AFAIK the plan would be to move the Al Boccalino building rather than tear it down. Not ideal but not a total tragedy.

FWIW all of the scenarios with a Western/Alaska couplet (surface C, integrated elevated, and bored tunnel) require moving the building.

That said I don’t see the great wall of Chopp or the deep bored tunnel getting much traction. Even with a big bundle of Federal funds to pay for the mess.

John Jensen. While I admire your passion about transit, I think the counterpoint of being able to invest in transit instead of roads is a little extreme. I take transit when I can, but there are plenty of times when it just isn’t practical. While I do use 99 to get into Seattle from Burien, there are plenty of other times when I have to go north of downtown. I always use 99 rather than I-5 since it is clogged.

I don’t find the argument that if the streets are clogged people will carpool or take transit. Nope, they will just leave their house earlier to get to work. Transit or carpooling doesn’t work in all situations.

On top of that, frieght mobility is critical to a thriving economy. Take away two more lanes through Seattle and you begin to choke off the frieght movement in and through the city. That cost eventually becomes greater than the savings in creating a cheaper project. Boxes can’t take the bus or light rail. Like it or not, trucks must be used to transport goods to all the stores in the region. If it costs them more, in time and fuel, then we all will be paying for it in money and CO2 emmissions from those trucks.

It seems that the surface option and couplet are about the same, although with the couplet we lose one of Pioneer Square’s historic buildings.

I really like the expanded streetcar lines being touted in the transit ppt deck…but the commentators above are right: very little of that is included in the project cost.

Not going to rehash all the pros/cons of the tunnel scenarios, but I am amazed that you guys got through a whole discussion of WW materials cost without mentioning the Baltic Dry Index, LOL. Come on, it’s so chic.

My vote is for surface and expanded streetcar lines…although I would go with couplet if they could figure out how to save the Al Boccolino.

And any sort of underground solution is simply too expensive, too demanding of perfection to be feasible. If they want to do crazy tolls, and the price is somehow acceptable, then I’m not going to get that upset. Underground is fine from an urban perspective, see the Big Dig that everyone here is talking about, but it’s an expensive investment — once again — cars. Transportation is the number one emitter of CO2 in the state. But we have an alternative to invest in transit instead of a highway and I think it’s time that we do so especially when talking about a highway within a mile of downtown.

Less people will drive, more will take transit, less greenhouse gases will be emitted, and our waterfront will open up to the city if we replace the Viaduct with surface streets. In terms of half the drivers going to I-5 and the other half to the roads, I disagree. Current drivers will have more incentive to carpool, use I-5 express lanes, and take transit. Any surface option would include transit, downtown street, and I-5 improvements.

It isn’t us/them, you’re right. We can eliminate obvious bottlenecks (like the two lane problem you talk about) and still move to a surface solution.

So you don’t want either of them widened. OK, fine. Why even replace it at all then if we need to focus on transit? Just raze it, close off the Battery St tunnel and let it end at Denny heading south and First Ave heading north. Get a super park and some light rail heading through the space and you’ve saved your self 100s of millions of dollars. I-5 can’t take the added pressure of closing down the viaduct altogether or even making it into a boulevard. You’ve turned I-5 from congested to unusable. Half the cars that use 99 as their main north-south option move to I-5. The other half continue to use the new 99 blvd. Great, so now we have an unusable I-5 and a boulevard that’s bumper to bumper. That makes Seattle seem so great and especially beautiful. I’d be glad to hear that our greatness is not measured by how fast we can drive through it, because we’d be near zero.

I love transit as much as the next guy, but it is not a panacea. Roads have to be part of the equation too. You need a certain level of service to be able to even function. You can’t just kill all roads and expect transit to pick up the entire slack. It’s just not possible.

And it’s nice to think you only have one “destination” to go to so you can live nearby, but that’s not a fact of life and will most likely become increasingly true. Do you live near where you work or where you play? I live and play in Seattle. I work in Issaquah. What if one of those changes? Staying in one job for over 5 years is practically being a lifer. Let’s say you work at Costco for 5 years, then you go to Amazon for another 5 and then to Microsoft for 5 more. Should I sell my house in Issaquah, buy in Seattle, sell in Seattle, buy in Redmond? The only somewhat effective way to move jobs like this and still use transit would be to live in Belltown/Downtown. I love my $500,000 1br condo atop loud nightclubs. I can even buy drugs in the adjoining park. Awesome!

I’m sure I’m coming off as this total pro-roads kind of guy, which I’m totally not. I’m not arguing against transit. I’m arguing for some roads. It’s not a with us/against us situation.

And worldwide demand is way down. Analysts don’t expect relief from China and others adding infrastructure projects. Much of the Chinese spending was already planned for, just moved forward. Compared to building the Three Gorges damn and the Olympic’s infrastucture, the Chinese future demand for steel and concrete is down and will stay down.

One argument is that you’ll have more contractors giving more bids, since they won’t be busy building skyscrapers in downtown Bellevue/Seattle since a lot of those building projects have been canceled. U-Link tunneling is expected to benefit from this.

Obviously we do not have the transit infrastructure yet to replace much of the region’s driving. But investing billions into roads rather than transit is the exact opposite path to that end goal.

With the I-5 chokepoint and losing a high-speed route like the viaduct, you’re gonna begin looking like Vancouver (and without the vastly superior SkyTrain). Once you get a hint of the city limits it’s all city streets and takes forever to get around.

I also find it hard to downplay the benefits of the tunnel when, as the original post mentions, the BigDig, with all it’s bashing during construction has pretty much been a complete success. How can you argue these numbers? Cutting the avg trip from almost 20 mins to just under 3 mins? That’s crazy!

http://www.boston.com/news/traffic/bigdig/articles/2006/02/15/big_dig_benefit_a_quicker_downtown_trip/