Here’s your animated, soaring, birds-eye-view of Seattle with smooth-as-lube traffic:
Besides the oceans of cement on either end of the tunnel, here’s what jumps out to me: It’s truly and verily a downtown bypass. And since it would have only four lanes, the same as an average downtown street, it doesn’t even let many vehicles bypass downtown. For the cars that exit, the first portal is far, far south of downtown in SoDo (where you’d have to get off the highway, navigate several streets, and make lots of turns to reach the heart of the city) and the daylight returns far north of downtown (where turning off Aurora Avenue N, backtracking, and then crossing the clusterfuck on Denny Way would take forever). Without exits, it just isn’t a particularly useful chunk of roadway.
But, man, look at those views!
16 goddamn lanes of highway. I hope the initiatives and lawsuits bury this idea under the city forever along with Richard Conlin’s self-destructed career.
Can I assume that the Stranger will work to help every pro-tunnel member of the Council as much as we helped Richard Sanders?
And where would they put the toll plaza(s)? And what provision for inevitable backups, with vehicles getting stuck in the tunnel?
Wow, that animation looks really nice. There’s really a lot of visual details. The downtown skyline, the Pepsi sign when you pop out on Aurora. It’s like GTA: Seattle.
Too bad it’s all wasted tax dollars to generate it. That tunnel won’t be built. It’s poorly designed/conceived with a post WW2 car boom mentality and way, way too expensive.
What strikes me isn’t the bypass aspect, or even the tunnel itself. It’s the enormous swathe that would be cut away at the portals. I can’t watch the video, but the freeze-frame at the start is all concrete as far as they eye can see, right, left and straight ahead. Absolutely impassible. The thing makes I-5 look like someone’s driveway.
I prefer using the animation from Japanese films where the teenagers piloting war robot mechas trick the JDF into entering into the tunnel and then collapse it, drowning them after they explode in the cave in.
Closer to what the tunnel would be like in a level 9.0 earthquake and the resulting hot ash flow on our “flood plains”. Trapped below sea level behind the seven gates of hell with no hope of escape.
seems like a lot of work for 2 lanes each way. in case you didn’t know, WSDOT, there are still traffic lights south (michigan) and north (greenlake) of your freight-mobilizing tunnel.
The portals are large, and take up space in parts of town I am familiar with from riding past on the bus. At the south end, the warehouses by the stadiums. At the north end, the 70’s motels with the mossy swimming pools. And look at that huge Gates Foundation building! It’s like the Pentagon!
Somebody needs to add up the acreage and number of lanes for these 2 enormous interchange portals.
Oh, and tell us again how Green this project is….
@8 it’s so Green that it literally has DOUBLE the carbon emissions and DOUBLE the particulate emissions of the other major alternatives – Surface Plus Transit and Rebuilt Viaduct.
Cause those fans and pumps don’t run themselves from magic fairy dust.
This actually suggests that the tunnel design is well thought through. Let’s get it done already and start transforming our center-city waterfront–sans the ugly, noisy viaduct. There will always be those who oppose one solution or another. Like it or not, cars are a part of our transportation future for a long time to come. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be building alternate transportation options so that, say, in 50 years or so, we can fill the tunnel with dirt and all live happily ever after in our ultra-low-carbon-footprint universe.
I await their video of the tunnel in disaster conditions.
Very lifelike animation EXCEPT for all the pedestrians hanging out on the sidewalks of 99 just north of the tunnel exit near Seattle Center.
Anybody ever seen anyone on those sidewalks (except spare-changers and perhaps sex workers)?
I lived in Boston during the “Big Dig,” when they put I93 underground.
10 years of increased traffic it took. $6 billion over budget.
Listen, I realize the more incendiary the post, the more hits. But rather than using legitimate concerns about the potential impacts as an argument to kill the project, why not look at those potential impacts and see how we might prevent them in their own right? As one of those transit/pedestrian/urbanist/density types, I look at that tabloid headline “…Dump 65,000 More Cars a Day onto Gridlocked Downtown Streets” not as a nightmare but as an opportunity.
Think of those 65,000 (or however many) vehicles like flood waters or the ocean waters. There’s nothing stopping us from doing like the Dutch did and build a dyke. The dyke in this case is (A) organizing and restricting the downtown street grid so that the cars won’t just get dumped on it and (B) transit. Imagine establishing dedicated streetcar/bus lanes on First Ave. Imagine establishing dedicated freight lanes on Alaskan Way. (Not sure that’s feasible, but play with me.) If we make smart and tough choices about our street grid, there won’t be any place for those excess vehicles to dump themselves. The dyke is simply too high.
