BART was born in 1957 – that’s the year the state of California created it.
The older, non-hybrid 60 foot coaches in Sound Transit’s fleet have 57 seats.
1858 was the first time documented that a slip coach was employed. This was essentially insane – instead of having an express train stop at a particular local platform, a car would simply be decoupled at speed and slowed to stop at the platform. I don’t think you’re allowed to do that now.
Did anyone else see that the ground on the Waterfront opened up and swallowed some poor fellow today? Can we tear down the Viaduct already before it collapses? I think it is crazy to say it will stay open until 2016 or later.
And then let us discover that, hey, we don’t need a tunnel.
That’s the hope. It’s a matter of time – remember that there hasn’t even been an EIS, much less significant design work, on the tunnel. The costs will increase dramatically, and it will die. We have to sit back and let it kill itself a bit before we go on the attack, or we’ll destroy our credibility for many.
I have it on fairly good authority that the only thing keeping the viaduct from being red-tagged and shut down is politics. It is not a safe structure, it is another I-35 waiting to happen even without another earthquake.
That said the tunnel is unlikely to retain much support once the EIS process is underway and enough design work is done to get a realistic price range on construction.
Any attempt to build a replacement elevated structure is likely to run into very strong opposition from the city along with a bunch of lawsuits from various parties. (just try to mitigate the visual, park, historic, and shoreline impact of two 45 ft. wide elevated structures in a 100 ft ROW on the waterfront)
Sign up with the People’s Waterfront Coalition to stay abreast of any real news and sit back and wait for all of the plans except for “surface+transit” to crash into reality.
If the universe was really against building another viaduct or structure like it on that waterfront, there’d be an accident or minor earthquake today.
Just crumble it.
… I wish.
I really don’t want Seattle to become the next face of America’s infrastructure failure. If the Viaduct starting to fall down, who knows how much damage it could do. That politics could get in the way of doing the right thing on this is really sickening.
I hope if surface and transit comes back to reality, it isn’t the Alaskan Way/Western Ave couplet that was the front-runner for a brief while. While better than building a tunnel, I think it is a worse situation for the Waterfront/Downtown. I like the current street alignment plans that WSDOT has, I just hope they do it without building the tunnel.