The Alaskan Way Viaduct: How Seattle chose the Bertha tunnel alternative 

Ben Dover City planning is amazing and complex. Quite interesting to researcc

it is not they just make it complicated. they made it work 100s of years ago with no technology

Go to China, they build this shit in no time. They don't argue and spew hot air. They just put the TBM in the ground and they keep digging.

@@bmw803 They cut corners and build stuff like shit. All kinds of skyscrapers have collapsed in China because of a lack of building codes.

@@chopchoi They did it in the USSR and other eastern block countries. And to even think that we have pro socialìst/ communist movements in America. Wanna know the future? Look into the past.

It is for me

@@angheritagecebu1121 in CS you can build whatever you want not depending on anybody else's opinion.

Yeet

If you’re not using mods

Cities skylines is basically how things operate in China

ShotgunFelatio As you and I both know The land where the viaduct once stud is going to be worth a shit ton of money

I really love all those people that are against something and only in later days inform themselves. Its always the same.

@@Delibro I do very much prefer those people to people who think they know everything and will not change their minds when hearing another point of view

@@christafranken9170 You are right, but I do prefer people who either inform themselves and then argue, or not inform and be quiet.

@@Delibro no one can know everything though. Informing yourself isn't something you do at some point to then know everything on the subject. We form opinions based on what we know, with the information we have gathered up tot that point. I don't think it is reasonable to exclude people who aren't the most reputable experts on a subject from the conversation. And who would decide hoe much of an expert one would need to be to be allowed to say something? Would OP first need to get a degree in city planning before being allowed an opinion on her own city? Or do they just need to know the same amount on the subject you do? You do seem to think you are allowed to express your opinion..

Hopefully now that people can see how short sighted this is, they will support rebuilding the viaduct, better and with another exit downtown. With the tunnel and the viaduct, work could then begin to fix I-5.

SO hows the traffic these days? with only I-5 being open? :)

Wouldn't people then be naturally forced to condsider telecommuting, carpooling, transit? I think we could make do with a lot less capacity by using I wiser.

I would guess i5 has about double the capacity as 99 but your point still stands. Tearing down 99 before the tunnel was built would have been a complete nightmare. I cant wait to see what it all looks like after everything is complete.

@@tannerrobinson5110 The tunnel is open now and they are in the process of tearing down the viaduct. They never had just i5 open except for a single weekend I think. Traffic is still pretty bad regardless though. Not much you can do in a region where almost all of the commuting goes north and south.

They should have that on the sign on the way into town: "Seattle: Home to some unique infrastructure!" :)

Yeah, exciting for you. Not so exciting for the city's tax-payers. Madness like that tunnel are one reason I moved away from Seattle in 2012.

kirokyo - In San Francisco, the Embarcadero viaduct didn’t carry through traffic. The only people who wanted to preserve it were Chinatown merchants. That structure was originally conceived as part of a highway bypassing all of San Francisco from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate along the waterfront. Thankfully, citizen opposition killed that scheme leaving just a little piece of it as an express route to Chinatown. The situation in Seattle was quite different, as the viaduct was primarily a bypass of the central city. The tunnel preserves the bypass function while rehabilitating Alaskan Way. It is clearly the right solution to the problem.

It’s gonna be “awesome” when we have our next major quake and that tunnel that was dug through essentially quicksand gets moved back and forth and up and down. It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the drivers stuck in it when that happens. Will the tunnel break? Flood? Sink? Stay tuned.

@grafvonstauffenburg but those tunnels weren't built inside of loose backfill like the Seattle one was. it was so bad that they had to continue draining the sand and water slurry that kept spilling in while they repaired the boring machine because they had to cut a hole in from the top. The current tunnel has already been leaking water in it, which is why you can see evidence of it when going in the northbound section on the walls.

contermann2, ditto, but as a public policy student.

I've always thought they should have replaced the viaduct with nothing, though that is maybe why I am not an urban planner. I would be terrible at managing the interests of the (unfortunately huge) car owner stakeholders.

@@AmbientMorality Ha, no one else thought of that.

Thanks! And me too!

It just did.

Was that overflow from the House and Senate in Washington? Sounds like about all that is produced there for several decades now.

Thanks!

You mean how China builds shit in 3 months time like it's nothing?

The farther over budget it goes, longer it takes for residents to forget about it. This is a fact.

The best example of the Seattle process at work is actually on the other side of Washington state, in Spokane, which has been trying to build a north-south freeway bypass since 1946. Initial attempts (which started a full 18 years after the traffic engineers determined the need for a bypass) to build a (terribly planned) freeway through the middle of several neighborhoods understandably failed (although the exit from the existing I-90 freeway at Hamilton Street is massively over-built because of this). After 33 years of further discussion, debate, planning, re-planning, engineering, and re-engineering, the current plan was approved in 1997. The new plan has still necessitated the destruction of several neighborhoods and the relocation of 1000 residents. It will also cross the campus of Spokane Community College, although how it is going to do this has yet to be officially decided. Additionally, construction has been delayed in the Hillyard area after a series of previously unnoticed antique underground fuel tanks below the former railyard were discovered, which have to be removed in order to construct the freeway. The current scheduled completion date is set for 2029, a mere 83 years after the initial decision to begin planning.

