You’ve got to give credit to the folks at the Discovery Institute; when they put their “minds” to something, they never seem to let little distractions like public opinion, science or, you know, reality get in their way.
As political momentum grows for a highway-free Seattle shoreline, some would-be visionaries want to help traffic move by digging a deep tunnel from Sodo to north of downtown. […] Costs are unknown, but would be in the billions of dollars. Even if a suitable tunnel path exists, Seattle’s loose, watery soils present a challenge in places, and there’s not much room at the surface for ramp connections at I-5.
That hasn’t stopped the Cascadia Center, a branch of the Discovery Institute think tank, from promoting a tunnel.
No, no… of course it hasn’t, because the folks at the Discovery Institute are a bunch of fanaticist nutcases “visionaries”… you know, if by “visionary” you mean promoting Intelligent Design, seeking to overthrow the scientific method and “replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions,” and ignoring both voter sentiment (“No/Hell No” vote on the Viaduct; Prop 1’s crushing defeat) and economic reality in proposing a multi-billion dollar big dig through downtown Seattle.
I mean, Jesus H. Christ… what does it take to tarnish the Discovery Institute’s reputation? Does Bruce Chapman actually have to strip himself naked and go on a shooting rampage through the Tacoma Mall before our local media and political elite finally accept the fact that he might not be the same reasonable city councilman they remember from the 1970’s? Is there nothing he can do or say to destroy his credibility?
I once proposed building a gigantic rollercoaster along the West Seattle to downtown portion of the Monorail’s abandoned Green Line, and you didn’t see my joke of a transportation proposal picked up by the MSM, let alone labeled “visionary”. And yet the Seattle Rollercoaster Project is no less technically challenging nor politically, well, utterly fucking ridiculous than Discovery’s deep bore, crosstown tunnel. Engineering and economic feasibility aside, God himself could descend from the heavens with a blueprint in one hand and an infinite supply of cash in the other, only to be greeted by polar bear clad environmentalists and angry Eastside developers complaining that He isn’t doing enough to ease congestion on I-405. In a city where completion of a 1.3 mile vanity trolley line is feted like some transportation miracle, the very notion that local voters might commit more than a half billion dollars a mile to an untested technology is a dramatic tribute to Discovery’s primary mission of promoting the exercise of faith over reason.
Of course, it’s not merely faith in God that ultimately drives Discovery’s transportation planning, but more specifically faith in the Invisible Hand of God and the inherent efficiency of the free market. No doubt Seattle’s “Big Bore” would be pitched as a public/private partnership… you know, one of those sweetheart deals in which tax dollars are used to subsidize the privatization of a public asset. Sure, taxpayers would probably be better off financing our transportation improvements through payday loans, but then, who the hell am I to question the wisdom and motives of such an upstanding civic leader as Bruce Chapman?
Oh, and on a slight tangent, I just loved this quote by city councilmember Jan Drago in the Times:
“Subterranean assets”…? Unless Seattle is sitting on some yet undiscovered petroleum deposit, the only thing that immediately comes to mind is the Seattle Underground episode of Kolshak: The Night Stalker. Huh. A 19th century alchemist who haunts Seattle, keeping himself vital by periodically draining the blood and spinal fluid of young women. In some ways, I guess, that might be the perfect metaphor for describing our city’s power elite.
I’m a visionary too.
But the doctor says if I stay on my medication, all those visions will disappear. I especially like the one where Tim Eyman morphs into a steaming pile of crap.
OK, that wasn’t a vision since there wasn’t much of a ‘morph’.
(Michael Palin jumps into view and cries: “Nobody expects the Discovery Institute!”)
Goldy, I know God is almighty and all but I think it would take more than one ‘blueprint’ to flesh out a tunnel design…also, pssstt, they’re not called blueprints anymore.
This is one of your more enjoyable/entertaining posts, tangent included!
: … the very notion that local voters might commit more than a half billion dollars a mile to an untested technology is a dramatic tribute to Discovery’s primary mission of promoting the exercise of faith over reason.”
Umm … not to point too fine a point on it, Goldy, but didn’t you very recently throw a temper tantrum over the voters’ refusal to do this very thing (the $500 million per mile light rail tunnel from U. District to Northgate)??!
On the other hand, I can see where a proponent of a giant rollercoaster would also support a $500 million per mile light rail tunnel between two points that have, between them, a grand total of perhaps 100 parking spaces.
Well okay, that’s enough Goldy-bashing for today. After all, he wasn’t serious about the giant rollercoaster, so we have to assume he wasn’t serious about Prop. 1, either.
Here’s an item that IS serious, though. While Seattleites were noisily debating whether to spend $18 billion on light rail tunnels and giant floating bridges, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps of Engineers, and Washington State Department of Ecology were quietly hatching schemes to spend $15 to $20 billion on constructing three gigantic dams in eastern Washington that would create three huge water reservoirs to benefit a few dozen industrial farms.
And you can bet your ass the farmers won’t pay for it. The bill will be sent to … guess who?