Part of the genius of Cary Moon’s surface/transit proposal was that many of the vehicle trips would simply disappear. Well, there’s no reason we can’t apply the same principles to a tunnel scenario. And yes, I realize surface/transit is a billion or two cheaper, but going all in on killing the tunnel and then being stuck with a worst-case tunnel if we fail is not a risk I want to take.
It is very telling that the backers of this thing are constantly hiding unpleasant facts.
Where are the toll booths?!!!
What a mess.
And the duel bike paths, one on each side down in Sodo? Right, yeh, I believe that is going to happen…
They need to widen it enough for a shoulder lane. What happens if a car breaks down in there? Or there’s even a small fender bender? You’d think this city would understand the importance of a shoulder after all this time of watching 520 come to a standstill just because Gus forgot to put gas in his ’94 Corolla.
Cornichon @2: And where would they put the toll plaza(s)?
cracked @15: Where are the toll booths?!!!
The tolling would be done the same way the tolling will be done next year with 520. No toll booths, just electronic sensors that debit the driver’s account as they drive along.
“It Will Dump 65,000 More Cars a Day onto Gridlocked Downtown Streets”
Where are you getting this number from? Is it just something you made up? People can come up with statistics to prove anything. 14% of people know that.
I agree with Dom – the state needs to pony up more $ and spring for a downtown entrance/exit.
They really need to do an earthquake simulation video for this.
@13: Yes, the Big Dig was way over budget and way over deadline. But the result is in every other way a success: Traffic through the city is no longer gridlocked, downtown is no longer separated from the waterfront, the traffic noise that drowned out all other city noise is gone and the ride to the airport is a breeze. Plus, a whole bunch of open space has been created.
@14 – “Let’s see what happens” or “let’s imagine” is not a good alternative to an actual plan. I’m blown away that no real traffic simulations have been done.
What’s striking to me is how difficult it will be as a pedestrian to get to the water. It looks like you’ll have access every third of a mile or so. And maybe I have a poor sense of aesthetics, but to me a 6-lane surface highway is no less obnoxious than an elevated one.
I’ll back a tunnel plan that has downtown exits. Then this massive west-side highway won’t be needed.
Gorgeous animation, though. I especially like the sunset at the end.
@21, okay, but I want no more open space: I want that we USE that space, and fucking hope that expensive design team from wherever it was can come up with something dynamic.
The absence of a downtown entrance/exit will pretty much eradicate express bus service in the 99 corridor–particularly for us folks in West Seattle since our express buses use the viaduct for quick entry and departure to and from downtown.
I don’t think the state will pony up for downtown entrances and exits since we’re outnumbered by seattle hating legislators in Olympia.
@2: Toll plazas? What is this, 1970?
Did you know that entire area is already zoned for 8-20 story tall buildings?
No view for you.
Once they build the tunnel, you can kiss your view goodbye.
I love Dom’s spin about the exits. It’s a constant refrain from people who think that’s a real issue with the tunnel. It’s not, complete red herring.
The NB exit on the southern side is better situated than exists now currently.
The SB exit on the northern portal is better situated than exists now currently.
I travel into downtown from north quite often on 99, and I rarely use the DT exits. It’s much easier to take the exit before the battery street tunnel (4 lanes that, kind of like this one!) and then take 5th into the core of DT (which has light timings that make this very fast).
The SB exit at Western is extremely difficult to use, you have to cross through Pike Place to get anywhere. Usable, but annoying and horrible backups.
@24, No, your bus will exit before the tunnel (didn’t the last graphic show dedicated transit on/off?), travel east a few blocks and start it’s route at Union Station, which is a major transit area with dozens of busses in this area most of the day. It’ll most likely be faster and serve DT south of Columbia better. That’s a win.
Schmucky #27, the new NB exit won’t work well for people who work smack dab in the middle of downtown like the present one does—buses will have to snake through a bunch of streets in Sodo at turtle speed with all the traffic that wants to avoid a toll.
My proletarian hardware won’t handle those renderings. Guess that means I’m classed out of the tunnel. (If gas prices and tolls hadn’t already)
@18 that number came from the WSDOT’s own survey, as has been pointed out a goodly number of times. That’s *their* number, not something made up by the anti-tunnel folks.
