How low can we go?
Alaskan Way by Slightly North from our photo pool
The current plan, to be announced tomorrow at an 8:30 AM news conference at the waterfront Trade Center, calls for a deep bore tunnel that will connect the stadium area to Aurora, with access at Royal Brougham and north of the Battery Street Tunnel. Transportation officials supported either another elevated highway or improving existing surface routes: there are a number of current surface routes that are now nearly unusable. The Seattle Chamber of Commerce, among others, supported the tunnel option. I wonder how many of the business owners currently members of the Chamber commute daily between downtown Seattle and points south.
About 100,000 cars travel the viaduct daily. Large commercial vehicles have been off-limits for years, diverting along Marginal Way, due to the frailty of the current structure. Other alternate routes include 1st Avenue South, 4th Avenue South, and I-5. I-5 is a parking lot, and quite a detour for those who live and work along the west edge of the city, while 1st and 4th need major surface and traffic management improvements. Western Avenue and Alaskan Way are also being offered as alternate routes for surface traffic. Both are also overdue for serious maintenance, even overhaul.
With all of these “alternate routes,” why do we need a tunnel at all? Apparently, so that sports fans in Shoreline can get to and from football games without ever having to actually see the downtown. The city might as well name the new tunnel the Seahawk Express Chute and ban actual Seattle residents from using it.
Tune in tomorrow to find out how our fearless leaders plan to pay for this white elephant. The deep bore tunnel is projected to cost about $4 billion. The state has $2.8 billion allocated for a replacement to the viaduct, leaving a $1.2 billion shortfall, minimum. Anyone who was around from the beginning of the bus tunnel project can recall how well projected costs actually line up with observable reality. In Seattle’s case, a big part of the bus tunnels’ problems came from the fact that Seattle is built largely on three things: old Seattle, sand, and garbage. Not really stable materials for tunneling through, but maybe the “deep bore tunnel” is really, really deep. Like, Iceland to Italy deep.
[...] will tear down the Viaduct and replace it with a tunnel. [...]
If you read p. 248 of the proposal, you’ll clearly see that they are planning on finding diamonds while boring deep under Seattle, paying for the rest of the expense. Let’s see, at $1000 a carat, and 2,200 carats in a pound, we’d need to only find around 900 pounds of gem-quality diamonds to pay for the shortfall!
I’m thrilled. It’s visionary. To reclaim that area from a two story high elevated freeway is just nothing but euphoria inducing to me.
yea Seattle!
Please, let’s not even joke about calling it the Seahawk Express Chute. It would take less than 5 seconds for people to nickname it the SEx Chute, not unlike shortening the South Lake Union Trolley to SLUT.
I humbly propose naming it the Vulcan Portal. Such would honor Paul Allen’s corporate stake as the major private landholder & sports team owner at both ends of the project, plus pander to Allen’s fanboy devotion to science fiction names. The City Council has already guaranteed that any viaduct replacement will include Aurora Avenue being lowered and covered to create more driving links and land investment returns for Vulcan’s SLU neighborhood takover developments all the way to its Experience Music/Sci-Fi Project at Seattle Center. Go Seahawks owner!