619 WESTERN AVE

DR: What are some of the other cities who have been through this?
CM: The biggest is Seoul, Korea. They took out a highway that had 160,000 cars a day and replaced it with transit and a four-lane street. The Embarcadero in San Francisco: they didn't think they could live without it, but they took it down and now that is one of the best places in San Francisco. Merchants love the local access rather than highway through-put. The West Side Highway in New York: there was a big fight about replacing it to avoid gridlock. The highway fell down and they realized, wait a minute, there's no gridlock, maybe we don't need it. They put in a surface street, maybe not the nicest street in the world, but it shows that a highway can be replaced by a better-connected street and life goes on. Portland took out a waterfront highway and reclaimed their waterfront for people.
DR: So, 2007 was when voters rejected both the tunnel and the elevated highway. Then?
CM: A lot of people at the time said that our side won, because [the surface-street option] was the only option left on the table. But it wasn't that easy.
At that point, the city, county, and state said, OK, we failed the first round, let's start again; let's set up a stakeholder process where we're going to stay in lockstep and come up with a solution together. After a year of study, the two winners were surface/transit/I-5 or a skinnier elevated highway with a lot of transit. A representative sample of the citizen groups involved signed a letter saying, yep, let's do that, and keep the door open to a bored tunnel later if it ends up not providing enough car capacity. We thought we won again!
Christine Gregoire
But then Gregoire checked in with the other people that she works with -- Boeing, the regional Chamber of Commerce, other suburban interests -- and they said, no way, that's crazy, you have to rebuild that highway; you should just do the bored tunnel. The bored tunnel had been rejected by officials because it was too expensive and risky, but they talked Gregoire into it anyway.
That's where the situation's been the past two years: the official preferred alternative is the bored tunnel and they're pursuing it full-force.
DR: This is the juncture that confuses me. Seattle voters spoke. The city and state departments of transportation spoke. Civic groups spoke. Then the governor single-handedly overrode all that?
CM: Yes.
DR: Wow.
CM: I'm giving you my biased view. There were plenty of stakeholders in the 29 citizen groups who liked the bored tunnel from the beginning. But officials were saying, no, you don't understand. That's too expensive. We can't do that. You can't have your cake and eat it too.
The stakeholder process ended in December 2008. On Jan. 13, 2009, Gregoire announced with [former Seattle Mayor Greg] Nickels and [former King County Commissioner Ron] Sims that they're doing the bored tunnel, along with $190 million worth of transit service (that's how they got Sims to go along with it).
DR: What is the legal force behind the tunnel being decided? Is it official now?
CM: It's still not official -- it's a "preferred alternative." It's just that politically it has a lot of momentum. Tunnel supporters want everyone to believe it's past the point of no return. And as you can imagine, after nine years of arguing, people are exhausted and they just want to be done with it.
DR: Has nobody been able to mount serious protest?
CM: Until there was actually a budget, a plan on paper, it was hard to attack the tunnel. Tunnel proponents kept saying, don't worry, the traffic's just going to disappear! It's totally affordable! There's no risk! They spent almost two years in that mode, but the draft EIS [environmental impact statement] came out recently from WSDOT.
Now that the facts are on the table, politicians are forced to confront the reality, not the fantasy. A new citizens' initiative [Move Seattle Smarter] is launching, saying the city can't sign any agreements on the tunnel until there's a full, transparent funding plan and someone steps up to the plate for potential cost overrun.
Seattle Mayor Mike McGinnWSDOT
DR: That's always been Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn's ace in the hole against the tunnel, right? Cost overruns? [McGinn was elected in November 2009 on an anti-tunnel platform.]
CM: Politically, that is what gets people the most irritated, that WSDOT picked this project and then said they're only going to pay a certain amount and the citizens of Seattle will pick up the rest.
The state has agreed to pay $2.4 billion out of an estimated $3.1 billion. They're hoping to get $300 million from the port, but that's not secure yet. They're going to toll the tunnel, so they're going to float bonds for $400 million on future toll revenue. There's $700 million of unsecured money.
Every single agency or government involved has said they are not paying a penny more for cost overruns. Kind of a problem. If the project goes over budget, there's no money for that. Usually that would be fine, except in this case the cost estimate the state is using is their 60th-percentile number, meaning there's a 40 percent chance it's going to cost more.
DR: By the state's reckoning. Is there reason to believe they might be under-counting?