Another thing: They don’t have the water to support these projects, either. As ALL the water in the Columbia River is already spoken for, legally and practically, how will they fill Lake Washington-sized reservoirs without taking someone else’s water?
For more details about these massive water projects, see http://columbia-institute.org/....._Dams.html
How Osama bin Laden Could Make A Lot Of Money
Given that Republicans have persistently blocked funding for cargo container inspection, all he has to do is (a) acquire a nuclear weapon and (b) short the S & P 500 index.
Uhhh…wait a minute here.
Not that I don’t consider any notion from the Discovery Institute to be automatically suspect, but the 400 feet of sand underneath downtown Seattle ought to be, if nothing else, one hell of a lot easier to dig through than, f’rinstance, Boston. In New England, there’s about six inches of topsoil and underneath that is solid granite.
In fact, one of the major problems with digging another tunnel underdown is that there are already two of them there to maneuver around: the Metro tunnel and the BNSF mainline. The latter has been there for the better part of a century. Don’t please anyone try to convince me that it’s beyond our abilities in the early 21st century to do something that the railroad folks managed to do in the early 20th!
#8 ArtFart says:
A lot less union regulations back in the early 20th century.
A lot less government regulations back in the early 20th century.
A lot less environmental impact studies back in the 20th century.
A lot less 24 hour news to showcase the number of deaths back in the 20th century.
This is really quite funny. Somehow the Democrat mayor of Seattle’s tunnel is now a discovery institute initiative?
C’mon now. We all remember his head donkness blathering about replacing AWV with a tunnel. He even tried to sell us a “tunnel light” which would have, if mememory serves, been less capacity than the current AWV…
I am in no way letting DI off the hook if they actually move forward with support for a “big dig” Seattle style. It just seems to convienient that the liberals in town are trying to pawn this off as a conservative idea…NOT.
@ 8, the tunneling in Boston did not go through granite. You may be thinking of Manhattan. All those subway and train tunnels were bored through solid granite. Boston, other than Beacon Hill, is mostly fill, which when combined with a very high water table is probably the most difficult medium to build a tunnel through. Seattle is primarily comprised of glacial till, not the most difficult material to work with when building tunnels. Tunnels can be great transit corridors because they add capacity in a third dimension, down, without the drawbacks of going up on an elevated structure.
Anyhow, I disagree with Goldy’s negativity toward tunnels. Yes they’re expensive, but good infrastructure usually costs a lot, but pays back through the extended utility offered over many decades of use. Seattle suffers from a severe lack of forward thinking. Thus we sit here increasingly immobile, watching other cities improve the quality of life of their residents by investing in public infrastructure. Our streets are some of the worst to be found in any city in the country. Every time it rains hard our sewer system fails and dumps raw sewage into the lake and ocean. And anyone who thinks our public transit system is adequate has clearly not been out of the state in awhile.
Just a note. Not sure if this impacts the entire argument. But if I remember right, one of the things we STILL have to do, is replace large chunks of the Alaskan Way seawall downtown along the edge of the peers. The “bonus” of the cut-and-cover tunnel was that one ‘side’ of it would have doubled as the new seawall.
But it seems simple cut-and-cover tunnel was deemed to crazy expensive, so now we’re looking into digging a thousand foot tunnel under downtown to Northgate or some such nonsense assuming we can raise the $25 billion in taxes to pay for it, the Discovery Institute was a little vague on where the insanely large amount of money would come from…again we don’t have the money for a smaller/easier tunnel/ditch, so where we’d get the funds for this I can’t imagine.
But fine, we build the bigger/longer/deeper tunnel, that’s all good. But we STILL have to go back downtown and rip up and replace the leaking/caving in seawall anyway…for another couple hundred million. Did anyone remember this?
Whatever@12
Yep, the sea-wall needs replacing too. Not too sure how much impact replacing that would have on a surface option, but you were right about the 2 for 1 on the cut-and-cover tunnel. Anyone know offhand how that could play out?
Goldy: The Roller Coaster Project may be your baby, but the Venetian Canal to Alki is mine!
We will be forced in the coming decades to invent totally different modes of mass transportation than we are using now (cold fusion, magnetism). Maybe sitting tight for the time being IS the best thing we can do.
Um… a lot of you seem to miss the point. The Big Bore is a political impossibility. It is a nonstarter. It completely ignores the political and economic reality here in Seattle and WA state.
Let’s leave the Discovery Institute angle out of it for just a moment, Goldy … and then, per your comment at 16, I’d ask:
If the point is that some interesting, alternative proposal (could be wacky, but maybe not, just for the sake of argument) is a political and economic impossibility, why is that?
Just asking …
seeking to overthrow the scientific method and “replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions
Kinda like Pope Urban VII! Wow. The Discovery Institute, not even visionary in the context of the 17th Century!
Most of us scientists had sort of hoped Galileo won that war for us back in 1623. Alas, we still have to fight superstitious nonsense 400 years later. You would think, with all of the fruits of 400 years of the scientific method that people benefit from today, that they would have learned better than to mistake Iron Age mythology for reality. Sigh.
