A mere 225 million? Jeff Bezos has that kind of money under his sofa cushions. Send Jenny Durkan around to his place with cardboard sign and a tin cup to rattle.

Within living memory, we had the technology to raise money for projects like this no problem. But the world built in the mid 20th century might as well be Atlantis and we live among its ruins.

@2,
That is fascinating. I've ridden through that tunnel on the Empire Builder (Amtrak). Didn't know it was dug by hand.

@3,
Like the quote.

Dreaming is much maligned.

@2 The Great Northern tunnel is above the water table, is half as long as the SR-99 tunnel, and has less than a third of the cross-sectional area.

When a worker on the Great Northern keeled over, they could just send in another worker. When debris wrecked the bearings on Bertha, an oversized boring machine of untested design from an inexperience firm, there was no backup machine to send in. Or any way to back her out, for that matter. And the Great Northern wasn't unfortunate to have sinkholes develop near it during construciton, either.

Absent delays for design flaws and unpredictable hydrology, the SR-99 took about a year and a half to dig, 25% faster than the Great Northern while clearing six times the volume of earth.

Much of the cost overrun for SR-99 is down to the decision to dig one huge tunnel with unproven machinery from a second-tier provider, instead of two parallel tunnels using standard tech from someone like Herrenknecht.

All of the tunnels for Link Light Rail have come in on time and under budget. Modern civil engineering can be fast and affordable if you don't burden it with a bunch of stupid decisions up front.

Charles, regarding the need to reanimate the West Seattle Bridge, a lot of people who live on that peninsula have to drive to work in places other than downtown, e.g., the Eastside, Snohomish County, North Seattle, locations that would take as long as 1.5-2 hours to get to by public transportation. People in neighborhoods all over the city drive to far away places to get to work and have been fortunate enough to not have their bridges fail them......yet., hello ballard bridge, hello aurora bridge, hello ship canal bridge; they can knock on wood, or rather cracked cement:) They would also demand bridge repair if not replacement if similar misfortune fell upon them.

As far as other transportation options, West Seattle has till 2030-2035 to get light rail and an affordable duck taped bridge at the least, may relieve the huge traffic backups in Highland Park and South Park until light rail gives us a viable option to reach employment centers beyond downtown.

In the bigger scheme of whether there will be cars available in the future 2050 or so....yes, if we're still alive. At least in America we will. Not enough political will to build public transportation in the states like there is in Europe and Asia. We like our Freedum on the road.

Look, I used to build bridges for a living (and airports, roads, and so on).

Even I think this is a bad idea.

It's time to reevaluate why we have a bridge, and what function(s) the bridge NEEDS to meet, not "so people can drive a short commute".

There are many types of bridges, and they all have their pros and cons. We're just throwing good money after bad, right now.

@2 The economy is also about 4 times the size it was in 1980.

I think maybe a better theory is that we don't collect as much tax revenue as we used to and have shifted what we do collect towards the military. As recently as the last economic fiasco, federal grants and whatnot were austeritied out of the budget and never put back and that was just the culmination of a project begun 40 years ago.

The spectacle of Jerry Jones's ridiculous boat bobbing in Elliot Bay is our consolation. Back when Eisenhower was running the place, we'd have taxed the crap out of that asshole and his boat would be only, like 80 feet long instead.

@10 Since the '70s we've also been letting our national infrastructure crumble instead of replacing it on schedule, or even maintaining it properly. You don't need to be a civic planning nerd to realize that's going to result in more and more emergencies, ever more projects to address emergencies, and ever higher average costs.

Step 1: Tear it down
Step 2: Spin off West Seattle into its own city
Step 3: Stop hearing West Seattlites constantly whine about the bridge

@7 Light rail is scheduled to complete in 2030 for West Seattle and 2035 for Ballard.

I remember when this thing opened in the 80's, and there was a big kerfuffle about how it was already too small. It was supposed to be called the West Seattle Freeway, but the lanes were too narrow to qualify, so it became a "Bridge". Regardless, it's a seismic catastrophe waiting to happen in it's current state, and a replacement would still present the same challenges.
Tear it down, rework the surface streets (with eminent domain if needed) and build shorter spans over the waterway.

@13 ftw

An entire front-page post, more than a dozen comments (and counting!), and not one word about the actual engineering problems with the West Seattle Bridge.

This may well be the paradigmatic example of The Stranger's modern attempts to cover politics.

@17 When you have both an engineering problem and a political problem, it's not unreasonable to devote a blog post to the latter when the former has been comprehensively covered in previous articles and there is no new information to add to it.