CM: Given that nine out of 10 mega-projects exceed their budgets, tunnels are some of the worst, and this is the largest diameter [single-bore tunnel] ever attempted in the history of the world, yes.

Seattle’s Impending Car-Centric Mega-Tunnel: A Chat with Urbanist Cary Moon
by David Roberts 15 Dec 2010 6:30 AM In the Pacific Northwest, where well over half the electric power comes from low-carbon hydro, the climate challenge is primarily about reducing greenhouse gas emissions from transportation. That is to say: it's about cars. Seattle's Alaskan Way ViaductWSDOT Despite their ostentatious talk on climate, many of the region's political leaders don't seem to be making the transportation connection. Nowhere is that more evident than in the fight over how to replace Seattle's crumbling Alaskan Way Viaduct, a two-mile-long elevated stretch of State Route 99 running along the city's waterfront. It offers a gorgeous, iconic view of the city and the waterfront, but the next earthquake may well reduce it to rubble, so there's pressure on to figure out what to replace it with. The alternative with the most momentum, backed by Washington Gov. Christine Gregoire (D) and powerful business interests, is a gigantic bored tunnel -- a concrete-heavy, emissions-intensive, multi-billion-dollar piece of old-school highway infrastructure devoted almost entirely to cars, shuttling suburban drivers past the urban core. What's worse, it is being rammed through over the express opposition of Seattle voters.
Cary Moon	If such a megaproject sounds crazy to you in an era of climate crisis, peak oil, and starved state budgets, you are not alone. A coalition of urbanists and environmentalists is rallying around an alternative: a "surface street option" that would, as with San Francisco's Embarcadero freeway, eliminate the highway, replacing it with a waterfront surface road, enhanced transit, and traffic improvements to surrounding streets and nearby Interstate 5. One of the major forces behind the surface option is a rising star in Seattle progressive politics, Cary Moon, whose People's Waterfront Coalition has done more than any other group to demonstrate that there is a viable alternative to car-centric madness. I chatted with Moon last week about the history of the tunnel fight and what comes next.
	DR: Can you lay out the basic story of how Seattle got here? CM: [The Alaskan Way Viaduct] has been in bad shape for a while; the 2001 earthquake forced agencies into action. It got pretty severely damaged and they almost closed it down right then and there. But they decided, no, we've got to figure out how we want to replace it before we close it. So WSDOT [Washington State Department of Transportation] and SDOT [Seattle Department of Transportation] considered alternatives and came up with either a cut-and-cover tunnel or an elevated highway on the waterfront. The mayor [Greg Nickels] liked the cut-and-cover tunnel, which was part elevated, part surface, and nine blocks of underground tunnel. The governor liked the elevated, because it was cheaper. They couldn't agree, so they decided to toss it to the voters. In 2007, voters in Seattle looked at both options and said no (55 percent) to the elevated and no (70 percent) to the tunnel. About two years prior to that, [the People's Waterfront Coalition] had formed to say, wait a minute, why are we even assuming it has to be a highway? We did a lot of research on what was going on in other cities and brought all these case studies of giant urban highways that had been torn down – and the traffic impacts were better without the highway than with it. It's counterintuitive, but it works. You're giving people more choice. You're distributing trips instead of channeling them all into one place, which can jam up when there's congestion. It's got environmental benefits, because you're encouraging people to stay local rather than enabling sprawl and long-distance commutes.