Well, almost 500 years now,actually, but who’s counting?
@8 Have you ever tried tunneling through sand?
12 & 13 –
Last I heard, the money is already secured to replace the seawall independently from any AWV improvements, if needed. The lack of construction is because of the AWV limbo.
Some people can make a lot of money working on these stupid projects. That’s the point of the project, not solving transportation problems.
All most people know about the “Discovery Institute” is that it’s a ‘think tank’.
Wow!!! The ‘think tank’ thinks we should make a tunnel!
Deb @17,
I think the question begs to be asked as to why Discovery would advocate for a Big Bore tunnel within the current political context? We have so many pressing transportation priorities, with little resolve to fund them, and Discovery wants to talk about a many billion dollar tunnel?
What’s gonna be really funny is when there are no roads left anywhere going into Seattle and the folks starve to death ’cause the grocery store shelves will be empty.
No roads means no goods being delivered. No food. No clothes. No housing materials. No TV’s. No electronics. No toys. NO JOBS! Yeah, that’ll be fun.
Exactly why leftists can’t be trusted to run/do anything. They’ve never accomplished anything other than run down a few countries (including working hard to ruin this one)…
LOL…#25…like Republicans in general, your lack of intelligence and general grasp on reality is funny! Thanks, I needed that!
You REALLY believe Seattle’s problem is we’re getting rid of all our roads? You’ve driven around and I assume you can point out where we’re ripping OUT roads? Republicans “beliefs” are always the exact opposite of reality. Reality is of course the exact opposite. We’re ADDING roads, not taking roads away. Some Democrats come along and say we should ALSO maybe add some rail on top of our existing roads (you know, like every other major city on planet Earth), and you complain we’re removing ALL roads and will starve! ROFLMAO. Sure Republicans are dumb, but at LEAST they’re funny!
The “reality” is that tunneling goes on all the time. Right now CA is boring 2 tunnels (30ft dia. and 0.80 mile long) to bypass Devil’s Slide (on the coast south of San Franciso) for a cost of $270 million.
England and France managed to bore 3 tunnels (2-25 ft and 1-16 ft dia.) for 31 miles under the English Channel and had to contend with water coming in from the Channel on the English side. Also they managed to build 2 crossovers so they could close a tunnel as needed. The UK crossover at 511 ft long, 59 ft wide and 33 ft high is the largest subsea cavern in the world.
I don’t think much of the Discovery Institute, but c’mon Goldy – try to do some research.
If Deb @ 17 is Rep. Deb Eddy, it’s obvious why she would be defending the pavement-loving dinosaurs (actually, dinosaur disbelievers) at Discovery.
She used to work for them. On regional transportation governance “reform.”.
Yet another argument for why we need to double legislators’ salaries.
When Ted Van Dyk claimed there’s now a “bi-partisan” consensus behind a future Intelligently Designed regional transportation commission http://www.orphanroad.com/blog.....l-agencies could it be Deb is the rabid anti-rail jihad’s token masthead Democrat? Man, that should inspire a lot of confidence from within Rep. Eddy’s (Democratic) base.
Gotta love it when anti-tax Reaganites at the Discovery Institute propose bigbuck$ socialist European solutions (check the tax rate over there, uptown)
The only time the Discovery Institute got on board with transit in this town goes back to the wonderful days of the “accountable” elected Monorail board. And the idiotic Freeway Monorail concept anti-engineers Bruce Chapman and Bruce Agnew were so quick to embrace. They liked the space cadets who inhabited monorail’s unreality for one reason: the opportunity for privatization of public assets.
IE, their rich Republican buddies could make a nice profit off the public’s tax dollars (see: HOT lanes, congestion pricing, dynamic tolling & Lexus Lanes). Nice fundraising strategy for Seattle’s fave right wing cold war-based think tank.
For a good laugh, go back and read Bruce Chapman’s brilliant pre-Iraq invasion column, where he outlines the quintessential Neocon argument for why invading Iraq was not only preferable – it was required.
Goldy stubled upon the local Neocons’ foray into transportation policy. Clearly, their new Microsoft -funded hobby follows a previous approach to the culture wars… and foreign wars, too.
“What’s gonna be really funny is when there are no roads left anywhere going into Seattle and the folks starve to death ’cause the grocery store shelves will be empty.”
Apparently, cmiklich is just about to graduate out of Middle School, where he’s President of the Super-Young Republicans Club.
“Exactly why leftists can’t be trusted to run/do anything. They’ve never accomplished anything other than run down a few countries (including working hard to ruin this one)…”
Jesus H Christ, cmiklich. It was the “Seattle leftists” who raised the gas tax in 03 and 05 to actually pay for the roads you seem so enamoured with. The R’s took the usual dishonest approach: they voted for the projects, and against the taxes needed to pay for them.
Cmiklich: tell us which elected offices Luke Esser, Toby Nixon and Jim Horn occupy now? Don’t spend too long on that one.