How does someone live in a city for 35 years and not know this? And then bother to post nonsense based on your admitted lack of knowledge?
The Alaskan Way viaduct is along the west side of Seattle, above the waterfront. I use it to sidestep I-5 and downtown heading south.
ETA: I’ll miss it, it’s quite scenic!
Apparently, the pipes were supposed to be removed after the tests, but the people who did it decided it would be cheaper to leave them in place and just sign papers saying they had removed them.
When they first told us the Viaduct wasn’t safe long-term and they were looking for ways to deal with it, I was in favor of the remove-it-and-don’t-replace-it option, just because putting in a new viaduct or a cut-and-cover tunnel would both involve 10 years without the highway during construction, and I figure that by the end of the 10 years everyone would have worked out new ways to get around, same as they would if it wasn’t replaced.
Then the governor’s office came up with this idea of digging a new tunnel somewhat inland. It’s far more expensive than the other options, but it does have the feature that the Viaduct could be left in place and operating during the construction time. I’d still perfer an option that resulted in fewer car trips somehow, but I’m in the minority on that.
Of course, I’m still mad that they didn’t go ahead with adding a monorail rapid transit system in the late '90s. This city would be so much easier to live in if that were here, even if it was expensive. (Cheaper than tunnels all over the place though. But everyone else seems to like the underground options. I don’t know why.)
Are there any legal ramifications from this? If the tunnelers did their due diligence, and the problem came from someone else’s negligence, who gets the bill for the repairs?
Kinda the same thing here, except the Dig ran right under the elevated road that was being replaced. Step two (after locating the utilities) was to create new (more widely spaced) support columns for the old road, shift the road onto those new supports, take the old columns out, and then start digging.
Apart from the political/financial aspects of the Big Dig, the engineering was phenomenal. Learn about the casing basin sometime.
I remember reading about that project. I always wondered if Seattle’s monorail would scale up successfully. Right now, it’s just two parallel tracks between two stations. (And I remember the old downtown station, even.) If you want to make a regional system out of it you need switches, maintenance yards, the whole deal. How do you switch a monorail from one track to another?
If you want to know why people like tunnels, I’ll give you my cynical answer. And this dates from my Seattle days, too. There was a televised town-hall sort of meeting/show about transit and subway options for the region. Someone in the audience made a comment that I’ve always remembered. He said that when people are trying to gain support for these projects, they always talk about how many cars they will take off the roads. The message they send is that people won’t have to change. Everyone else will be riding the subway, and you (yes, you!) can drive on the suddenly empty freeways. People want subways in tunnels so they won’t have to look at an elevated train. They don’t think about what it will be like to ride it because the riders will be somebody else.
I haven’t heard. There is certainly a lot of fighting starting about who pays. The company that brought the boring machine is apparently known for litigating to keep from paying for delays and overruns.
The new monorail was going to be just that: new. The old Century 21 World’s Fair monorail was going to stay in place and separate. They had designed switching systems for the ends of the lines so that there’d be two tracks, each with trains going only one way. Unfortunately, it wasn’t managed very well financially and was cancelled just before construction would have started.
As a structural engineer who worked on the Big Dig for about 5 years, my opinion is: no, the numbnuts can’t be convinced of their hammerheadedness, because they think they are right. For example, the cable-stay bridge that is a signature feature of the Big Dig? Totally unnecessary. Well, the bridge is necessary but there was no need for it to be a cable-stay. If you look closely, there is another bridge right next to it that is essentially an offramp. It is a basic and relatively cheap concrete box girder design. The cable-stay could’ve been a box girder design too, except that the powers that be decided that they wanted a beautiful, signature and needlessly expensive cable-stay bridge. So that’s what they got and the taxpayers paid for a lot of unneeded design and construction. Although some would argue that the beauty is worth the expense. I believe in “form follows function” so it bugs the heck out of me.
I’m sure that something could be figured out, but again, it probably depends on what the powers that be want, not what makes actual sense from an engineering standpoint.
I’d like to think that civil engineering is not a practice in autistic OCD. 