San Francisco's Embarcadero, in 1992 and post-highway in 2003
DR: What are some of the other cities who have been through this? CM: The biggest is Seoul, Korea. They took out a highway that had 160,000 cars a day and replaced it with transit and a four-lane street. The Embarcadero in San Francisco: they didn't think they could live without it, but they took it down and now that is one of the best places in San Francisco. Merchants love the local access rather than highway through-put. The West Side Highway in New York: there was a big fight about replacing it to avoid gridlock. The highway fell down and they realized, wait a minute, there's no gridlock, maybe we don't need it. They put in a surface street, maybe not the nicest street in the world, but it shows that a highway can be replaced by a better-connected street and life goes on. Portland took out a waterfront highway and reclaimed their waterfront for people. DR: So, 2007 was when voters rejected both the tunnel and the elevated highway. Then? CM: A lot of people at the time said that our side won, because [the surface-street option] was the only option left on the table. But it wasn't that easy. At that point, the city, county, and state said, OK, we failed the first round, let's start again; let's set up a stakeholder process where we're going to stay in lockstep and come up with a solution together. After a year of study, the two winners were surface/transit/I-5 or a skinnier elevated highway with a lot of transit. A representative sample of the citizen groups involved signed a letter saying, yep, let's do that, and keep the door open to a bored tunnel later if it ends up not providing enough car capacity. We thought we won again! Christine Gregoire But then Gregoire checked in with the other people that she works with -- Boeing, the regional Chamber of Commerce, other suburban interests -- and they said, no way, that's crazy, you have to rebuild that highway; you should just do the bored tunnel. The bored tunnel had been rejected by officials because it was too expensive and risky, but they talked Gregoire into it anyway. That's where the situation's been the past two years: the official preferred alternative is the bored tunnel and they're pursuing it full-force. DR: This is the juncture that confuses me. Seattle voters spoke. The city and state departments of transportation spoke. Civic groups spoke. Then the governor single-handedly overrode all that? CM: Yes. DR: Wow. CM: I'm giving you my biased view. There were plenty of stakeholders in the 29 citizen groups who liked the bored tunnel from the beginning. But officials were saying, no, you don't understand. That's too expensive. We can't do that. You can't have your cake and eat it too. The stakeholder process ended in December 2008. On Jan. 13, 2009, Gregoire announced with [former Seattle Mayor Greg] Nickels and [former King County Commissioner Ron] Sims that they're doing the bored tunnel, along with $190 million worth of transit service (that's how they got Sims to go along with it). DR: What is the legal force behind the tunnel being decided? Is it official now? CM: It's still not official -- it's a "preferred alternative." It's just that politically it has a lot of momentum. Tunnel supporters want everyone to believe it's past the point of no return. And as you can imagine, after nine years of arguing, people are exhausted and they just want to be done with it. DR: Has nobody been able to mount serious protest? CM: Until there was actually a budget, a plan on paper, it was hard to attack the tunnel. Tunnel proponents kept saying, don't worry, the traffic's just going to disappear! It's totally affordable! There's no risk! They spent almost two years in that mode, but the draft EIS [environmental impact statement] came out recently from WSDOT. Now that the facts are on the table, politicians are forced to confront the reality, not the fantasy. A new citizens' initiative [Move Seattle Smarter] is launching, saying the city can't sign any agreements on the tunnel until there's a full, transparent funding plan and someone steps up to the plate for potential cost overrun. Seattle Mayor Mike McGinnWSDOT DR: That's always been Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn's ace in the hole against the tunnel, right? Cost overruns? [McGinn was elected in November 2009 on an anti-tunnel platform.] CM: Politically, that is what gets people the most irritated, that WSDOT picked this project and then said they're only going to pay a certain amount and the citizens of Seattle will pick up the rest. The state has agreed to pay $2.4 billion out of an estimated $3.1 billion. They're hoping to get $300 million from the port, but that's not secure yet. They're going to toll the tunnel, so they're going to float bonds for $400 million on future toll revenue. There's $700 million of unsecured money. Every single agency or government involved has said they are not paying a penny more for cost overruns. Kind of a problem. If the project goes over budget, there's no money for that. Usually that would be fine, except in this case the cost estimate the state is using is their 60th-percentile number, meaning there's a 40 percent chance it's going to cost more. DR: By the state's reckoning. Is there reason to believe they might be under-counting? CM: Given that nine out of 10 mega-projects exceed their budgets, tunnels are some of the worst, and this is the largest diameter [single-bore tunnel] ever attempted in the history of the world, yes.