Last I checked, there are still a lot of cars in Queens and Brooklyn, even though NYC has all the public transportation options we lack. The same is true of Paris, Amsterdam, and Barcelona, where I've spent time. And even though the Netherlands is a very bike friendly place, if you leave the city, as we did, and go out in the country more, everybody is getting around in cars.

Perhaps the role of the car in the USA will be de-emphasized 50-100 years from now (see e.g., the increasing popularity of ebikes for shorter trips), but I'll be shocked if some kind of car doesn't have a role to play. And if cleaner car tech comes online, that role could be very similar to what we have now.

Think about Raymond Williams' notion of emergent, dominant, and residual cultural formations. At any time, these three cultural strands overlap at varying degrees of intensity. Cars were certainly a part of the dominant cultural formation of the 20th century (especially in the USA, but also all over the world). But even if cars are trending into a residual cultural artifact, which is far from certain, I expect they'll be central to our lives for the rest of my life (maybe 30-35 more years if I'm lucky). So like it or not, that infrastructure will need to be addressed.

Say what you will about the 99 tunnel. It took a long time. It was expensive. Perhaps it wasn't needed. But in my experience, it works really well. I expect we'll be happy to have it over the next 50-100 years. The same is true of the WS bridge. Once you build something like that, you can't go backwards. from. Would they tear down the Brooklyn Bridge or the Williamsburg bridge? Of course not.

I just wish they'd put a bike lane from Columbian Way on Lower Spokane Street in Beacon Hill, so I didn't have to detour 1.7 miles through Beacon Hill and SODO to bike to WS from my house.

If more of that sort of infrastructure was in place, then it might be an easier sell to remove some of this car-centric infrastructure.

Not that I'm the King of Grammar or anything, and not that The Stranger is The New Yorker or anything, but I would have edited your "further and further into the future" to "farther and farther."

Remember when the West Seattle Bridge was touted as an engineering marvel and earthquake-proof?

@14, I'm well aware that those are the official dates for light rail completion. I was factoring in the possibility of revenue shortfalls for sound transit due to the economic crash that some link projects will be delayed a few years. So I'm not ruling out the possibility that West Seattle and Ballard will be delayed due the the revenue shortfalls.

@19 Everyone who cycles regularly has an "I just wish" about the city's bike routes, and they're all different. This is why there are comprehensive plans (for bikes and for any other transit network) and this is also why nobody likes the comprehensive plans-- they can't cover the long tail of our "I just wish"es.

Much of the hoopla about the bridge comes from people who have moved to West Seattle because of it. Maybe some of you remember when West Seattle was considered remote and hard to get to. I moved to Seattle (West Seattle) in the mid-80s. It was like living in an isolated time-warp. Lots and lots of post-war, very affordable cracker box houses that often featured a picture window with a gorgeous view of the Sound and mountains. When that bridge opened, people discovered those houses, and the little $60K cracker boxes started selling for upwards of a half-million in about five years.

But people weren't going to move there unless it was more convenient to get there and elsewhere from it. I worked downtown and public transportation wasn't so great in WS unless you worked 9 to 5, Monday - Friday (I didn't). I finally moved downtown (Belltown) after the Blizzard of 1990 (a week of not knowing whether a bus was coming or not) so that I wouldn't have to depend on buses to get to work. I think I remember cars being abandoned on the bridge during that snowstorm.

Now, all of those people who moved to accessible West Seattle will be greatly inconvenienced if the bridge goes away,

@18: There is no useful information in the front-page post simply because any such information would completely invalidate the post's central claim:

"There is no difference between the way SDOT is handling the West Seattle Bridge mess, and the way Trump and the GOP is handling the pandemic."

That's one of the bigger and nastier political lies The Stranger has published of late, which is really saying something. From the day they closed the bridge, SDOT has been as forthright as the facts allowed. SDOT has organized stabilizing the bridge, planned for repair or replacement, and updated budget estimates whenever warranted. By contrast, Trump has done worse than nothing towards containing and eliminating COVID-19, by constantly spreading misinformation about it, and then attacking people -- including public health officials -- who contradict his false information.

Recent losers of Seattle's civic debates are themselves most like Trump: unable/unwilling to understand why they just keep on losing, they lash out in impotent rage against the victors, often smearing those victors with false comparisons to Trump.

@15 "Tear it down, rework the surface streets (with eminent domain if needed) and build shorter spans over the waterway."

This is so obviously the easiest solution I don't see what the rest of the discussion is for. But knowing Seattle we'll dig a freaking tunnel or build and aerial tramway or something.

@27: The Duwamish is a navigable waterway, so per federal law, any bridge over it must either rise at least as high as the current West Seattle Bridge span, or be a drawbridge, like the Spokane Street Bridge.

Also, there has yet been any engineering reason found to justify the immmense cost of tearing down the current structure.