I just want to make it clear to the rest of the state that since the rejection of the tunnel and rebuild options at the polls, a consensus had been building in Seattle for the less expensive, surface/transit option to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct. And now the state is essentially imposing the most expensive option, a deep bore tunnel.
Strange.
All I can say is that state and city leaders better find the extra couple billion dollars from somewhere other than Seattle taxpayers, because if we’re forced to pick up the tab ourselves, there’s going to be an awful lot of resentment about being forced to pay so that north/south drivers can get through the downtown a few minutes faster.
Seattle taxpayers are extremely generous; we’re not shy about paying for infrastructure and services we want, and we’ve a long history of quietly subsidizing infrastructure and services in the rest of the state. But if you’re wondering why Seattle needs a $4.3 billion tunnel when a $2.8 billion alternative would do, don’t look at us.
Given the choice, I’d rather spend the extra couple billion dollars building light rail from West Seattle to the downtown, and onward to Ballard. But it doesn’t look like I’ll be given that choice.
Seattle taxpayers are extremely generous; we’re not shy about paying for infrastructure and services we want, and we’ve a long history of quietly subsidizing infrastructure and services in the rest of the state. But if you’re wondering why Seattle needs a $4.3 billion tunnel when a $2.8 billion alternative would do, don’t look at us.
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Couldn’t agree more. With all the other levies taxpayers have taken on, this is too much. It also flies in the face, as you note, of what the voters have already said regarding a tunnel. So why does Seattle need a more expensive tunnel? Business interests, pure and simple.
Oh, I completely disagree with the both of you. I have never favored a street level road. We are so far behind the times it is ridiculous.
Seattleites and their politicians are not generous with the money either when it comes to public transportation or the nature. Read: Commons Park, Tunnel Option, etc.
This is by far the best alternative, opening up numerous other options for getting around the city. Frankly, this should have been done 20 years ago at 1/1000th of the cost. Unfortunately, those generous Seattleites and the politicians were too greedy with taxpayer money.
Thank goodness Seattle and Washington has decided to start to make us a better, world class city.
Now, more major public transportation please. Light Rail to EVERYWHERE!
In one of the articles yesterday they mentioned a possible special tax district to help pay for the Big Bore.
Could they possibly have meant the developers and condo owners near the (current) viaduct who will see major increases in their property values with the improved waterfront view? After all, they are the ones who will see the most financial benefit from this boondoggle.
Completely agree with #2.
I was completely disappointed when the surface/transit option was picked. I have a very hard time seeing that as anything other than a traffic nightmare, being a frequent traveler of the current surface option in that area.
Everyone is ready for a compromise. Two years ago, I commented to friends, and perhaps here, that the process would grind along until people were so tired that they would accept compromise, any compromise. There will be exceptions of course, probably from those with the positions most dug in throughout this discussion.
What’s troubling is the survival of the false notion that the Viaduct only serves people driving in the individual cars driving from West Seattle to Ballard. I think this is a very simplistic view of traffic and needs, based on an ideological point of view; e.g. all roads are bad. I believe it comes from folks who only casually use the viaduct to go places.
I invite anyone to stand on the corner of Royal Brougham and 1st ave from 6am to about 8am. Ask any of the folks passing by why they don’t prefer another route to I-90.
The main issue with the original tunnel was that construction would be so disruptive for so long that it would run business out of town, including and especially trade. For our city’s developer lobby, that was okay, but we see clearly the lack of sustainability in their agenda.
But the public fear and skepticism of the old tunnel idea is likely rooted in the experience of the bus tunnel; lots of small businesses went under as a result, and some would argue this was planned by Seattle’s boosters to “revitalize” downtown. No one criticizing the idea of replacing the highway seems to have had a problem with a bore tunnel for transit, so I hope they don’t make an argument based upon seismic or engineering or cost concerns.
Yes it is expensive, but eventually, one level could be a two way route for vehicles and the other for some kind of transit–build in the ability to convert over eventually, and we are on the way to phasing out over time the mass dependence on the automobile.
It’s also worth noting that the old tunnel, flawed as it was, received slightly more support then the “no/no” vote in the referendum. This takes the wind out of any argument that the public is being forced to swallow a bitter pill, if the argument is promulgated by those interpreting a “no/no” vote as a vote for “surface transit”.
If the feds are putting money into public works, this would be the place to do it, along with the South Park Bridge, which is rated even lower then the Viaduct as far as stability.