Read Complete Article~Seattle’s impending car-centric mega-tunnel: a chat with urbanist Cary Moon~Continued
Liveblogging the Tunnel Debate
By Erica C. Barnett, Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 7:07 PM 7:05: PubliCola investor Rajeev Singh is introducing the tunnel debate (and future debates on other topics—with booze!). 7:10: Sen. Ed Murray says the state Senate “stands ready to remove” cost overrun language, prompting a smattering of applause. He also promises to put a financial review oversight body in place this year to ensure that the tunnel project stays on budget. “Unless that language goes, that assurance isn’t there.” 7:14: Mayor Mike McGinn notes that “the winning bidder has a history of cost overruns on other projects. … Of course we’re at risk.” 7:16 pm: Council member Rasmussen says, “Now he’s doing everything he can to try to slow down, hold up the project.” McGinn responds: “We don’t know how much it’s actually going to cost. … Seattle cannot live with paying the cost overruns on this tunnel. I’ve kept my word to ask the tough questions about this tunnel, and I ask of council member Rasmussen, when will you start defending Seattle the way you defend Olympia?” “If we say we don’t want to pay, and the state says they don’t want to pay, it leaves out the question, who will pay?” Council member Tom Rasmussen points to the memoranda of agreement that the council still has not signed and the fact that the state has adopted a “very strict contingency fund” as evidence that there won’t be overruns. 7:25: State Sen. Ed Murray says that the $2.4 billion is more than the state has ever invested in any transportation project. He continues: “It doesn’t help when the Democratic mayor of a democratic city in the press bashes a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature. Mr. mayor, you keep making derogatory comments about the legislature.” 7:28: King County Labor Council executive secretary David Freiboth: Both the surface/transit and rebuilt viaduct options “weren’t viable,” according to the stakeholder process. 7:31: Freiboth again: “If the city needs more amenities, if the city needs more things done to make this happen,” that should’ve been the city’s responsibility, but overruns on the tunnel the state proposed shouldn’t be the city’s responsibility. 7:35: People’s Waterfront Coalition founder Cary Moon says the stakeholders supported the surface/transit option. Freiboth disagrees, saying the document said the document everyone signed said they would support the tunnel if there was enough money. 7:37: On the question of how people will park while the tunnel project is underway, council member Rasmussen points to EPark program, fact that the state has agreed to work with the city to resolve parking concerns. 7:39: Council member Mike O’Brien: “This plan to build this tunnel is broken. It doesn’t work. We’re going to spend $2 billion on a tunnel that carries about a third of the cars the viaduct carries today.” 7:42: Murray: “I don’t see a proposal that’s brought [everyone] together. Where’s the alternative after ten years and $90 million worth of process? … The only alternatives I’ve seen are pretty much nonstarters. The idea of pushing more traffic on I-5 through Seattle is the same Jim Horn traffic plan that we killed in 2003. … When I-5 fills up, our streets fill up. … A surface option without a tunnel doesn’t give you the leverage to work with transit. … Light rail’s a good idea, but where’s the plan? How do we pay for it? 7:46: McGinn says “It’s time to wake up and smell the recession” re: tunnel costs. 7:48: KCLC’s Dave Freiboth says the surface/transit option wasn’t seriously considered because it was “not well though out.” 7:49: In response to the question, “Where do all the cars go?”, Cary Moon says the answer is: transit, improvements to I-5 (including reducing exits from 8 to 7), improvements to north-south streets downtown, four-lane street on waterfront, and incentives like commute trip reduction and biking programs to help people “make other choices than driving.” 7:52: What question does the side never answer adequately? Tom Rasmussen says: It’s 10 years since the Nisqually Earthquake. What if we had to close the viaduct “because of your dithering in your efforts to stop the project” or if the viaduct collapses? What’s your plan? 7:55: McGinn’s response: What’s really irresponsible is keeping the viaduct open as long as we are and not building the I-5/transit option. 7:56: In response to question of how will you pay for surface/transit option, McGinn says, it will require consensus of the state legislature. 7:57: Audience question: What are you going to do with cars that use the viaduct and waterfront businesses if you close down the viaduct tomorrow morning? 7:58: McGinn’s response: Actually, you can shut the viaduct down faster and fix problem faster with surface option than deep bore tunnel. 7:59 Question for CMs: Will you listen to voters on the anti-tunnel initiatives? O’Brien: I support the one [Sierra Club initiative] that was just filed. I have not read” the Seattle Citizens Against the Tunnel initiative. Rasmussen says he doesn’t support delaying signing of agreements with the state until the voters can decide on tunnel initiatives, and calls it “one of [McGinn's] ploys.” 8:08: Labor Council’s Dave Freiboth says his constituents want jobs, not talk about social services. 8:09: Question: Why hasn’t Sen. Murray worked harder to get transit funding in Olympia? Murray’s response: I’ve fought for transit funding and defended against attacks on Sound Transit. 8:11: Mayor McGinn: “We’re not unified [on tunnel project] because it’s hard to unify behind a bad project.” 8:13: Final question: How do we make sure the things listed as concerns in environmental impact statement are addressed? 8:15: Cary Moon says there are huge problems raised in EIS: Unacceptable congestion for transit users; huge risks to Pioneer Square; potential for flooding in Underground; no money to fix problem. “Citizens of Seattle should demand that elected officials create a full funding plan” that deals with all potential problems. 8:17: Dave Freiboth: “If you’re just looking at replacing the structure, you build an elevated.” 8:20: Poll of audience reveals that no one had their mind changed by debate.