From my experience, we civil engineers do not like to design things that don’t make sense, but if you give us no other choice we’ll do our best, but it may not turn out well because it was a stoopid idea to begin with!
Many years ago, I saw a hearing or meeting or something where one of the attendees put forth a transit idea that I found quite fascinating, but no one else seemed to have any interest in.
He called it a “terrafoil”, which was essentially a train in sticks. The tracks and carriage were all below street level, the cars rode on struts that rose through a slot in the street and carried them above the level of traffic. Presumably, the carriage tracks would descend to the stations so that passengers would not have to use elevators or a lot of stairs to get to the street.
Not sure how wide the slots would have to be, but I would think they would be designed to not inconvenience motorists (the slots would be the only visible feature of a terrafoil’s presence when no cars are about). They would only be a problem for cyclists, but everyone seems to hate them anyway.
Sorry, I did not really mean to insult the people who use whatever things have replaced slide rules, T-squares and compasses, I guess the real villains are the ones who say, “oh, that option sounds like a good idea” and push forward with it.
I’d be interested to see how far they got in the engineering, routes, etc. There are other monorails, of course, but places like Disneyland seem to have them more as a curiosity; it’s another thing to see how they hold up in a big city with tens of thousands of riders. There’s one in Las Vegas, but it also seems like more of a tourist thing.
Interesting. I had noticed the bridge next to the Zakim; never really knew that it was done totally for looks, though. I heard somewhere that the arrangement of the cables was somewhat compromised by having to build it while the old truss bridge was still there. Back when it was going up, a friend commented that the towers weren’t being built evenly. (Progress on one always seemed to be a couple months behind the other.) He figured they were using the same concrete molds for both, so they they saved a couple bucks, anyway.
I’ve never been all that impressed with the Zakim Bridge. It’s not that pretty, and organizers seemed proud that it was the widest asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world. Who the hell brags about how wide a bridge is?
So there’d be slots running all over the city, and every now and then some posts would come cruising down the slot with a train on top of them?
I can see a few problems. If the posts are thick enough to support a train, the slot might be wide enough to swallow a foot or a car tire. Even if you could drive over the slot, you’d run the risk of the posts smacking into you when the train went overhead. And if anything broke, you’d have people stranded 20 feet in the air.
And when I did that, it appeared that the Alaskan Way viaduct did go to West Seatte.
I only lived in Seattle proper from birth until about 9 months of age. After that we lived in Lake City & Bellevue, and as an adult I lived in Bellingham, Deming, Kent and Tulalip. I don’t believe I ever did anything with the viaduct except drive under it on the way to the ferries.
So, since it’s been almost 25 years since I’ve been there, and the map I looked at (see above) did seem to make it go to West Seattle, I asked a question. I am very sorry it hurt your feelings.
No offense taken, eschereal. Even if this is The Pit. 
Whenever I heard that, my standard reply was, “Yeah, and it’s also the shortest!”*
*I have no actual proof of this, but I would be very surprised to find it’s not the shortest.
For shit’s sake.
http://www.kirotv.com/news/news/wsdot-acknowledges-theres-risk-bertha-could-be-aba/nfkr7/
Ah, some good news on this front. They have found a site of archaeological interest while digging out the boring machine. Perhaps this will force them to give up on the tunnel project.
Hasn’t stopped Crossrailin London. But very different mindsets, I imagine.
SEASHELLS! Near the water! Who would’ve thought? By all means, let’s grind this thing to a halt for months while archaeologists investigate.
Considering that it was only a few months ago that construction on an apartment complex in downtown Seattle turned up an intact wooly mammoth tusk, the caution isn’t entirely unwarranted.
London is full of people whose families have lived there across scores of generations. The Seattle area has a bunch of those, who raise a fuss when these here newcomers start mucking about with their ancestors.
I was responding to a post from April, which seems kind of pointless, so I’ll delete this.
If this project was happening by me it would just be another example of laughable corruption, is everyone entirely sure there aren’t ties between the project companies and government? heh.
All these Pit threads are tying together so well that I expect Stephen King to have engineered it.