Light Rail for West Seattle, sure the actual train is the ultimate goal, but West Seattle will be connected to LINK Light Rail by the end of the year. Metro is proposing to replace the 39, keeping the Seward Park leg, but service south of Othello will be cut, as well as Downtown Seattle, but will come close as it serves at least Lander st station before running to West Seattle. The 50 was a bus route that ran between Columbia City and West Seattle without going Downtown. I thought Metro starting to deploy smaller buses would save it, but instead they twinked it a little, instead of West Seattle Junciton, it terminated in White Center, and only a peak-hour only. Then it was cut when I-695 has passed. Every Metro survey I participated in, I suggested bringing this route back in some form. As there have been times I needed to catch a bus to West Seattle and had to go through Downtown first.
http://transit.metrokc.gov/up/.....sp-aj.html
http://transit.metrokc.gov/up/.....dPark.html
Now can Light Rail get to West Seattle. Theoretically, yes. It did once before, but requires a low-level bridge. There is danger in that, but just base a new one on the current low-level design. That will deter future Rolf Neslunds.(He was the harbor pilot who was responsible for the collision that damaged the low-level bridge that led to the high-level one being built, June 11, 1978).
Both LRT and a Deep Bore tunnel for the viaduct should have been done decades ago. Now there was a rumor that Governor Dan Evans wanted to demolish the viaduct in the 70s. Wonder if that was true.
As someone who preferred a minimalist tear-down surface and transit option rather than the surface-on-steroids plan crafted by WSDOT, I could accept an expensive tunnel as a compromise if it didn’t forestall the possibility of future transit on the corridor.
There’s not a lot of room underground for more tunnels, and we’re taking one of the remaining opportunities and filling it entirely with cars. Where will West Seattle to Ballard light rail go now? The central DSTT isn’t big enough to carry Central Link, East Link, and some future West Link. I also don’t see how once the new tunnel is all-cars it will ever be politically possible to convert part of it to rail. The decision made yesterday, if it becomes reality, will kill any future possibility of underground light rail, and we’ll be lucky to end up with a surface or elevated line that has poor integration with the existing system.
We should demand that any tunnel have space reserved for transit, even if it ends up being BRT in the short run until Sound Transit can cobble together money for a rail extension.
Also, I wonder how the existing Metro Bus Routes using the Viaduct will be affected by the tunnel? Will they run down via 1st Ave. Several bus routes, including Routes 121, 122, and 125 use the Viaduct now. Might be a bonus. I am in favor of Metro using Double Deckers wherever possible on routes that use Downtown Seattle to boost the number of buses that could be squeezed through Downtown streets. The Viaduct is one obstruction preventing this. Community Transit is going with Double Deckers, but the overpasses on Interstate 5 are much higher. The type of Double Decker they use, by the way, is 14ft tall.
We still have room for cobblestone paths and donkey carts.
I think doing the tunnel is a bold move that will serve future generations well. I was disappointed a few years ago when we stopped the monorail in its tracks, mostly because it had been hijacked by incompetent fools. But that’s history and now we must move on.
The ‘surface only’ option was never going to happen. Can you IMAGINE the traffic on Monday morning trying to get into downtown from West Seattle with the viaduct gone and just a standard surface road (which we have now, many of them) with stoplights? That’s a non-starter.
I KNOW no one wants to pay for stuff. But you have two options. Either PAY for the infrastructure, or just shut the hell up and enjoy your 4 hour commute. And of COURSE anything will be disruptive while you’ll building it…there is no magic wand to eliminate that, that’s just reality. Get over it.
Don’t be surprised when the cost overruns hit. It’s a bit damp down there.
We were waist deep in the big muddy; but the big fool says to push on.
#12 – Tru nuff. But I think in the year 2009 we have the technology to water proof concrete…and add a drain. So I think we’re ok as long as the engineers start out understanding that tunnels might hit water…and I think that’s a GENERAL assumption with EVERY tunnel, given that they’re, well, tunnels…underground and all.
How many huge complications and cost overruns have occurred specifically in the Beacon Hill tunnel? Not light rail ‘in general’, but in digging that tunnel? Far as I’ve heard, that’s gone pretty smoothly (as smooth as any project that large).
Seattle has a weird kind of democracy. We voted against a stadium and now we’re paying taxes for two stadiums. We voted against a tunnel and now we’re gonna pay taxes for a tunnel. This all seems very fishy.
14, did not here much about cost overuns in the Beacon Hill tunnel, but there was one construction-related death that I know of, when a supply vehicle carrying the construction crew into the tunnel crashed.
As for the Beacon Hill Tunnel itself, the Discovery Institute has been using it in their propaganda blogs pushing their Deep-Bore tunnel solution.
Seattle has a weird kind of democracy. We voted against a stadium and now we’re paying taxes for two stadiums. We voted against a tunnel and now we’re gonna pay taxes for a tunnel. This all seems very fishy.
