think they can make people stop driving their cars by inducing as much gridlock as possible (technically not their plan; only the inevitable result). i wonder how they determine which people aren't driving with a legitimate purpose. i'm surprised everyone in west seattle hasn't banded together to burn carey moon in effigy by now to celebrate her stupidity.
we only have two N-S arteries going through this city. shutting down one, and trying to funnel 100,000+ cars through the downtown streets (or even worse, forcing everyone to use I5 with no other option available), is a disaster in the making. regional traffic planning for the next few decades shouldn't be based on the state's emergency plan. we're a city built around water! of course we're going to have more highways/bridges than most.
I don't like the viaduct, but it needs to be replaced by something. if the tear-down plan was accompanied by the monorail or another legit transit option (not just adding more buses!), then it might be worth considering. the PWC continues to pretend that taking away traffic capacity, and offering nothing in return except pipe dreams of mass transit, is an idea worthy of discussion. as it is, the tunnel is the best of the bad options currently available.
as much as I dislike nickels, this really isn't a decision that should be left to the voters. it's why we live in a representative democracy - they're paid to spend their time studying & discussing the big issues down to the finest nuance so that the best outcome occurs. I know I don't trust the voters to consider it as carefully.
Let me guess Jason. You think the rest of the state should pay for Greg Nickel’s Big Dig pipe dream. A tunnel is one of the worst idea since $30 car tabs.
A fascinating proposition: blaming the people pointing out gridlock for the gridlock. When it comes to highway planning, a lot of people seem to have the idea that if only their were more space, everyone would be able to go faster. Unfortunately that's not the case: gridlock's going to happen whether you want it to or not. So we're faced with an option: spend $4 to $7 billion to give them a tunnel to be stuck in when gridlock hits, or maybe spend that money to give them another way to get there.
One thing that's not going to happen is that more highways will save us: have you seriously never been to LA?
And finally, whether or not no highway is a good idea is only relatively pertinent to a discussion of whether the mayor pulls off his tunnel. The monorail invested millions of dollars and moved a long way towards groundbreaking, at great cost, for a project which never made it anywhere. Monorail was a new system, though; do you really want to risk the same thing happening, at even higher cost, to a crucial transit option?
i wish this was a voice recording so i could speak slowly to the two above -
1. it's a STATE HIGHWAY, so yes, it's going to be state-funded, regardless of what happens. given the amount of international & state-wide freight (and how much extra stress would that much weight put on city streets or I5?) that travels said highway, it's not a seattle-centric project.
2. the PWC is to be blamed for attempting to create *worse* gridlock than already exists. traffic already sucks & you're not going to get people to magically stop driving unless you offer viable alternatives.
3. this is not creating more highways, but just retaining existing capacity. yes, LA is stupid. this is different. it's also different from san francisco or milwaukee.
4. except for the fact that its failure guaranteed that the street-level option isn't viable, the monorail has nothing to do with the tunnel. one major difference is that the mayor is behind something (like sound transit), not actively opposing it. beyond that, the failure of one project really has nothing to do with what will happen with the next one.
i'm not sure why the PWC and their acolytes are trying to create straw arguments, but i'm guessing that it has something to do with the logical fallacies in their own.
This might have something to do with me not being a traffic engineer, but it seems like spending $7.7 billion for a tunnel that gets us right back to where we are today (with the added excitement of the sound exploding into stalled traffic) is an undesirable prospect. I think it at least makes sense to give some serious thought to alternatives, even if they come from hippies.
I think the idea of the PWC people, and I wish they'd just say it, is the exact situation that jason describes: gridlock.
Gridlock will force people to use alternatives. These alternatives exist, people just don't like them because driving a car is easier.
Gridlock will force people to work closer to home, cutting down on emissions.
Gridlock will force people to take the bus, also cutting down on emissions.
Gridlock will force people to walk places, and maybe talk to each other, and everyone will be happier and healthier and a lot less passive-agressive.
Look--I'm no anti-car nutjob--I live right off of Aurora and drive the viaduct every day. It's going to suck major ass for me when the thing is shut down (which it will be for at least two years while they build or don't build its replacement). But if you spend money on roads, it encourages driving. And with the world warming up the way it is, that's not the best idea.