Article: Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck

David Roberts has an outstanding recap of how Seattle managed to end up with a nightmare transportation mega-project - a massive new tunnel with major issues. This article and the linked prior articles provide critical lessons to all urban residents about the need to be informed about these projects and campaign persistently to kill or change the terrible ones. The project's flaws were known before it started and are now becoming obvious to all:

"In short: There is no plan to resolve the dispute over cost overruns, which are ubiquitous on projects like this; at $4.2 billion, it’s the most expensive transportation project in state history. The tunnel will have no exits — no ingress or egress — throughout the entire downtown core (which makes the support of downtown businesses all the more mystifying). It won’t allow transit, only cars. It will be tolled, highly enough, by the state’s own estimates, to drive nearly half its traffic onto the aforementioned side streets. It will be a precarious engineering feat, the widest deep-bore tunnel in history, digging right between a) Puget Sound and b) the oldest part of Seattle, with vulnerable buildings and God-knows-what buried infrastructure. Also: Pollution. Climate change. It’s the 21st f’ing century. On and on. People said all this and more, in real time, to no avail."

Link: Grist: Seattle’s unbelievable transportation megaproject fustercluck

Related BetterByBicycle Posts:
> Why you should campaign and vote to kill bad infrastructure projects