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Yes, just my thoughts. And let’s have a thorough understanding of the benefits, risks, costs, and revenue sources. The latter is still very vague, and we’ll have to know much more.
After all this, then let’s hear what people have to say. They already spoke once on this subject, or so I thought.
@5 If I have to pay for this, why shouldn’t I have cost concerns? And why do you imagine I wouldn’t, or can be talked into believing that what it costs me is irrelevant? If the purpose of incurring the extra expense of a bore tunnel is to save businesses, then why shouldn’t those businesses and their customers pay for it?
It seems to me this is just the tip of the iceberg in a much larger problem. Our whole economy has become a giant cost-shifting scam. Business is no longer about making profits by managing balance sheets; the mantra now is to make money by making someone else pay your costs. That, like nothing-down no-principal no-interest mortgage loans, isn’t sustainable and sooner or later will hit a wall. This practice has become so pervasive that I predict it’s the next bubble that will burst.
@10 What stopped SMP in its tracks was the realization by the people who voted for it that they would actually have to pay for it.
Let’s recap. Seattle voters passed SMP four times at the ballot box. SMP was to be funded by a car tax costing the owner of a typical late-model car $300 to $400 a year. People voted for this figuring they could dodge the tax by registering their cars out of area. For a time, it worked, and SMP was financially foundering because so many people were cheating that the expected revenue wasn’t coming in. (This is apart from the cost overruns, which was another issue.) When the Legislature closed the tax loophole, the people demanded a revote and voted to kill SMP. It turned out they wanted it only if it was going to be free.
It’s hard to believe voters are so stupid that they think a multibillion-dollar project can be built for nothing, but apparently they are. There is evidence for that all over the place — in the school initiatives they voted for while simultaneously voting against the sales tax increase to pay for them; in the light rail they voted for, apparently because they swallowed the ridiculous propaganda that an $11 billion project can be built by taxing 1 million households $69 a year for 20 years (the math doesn’t work; try it yourself and see).
Well, it was the same with the monorail. People voted for it because they thought they could get it for nothing. When they had to pay for it, they voted against it.
Now we are in the early stages of substituting a costlier tunnel for a replacement viaduct that’s already paid for with the higher gas taxes voters agreed to pay. What do you think will happen when the public realizes that the state money from the gas tax increase isn’t enough to pay for this tunnel, and they’ll have to pony up additional taxes for it?
This drama isn’t over, it’s just beginning.
@11 Of course we have to pay for things, but we do have a choice about paying extra for a tunnel whose only function is to make downtown prettier. That part of the cost is optional. And being optional, it’s debatable. The money is already there to build a viaduct. If you want to spend more for a tunnel, I say, pay for it yourself and don’t come to me for the money. The parade of people dunning me for money for civic projects is endless. The supply of money I have to give them is not.
My property taxes have tripled since I moved into this hole. That’s why. And I’m sick of it.
And before anyone says the tunnel won’t raise property taxes, let me say that if you think the downtown interests won’t try to dump the tunnel costs on homeowners by drawing the LID boundary all the way out to the county line, I know a guy who wants to sell you some Florida swampland.
@17 — 75% of us voted against paying taxes for a basketball arena, and what are the politicians talking about? Spending our money to get an NBA expansion team here. But it would be a mistake to just blame the politicians; they’re merely responding to the money, power, and influence that runs our community. This area’s real power structure is hidden, although we generally know who the power elite are, and they can not be trusted. We must be eternally vigilant against their greedy machinations against our pocketbooks.
What Seattle and King County do with their transportation dollars is completely up to those jurisdictions. However, the state has a vested interest in improving accessibility to the port and helping people get through Seattle. This is by far the best option when you look at it that way. Future generations will thank the leaders of today for making a tough decision that benefits everybody. I’m excited to see what our renovated waterfront will look like without the eyesore that is the viaduct. Bored option has been done in many east coast and European cities.
My property taxes have tripled since I moved into this hole. That’s why. And I’m sick of it.
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Just for some perspective, north of N 85th Street NE in Greenwood in Seattle the homes don’t have sidewalks. It means people have to share the streets with autos. It’s been this way for decades. When people in these and similar areas hear about turning Seattle into a “world class” city through the creation of a Seattle waterfront tunnel project that will drive up their taxes, they look out their front window and wonder. Throughout these older neighborhoods with working class heritage many of the homes are owned by people on fixed income or a growing number with no income because of the economy. NBA teams and waterfront tunnels and other tax-sucking projects make their prospects in Seattle worse, not better.
Ok, first off – you do know that the $4.3 billion price tag covers everything but the kitchen sink? They’ve basically just stuck the whole wish list together and added it up, so it’s not easy to compare to any costs they’ve given in the past unless you break it all out again.