Dave102693 because china owns everything

@daAnder71 You forgot about re education sir

We get it. That tunnel's not going to do very much though when our traffic is nearly as bad as LA's. What we really need is more work on our public transportation so that we're not overwhelmed by the 15-20,000 people that keep moving here every year.

Seattle traffic is AWFUL.

Seattle is not accommodating visitors to the city. Besides tourism, entertainment, sports, there is a big demand that people come for business, medical, government (all levels) and other things. Seattle isn't making the streets easier to drive on, they are eliminating lanes and closing streets to cars. Total insanity. You can't compare to 'Couver because Seattle is Hour Glass shaped with the highest demand to go to the center. They must replace the viaduct and rebuild I-5 to make things functional

Sahil Prasad - Traffic gets worse primarily because population increases so there is more of it. The tunnel project in Seattle won’t make driving easier, but it will make it safer and will make the waterfront a nicer place.

dont worry.. the perpetual lockdown will eliminate traffic until a real pandemic thins the herd

B. Kanishka Guluwita I agree with this comment on a well put together video. Sub from me.

falloutpictures you got to go down on Bertha?

I graduated and live in Seattle.

pretty sure that refers to distance, not elevation

@@waytoobiased I'm pretty sure I knew that and was making a boring (ha) joke

Gardiner Expressway anyone?

Haha i was thinking the same thing

The result is even worse. Toronto basically do nothing at the end.

The public didn't like the idea of dismantling the Gardiner Expressway. At the moment it works, but just like Seattle it cuts people off from our waterfront hense why we have such an under developed waterfront is some areas.

Lmao torontonians, TTC anybody?

No, the opposite. Aboveground should be transit heavy where it's in the public view - and transit vehicles improve safety for roads.

For large metropolitan areas, you can't build enough roads. Whatever road you built will have congestion during rush hour. The more roads you build, the less public transportation is used and you again end up with congestion. As it is, the road is up to the task. If you check traffic data, it is one of the less congested streets, compared to it's surrounding streets.

It's the way City Beautiful said it that urks me too. It makes it sound like after the Embarcadero Freeway was removed, traffic disappeared. TRAFFIC DID NOT DISAPPEAR. Traffic only diverted to the surface streets and clogged up those roads. So, traffic problems DID appear in the form of surface streets that paralleled the freeway that carried a few thousand cars were suddenly carrying tens of thousands of cars. It's unfortunate that this lie of traffic disappearing after the freeway was removed continues to be circulated by anti-car activists, some of who are now trying to legitimize themselves by becoming an urban planner. As a native San Franciscan who lived through the 1989 quake and studied its transportation effects in the region, it's very sad that this lie is becoming the truth. One only needs to read through the newspaper archives to show that this lie is a lie. My experience has been that the anti-car urbanist/planner/etc. will just discount it by saying mainstream media is biased.

puffpuffin1 it's boutique enviormentalism alot of the anti car activists think of. They want to destroy the 345 here in Dallas which connects I-45 to US-75. It along with stemmons freeway forms a nice loop for Dallas. Thankfully stemmons freeway was turned into a tunnel to allow klyde Warren park above ground. But the proposal to connect deep elum with downtown by demolishing the 345 is ridiculous. A better proposal would be to rebuild the 345 or build it underground then turn it into a surface street project.

TheNekoman123 "build it underground then turn it into a surface street project" i don't know about that. In north america, people don't even like the idea of building a tunnel in the first place. people already want to make something the cheapest and most durable as possible. i mean, in dallas, like most cities in america, it's surrounded by a freeway loop that actually works. but people tend to try spending the least money as possible, which, in most cases, they don't even care about traffic. in montreal, they already marked too many intersections with traffic lights (and they are not even timed equally). prior to 2010, there was an expressway interchange in the montreal-north borough that flowed very well until they decided to destroy it because they didn't want to maintain it. result??? they fucked it up with more stupid traffic lights and a bus rapid transit stop, which the entirety of the pius-ix boulevard was meant to be for bus rapid transit, which they still haven't resumed construction. however, if they complete the bus rapid transit, they'll jam the entirety of the primary highway (primary highway because it's signed as highway 125) by reducing it from six-lane to four-lane, plus they'll remove even more parking space, since most of montreal is built with tightly-placed apartment buildings. reason why they want to build a bus rapid transit from this boulevard (the boulevard crosses the entirety of the island of montreal by northwest/southeast by the way) is because they want to give a better advantage to the poorest communities of canada, which they live all along the boulevard, and they want to encourage public transit, while public transit is already bad in the first place. because of quebec's public transit bullshit along with their unnecessary language bullshit, i'm actually seeking to move out of quebec into somewhere else that doesn't feel too bad in north america

Facts

Me too. I'm gonna miss driving northbound on the viaduct 30 feet in the air though

Yeah, wait until the next earthquake hits and the whole tunnel caves in. That'll be fun.

MJT Isn’t a tunnel safer to be in during an earthquake?

MJT Tunnels are one of the safest places to be in an earthquake. Sorry to disappoint 😉

finally a positive person

The project is not completed yet. The city has built the tunnel and finished demolishing the ugly viaduct, but still needs to work on the boulevard with planting new trees, and a new pedestrian zone like the seawall

NOOOO why?