About fifty years ago, Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon stream was buried beneath an elevated expressway. Quite recently, the elevated freeway was ripped down and replaced with a lovely park. I had a pleasure of visiting it tonight.
But, hey, at least when I return to Seattle, I can still experience a dank, dark, festering swamp of poverty and pollution that elevated freeways are so exemplary at providing. Plus, the pleasure of picking up a multi-billion tab for replacing it with and extended driveway/tunnel for SOV drivers from Ballard and West Seattle. Because, even if Seoul (the second largest metropolitan area by population in the world, one of the most important commercial and industrial centers as well) can simply rip down one of its ill-advised elevated freeways, Seattle cannot. Because, Seattle is special.
Meet What Seoul’s Viaduct? What the heck does that mean?
I imagine if they built something like this trench in Seattle that it would be just like Freeway Park, i.e. top notch crack cocaine and handjob habitat.
http://www.urbanrail.net/as/seou/seoul.h…
They built massive amounts of transit before they took it down –
i love that place! such a freakin cool park, and right in the middle of such a busy city. why’re you in seoul, jonathan?
With a tunnel, you have the potential for something like this on top of the tunnel. I just can’t understand why some people want to tear down the viaduct and make it look like Aurora. Would it be cheaper? Sure. Would it be better? Nope.
@ 2: Not necessarily. Providence, Rhode Island has a river running down the middle of it, with the same walls-sidewalk-water feel to it. It is downtown, beautifully lighted, relatively pollution free (you can see fish swimming in a river in the middle of a city!) and-perhaps most useful for keeping the crack and handjob crowd out- connects several pedestrian areas, making it an efficient way to get between points, so people use it most hours of the night.
And it won’t collapse and kill a bunch of people if an earthquake hits it.
@3 nails it: Just taking away the roads, without offering real transit alternatives, is irresponsible.
check history @3: They built massive amounts of transit before they took it down –
True, but we get into this vicious cycle where we keep spending billions to build more freeways simply because we already have so many freeways and we don’t have the will to make the transition to something better. In the process of avoiding the pain of going to a better system, we cement our current system ever further–making the transition pain even worse later.
You see, the problem is we don’t have unlimited billions of dollars at our disposal. It’s going to take $5 billion or so to replace the 520 bridge. Can we at least make sure we’ve got that paid for? Or is the state of Washington now in the business of starting infrastructure projects without knowing how they’ll be funded the way the Bush administration did with foreign wars?
@8: The “they built transit” thing is a red herring as it ignores scale and when those investments were made. No substantial investment in the metro or rail system was made in the downtown and eastern downtown area in the prior 20 or so years, it had basically been built out and fits the scale of the population, current and near-future.
In Seattle, our scale is much less than that of Seoul, so building transit to fit is not a pocketbook-busting affair.
In terms of analogs in Korea, there is also Incheon, which has a major industrial seaport, only one line of high capacity transit, and a waterfront that was redeveloped by removing freeway capacity and one of many many many many major steel plants.
You’re flogging a dead horse. Get the fuck over it and move on.
but if they tear down the viaduct, it will force port traffic to go through downtown on it’s way to the stop lights on 99 in green lake!
Great, you want to use Seoul as a model for urban development?
Well, take a deep breath then, you’re in one of the most polluted cities on the planet with some of the highest levels of dioxin.
All cities are exactly the same. All parts of the city are exactly the same as other parts of the city.
That park looks like a crime magnet, and about as esthetically pleasing and human-scaled as the Los Angeles River culvert. I don’t understand why anyone would want something like that in the (formerly thriving) middle of their downtown. But that’s OK, because we won’t get anything as nice as this; we’re just going to get broad miles of pavement with the wind whipping down them.
Of course, if we could pay American workers the same shitty wages Koreans make, we could build nice stuff. Maybe we should hire more Mexicans to build light rail? If you ask me, the American working class is OVERPAID.
SOV from Ballard? really?
right now if i want to head south on 99 from Ballard, i would take 15th and hop on the viaduct. connecting via Market, Fremont, and Nickerson are all already lousy traffic – the deep bore tunnel does not do Ballard drivers any favors. (Ballard businesses were protesting the deep bore alignment at public meetings months ago.)
#9 So because they built transit in the 70s and 80s it doesn’t count?
They have an extensive transit rail system which gave people an alternative to driving. There is no plan to build any significant transit to serve the people that use our viaduct – the tunnel plan reduces capacity and makes it harder for buses – roads and transit is missing any meaningful transit enhancements.
What percentage of Seoul’s vehicle capacity was carried by their viaduct?
The idea behind tearing down the surface option is not to create an equivalent on the ground, but to reduce capacity. Because increasing capacity just enables terrible decision making.