One project in New York is the Tunnel to Nowhere. A double deck subway tunnel that was dumped in one of the rivers in the 1970s, but not totally connected to the New York Subway network until recently, and now they are boring the connections for the second deck, bringing the Long Island Railroad to Grand Central Terminal. The MTA is finally succeeding at something that made sense a 100 years ago for commuters, but the Great Pennsylvania Railroad(which owned the LIRR)/New York Central(which owned Grand Central Terminal) rivalry. They should have it finished by 2015.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Side_Access
Boston’s Big Dig Highway project ruined the chances of a rail tunnel being built that would have made the MBTA’s Commuter Rail Network more effective, as well as boosted the Downeaster(Maine’s hard-fought to get started passenger train) into another regional train, possibly running down the NEC. Currently any transfers have to take the Orange Line between South Station and North Station.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North-South_Rail_Link
If we provide some ability for future transit in the tunnel, I say go for it. I doubt anybody would want to replace the elevated viaduct with an elevated railway, even if the “footprint” might be smaller.
I keep asking the same question, “Why use Seattle as a truckstop?”
The idea of spending huge amounts of money so that people can drive through Seattle rather than around it makes no sense. Even if you built a 12 lane tunnel under Seattle. Aurora ain’t a freeway! How many commercial shippers are dumb enough to use Aurora to ship stuff from Everett to Seatac?
In the real world, people use I99 or Aurora either to find a place to take a cheap room for a few hours, shop at Sears, or eat Korean food. From the south, the choices are more meagre, but I99 is pretty nice to get from White Center to Safeco Field, if you can afford the tickets. Some folks even use this piece of the Alcan to get to Seattle Center or shop at Pike Place Market. The numbers I have seen say no more than 20% of drivers use use this motel and stop light strewn stretch of the Alcan to drive from Everett to Tacoma!
It seems to me that we should stop trying to squeeze more cars through this city. Aurora/99/waterfront boulevard makes sense to me, especially if it improves the use of 15th and Elliott Ave as a route into Seattle form the North. Broadening Montlake/23rd/Rainier to create a parallel boulevard on Seattle’s Eastern slope also seems inevitable if Seattle is ever to have the kind of broad streets that work so well in major East Coast cities ..like Boston’s Commonwealth and Massachusetts Aves.
I assume we will need to do something to provide for freeway traffic going NS. The capacity of Seattle to serve as a freeway is probably already maxed. The only options that make sense are increasing capacity on 405 or getting serious about our last possible NS highway and building 605.
OR we could just lid the whole effin city, let cars drive on the dome and folks walk below in rain free shadows.
There was no consensus building for the surface/transit option except people who read, and agree with, Erica Barnett. Since Goldy felt free to speak for me in that regard, I’ll return the favor and ensure Washingtonians that the aforementioned group is a tiny, albeit vocal, minority.
The vote for the cut-and-cover tunnel (which the newly-announced project is not) was poorly designed and no good analysis can be determined from its results.
Most of us want mass transit, but we also want Ballard and West Seattle to remain connected to the city. We want more than one N-S connector to get people and goods running through the city. Even if you got lucky enough that half the vehicles magically disappeared off the road, that leaves 30,000+ that would have been driving by the Pike Place Market and clogging up Belltown roads… and downtown roads for that matter, for the ones trying to get around the major backups. The surface option was a non-starter touted by people who don’t drive and have no concept of traffic mitigation.
Yes, infrastructure costs are expensive, and it will only cost more the longer we wait.
“Given the choice, I’d rather spend the extra couple billion dollars building light rail from West Seattle to the downtown, and onward to Ballard. But it doesn’t look like I’ll be given that choice.”
Wow, Goldy! That’s really passive aggressive. Are you asking for a choice? Then ask! And I will say, hell no I don’t want you to have a choice. Because then we will have to vote, and with the exception of Prop 1, voting on transportation hasn’t gone that well in King County.
I really get tired of having the high and mighty telling the rest of us what we want. I’m still mad about paying for two stadiums we voted NO on and now this. If the business leaders want all these things, then dammit, they can pay for them. And that means IMHO, a hefty corporate income tax. Otherwise it ends up being homeowners paying property taxes, and people on welfare paying for it with sales taxes.
With regards to the question about where the money is going to come from, isn’t it plausible that consensus to go for the most expensive option was finally attained amongst the leadership impaired political leaders in the region, because they figured Team O would pick up the tab as a stimulus project?
I think the tunnel is stupid, but I doubt anyone in Seattle is going to have to pay full price for the gold plated option.
Bwahahaha. Nice to see how voting for Donks is working for ya. What an idiot. You deserve the financial ass fucking you loser. Anyone who votes for Democrats deserves to be fucked over nice and good.