@31, and to be sort of fair, on the same page Dom pulled that worst-of-three-options figure from, WSDOT said that even the best of their three tolling options would cause too many slowdowns so they wouldn’t toll until it was fixed.
@17 – but wouldn’t there still be booths? All over the Bay Area we use electronic tolling (FastTrak), but it requires you still drive slowly through an open toll-booth with a sensor. The majority of the lanes, however, include attended booths to accept cash, which leads to the real clusterfuck of people trying slowing from highway speeds to a stop, and then to merge to get to their appropriate lane.
@33 not after they use your GPS-tracking cell phone to let you pay that way.
Got cash?
Not after it’s been swiped by Seattle hackers.
Free Lunch @22:
Do you ever get out of your car? Can you think of something that a pedestrian cannot do when confronted with a 6-lane surface highway that he can easily do with an elevated one? Hint: nothing to do with esthetics.
He CANNOT CROSS IT.
And it’s not six lanes but SIXTEEN lanes at its widest point, or the equivalent in impassible concrete, counting all the shoulders and retaining walls and ramps and whatnot. The portals are something like 400 feet wide!
It’s an abomination, and unutterably opposed to everything that a city could or should be. It’s two more giant freeway ramps right in the middle of downtown.
Fuck this tunnel.
@35 – I thought I made that point.
@32, Your talk is pure fantasy. The “worst-of-three-options” figure for tolling is the only realistic figure on the table (the top two are basically the same). The state has no alternative but to charge that much to afford the tunnel, that big of a toll will divert traffic, and the state has no money or plan to deal with mitigation. The page I assume you’re referring to–chapter nine of the SDEIS–says this:
But the cheapest of these tolls, scenario E, can’t produce the $400 million the state needs for the tunnel. “Option E achieves a little over $100 million,” Ron Paanenen, the project coordinator for WSDOT, said at a press briefing earlier this month. “It did not achieve the goal that the legislature requires.”
So the state has to implement one of the others–scenarios A or C–which are very close in cost and will cause almost identical diversion. “We will see if we can reduce the impact of scenario A, which is the one we think is most likely,” Paananen says. But again, there’s no plan for reducing the impacts and no money.
So your claim “they wouldn’t toll until it was fixed” assumes that the state actually has “reasonable optimization measures,” but until there’s more money, which there isn’t, that’s fantasy land.
The higher the toll, the more traffic diversion it causes. The only plan on the table now to pay for this tunnel is with a high toll, and lots of traffic diversion.
@ Will in Seattle:
Re: New waterfront zoning for 8 story buildings…. I knew it! Open space? I don’t think so. And WHO profits from the sale of this “new” land? Where can I learn more about the new zoning?
Tuck the Funnel!
@35, you can’t cross it now. So who cares if you still can’t cross it in 5 years.
@ Will in Seattle:
Re: New waterfront zoning for 8 story buildings…. I knew it! Open space? I don’t think so. And WHO profits from the sale of this “new” land? Where can I learn more about the new zoning?
Tuck the Funnel!
@39 – right now there’s a crosswalk every 400 feet. I can’t find any documentation on the future pedestrian crossings, but judging by the WSDOT Alaskan Way fly-through animation, it looks more like 1500.
#39 there is no crosswalk anywhere on the current surface highway portion of 99, nor are there any crosswalks across any part of the 24 tracks of train yard currently occupying the site where the on/off ramps (omg, 16 lanes of concrete) will be. At the place being complained about as impassable with the tunnel, it is currently impassable already. Nothing changed.
@37, thanks for adding some reporting in your reply to me. Still, in reading the bit in that chapter on how and why they dreamed up some tolling scenarios to kibitz about in the DSEIS, it says they haven’t finalized any or even tried to yet, so for you to say they’re going to have to pick one of these and it will have to be Option E doesn’t seem accurate.
It’s just as you reported O’Brien said when he first read it: this DSEIS doesn’t talk about hard and fast tolling stuff, just generalities.
And I hope it’s a mistake to dismiss me as a fantasist, though of course you’re welcome to.
Oops. You didn’t say it had to be Option E, but that it had to be A or C. No loose ends in this dead thread now, no siree.
@21 the Big Dig was “in every other way a success”? Really? Setting aside the ridiculous time and money overruns, aren’t you forgetting the people who died when it collapsed because they used the wrong kind of cement?