When the tunnel is finished, and it will be, it won’t be too long before everyone notices that the new waterfront is an excellent place for additional mass transit. Streetcar? Light Rail? Monorail? Buses? Who knows, but you can be assured that some form of MT will happen. Right now, your choice is car, car and more car.
@6 – Was going to mention Providence, RI’s urban revitalization that looks just like this. See also, San Antonio, TX.
@2 – Re: freeway park, I searched every corner of and under every leaf of freeway park during last year’s one night homeless count around 3 or 4am. There was ZERO activity. Nothing. I went in scared based on the rumors and I left thinking freeway park was safest most desolate place all night long.
@8 good one! WE are highway addicts.
Check it out with history…the monorail MT failed because of finances, ohmygod we had to have a 100% certain finance plan, no way the city could have supported the monorail to make the finances better, are you crazy? Let it fail.
That’s the standard for transit.
Then with the DBT they have the audacitiy to say there will be no overruns, to base it on an illegal law, and to throw bazillions from the city into it, even though it is basically a transit free tunnel.
But it’s a highway so a few billion for two miles and 45,000 trips a day without any finance plan is just fine, don’t ask questions.
But $2 billion for a monorail with 23 stations and 75,000 trips a day, ohmygod we can’t possible finance that!
So ahem here we are in the same corridor building a highway at the greatest expense possible.
Oh how green and mighty we are, we are soooo green!
This is a pretty funny comedy of errors actually, except really it’s a tragedy.
“We have to build highways because we haven’t built transit!” There’s our vaunted engineering and technical expertise at work!!
Come to Boston. See what we did with the space where our elevated freeway was before we buried into a tunnel. It’s so freaking amazing. That’s why I love giving a tour of it.
http://www.roadtraffic-technology.com/pr…
That ugly green thing in the left of the photo is totally gone and we now have lovely open park spaces with lots of potential.
Big Dig before and after:
http://inlinethumb23.webshots.com/41750/…
I admit, that I am an SUV owning West Seattlite. However, I only use the viaduct when I ride the bus. I vehemently oppose the tunnel. The tunnel would have made sense if there had been a couple of transit only exits downtown- but that was too much to ask. As for the surface after the tunnel is done, it will be sold off to pay for the enormous cost over runs.
@21: “lots of potential”! Whoo hoo! Who doesn’t love a big heaping pile of potential in the middle of their business district?
What I see when I look at that “after” picture is waste ground. Grass? Why the hell would you want acres of grass in the middle of your CBD? Especially in Boston, with one of the most famous patches of grass in the world just across the way, in Boston Common?
The Big Dig is not a good advertisement for expensive tunnel projects. As a former Boston resident, I have to say I LOVED the old Artery, every dank, dripping inch of it. It made the stroll from downtown up to the North End interesting and exciting. Now it’s just more nothingness. Coming on top of Government Plaza (an earlier era’s nuclear-bomb approach to urban renewal), one has to guess that in about fifty years central Boston will be nothing BUT windswept nothingness.
Cities are cities. They’re SUPPOSED to have traffic and dirt and noise and stuff all crowded together. If you want parks, go out to the fucking suburbs. Don’t bring your suburbs downtown.
“If you want parks, go out to the fucking suburbs. Don’t bring your suburbs downtown”
You hit your head recently?
No. I just don’t understand how people who claim to be “urbanists” look at the Seattle waterfront and think “this would be a terrific place to put another Marymoor Park, if we could just get rid of that stupid road with all those stupid cars full of stupid people”.
@24/26-
Holy shit, you can’t compare Government Center to a park. That was a “Let’s just pave everything, close every business and get rid of all the housing.” project. Burying, diverting, or limiting car traffic through an area doesn’t mean you have to kill every living thing that might remain after 6 o’clock. People in Boston really, really like the new area created by Big Dig (even if they hate the incredible cost/delays/falling ceiling panels of death). It’s not a vast plain of anti-life pavement like Government Center. It’s also not a big field like Boston Common, it’s a corridor for pedestrians and bicyclists, there’s more business opportunity per park acre than around a thick rectangle like the Common/Public Garden area. There are people living next to a park who used to be living next to an elevated freeway, and living next to an elevated freeway sucks.
Boston is not nearly as full of cool fun parks as Seattle, and that (and snowy winters) are why I prefer Seattle by far.
No reason urban environments can’t have green spaces. Your idea of urbanism sounds like something out of Blade Runner.
Coming from the Bay area, I cannot believe Seattle is *still* debating this.
Comparing this to Boston’s Big Dig is specious. That tunnel is not just a downtown bypass – it has multiple exits to downtown. No downtown exits are planned for our tunnel – a crazy plan, considering downtown is where more than half of current viaduct users exit.
An enormous amount of planning went into the Big Dig. The planning for Seattle’s tunnel looks like it was done on a napkin. You can’t just say, “Let’s build a tunnel because I want a park.” You have to ensure it will improve the city’s utility.