Viaduct replacement: Should we have built bridge instead of tunnel?

Taken from Monday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.

In 2009, I was really pushing for an alternative for the Seattle tunnel that I think would have dramatically transformed our city forever.

There was a local architect who came to me and he said for a fraction the cost of a tunnel we could build a bridge over Elliott Bay.

You’d come out of the Battery Street Tunnel and instead of hugging the shoreline to the left, it would just extend out straight over the bay and then it would rejoin Highway 99 just south of the stadium.

So I had listeners who put together a Photoshop of what that bridge would look like and it would be absolutely spectacular. It would have been gorgeous. There would have been very little risks like we have with tunnel. It would have been a fraction of the cost and it would have been a dramatically improved front porch for our city.

Here is a mockup of a potential bridge design I was given and shared with listeners in 2009:

Multiple architects were proposing designs for a bridge across Elliott Bay. Here one of the architects tells The West Seattle Herald how it could have been done.

I said this would be the most beautiful addition to our city since the Space Needle. So I pushed hard for that.

But it’s my contention then and now that it was too inexpensive. It did not allow enough money to be transferred from us to government, and so that option was quickly dismissed.

More than ever, with the problems of Big Bertha, I think the option that I was championing on this show five years ago certainly would have been the better option.

Taken from Monday’s edition of The Dori Monson Show.

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