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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3358 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Seattle may join the super tall skyscraper club

Parking is miserable there. Not only that, they're nuking two parking structures to put in the building. Both parking structures serve the existing tallest building in Seattle, the Columbia Tower. And then, of course, there's the fact that of the two major roads through Seattle, one viaduct is being replaced by the most star-crossed tunnel since Boston's Big Dig and the other crosses through the convention center, thereby guaranteeing it will never be any bigger than it already is.

You can't erect a structure in Los Angeles county without two parking spaces on site.

Put it this way - Seattle built a tunnel for a subway, but ran out of money for the subway. So then they put buses in it. Then they decided maybe they'd actually try to build a subway and the bus system said "fuck you, our tunnel" so no subway. Meanwhile, the approach Seattle takes to public works projects is so pathetic and overwrought that it has its own Wikipedia page.





user-inactivated  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Wait just a damn minute here. HOW are they going to make a tunnel like that in... Seattle of all places? Seattle is sitting on a faulted mess of bedrock worse than L.A. I have no doubt that the engineers can work with it, but fuck being in that tunnel when a 6.0 hits.

Edit just read the wiki articles. 2001 was the earthquake. That was two years after I worked on a fishing boat that docked there. Looks like they are going to make the waterfront a destination like they did out here to the Ohio River, which will be nice once it is done. But tunnels in active fault zones freak me out.

kleinbl00  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  
user-inactivated  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Wow. We paid a company to paint a major Interstate bridge. They took the money and bailed. Did not even do the pre-engineering work. Instead of suing them, arresting them or you know trying to get the cash back, the state doubled down and paid a friend of the governor to hire a company to paint the bridge under questionable terms. One of the terms was a demand to scrub the rust and scale off the bridge. The second company, now doing the actual work, found out that scrubbing the rust and scale would weaken the bridge and wanted to go in and treat the rust to make everything stronger and more corrosion resistant. The state bucked at the cost increase so company 2 waited out the terms of the contract and walked away... WITH FULL PAYMENT.

Company three came in with federal cash and finished the job. Add into this whole mess was a fear, found with I think company one, that the paint they originally used was full of lead and lead additives and they did not want to pay to prevent all that lead and heavy metals to go into the Ohio River. Note that they did not include the environmental concerns in the original bids. They ended up spending almost as much on the repaint as it would have cost to make a whole new bridge across the river.

http://www.kentuckyroads.com/kennedy_bridge_painting/

This is before we get into the 20+ year fight to get a whole new bridge to increase traffic load across the river. This project was fought by 10 wealthy families that did not want a new bridge on their side of town and played every single trick they could including marking a few large homes as nationally protected historical properties to prevent them from being harmed by new highway construction.

kleinbl00  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  
user-inactivated  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  

AHHAHAHAHHAH They lost *TWO bridges. Amazing.

kleinbl00  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Depends on how far back you count.

ButterflyEffect  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Fuck that tunnel, the constant construction on I-5 and 167, the lack of lighting on any of the roads and highways, the lack of good public transit options, and most of all those god forsaken HOV lanes.

kleinbl00  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Okay first thing:

There has never been a time 167 hasn't sucked. There will never be a time 167 won't suck. 167 is the suck magnet for all of puget sound. There are worse roads in the world, but there are none worse in King, Snohomish or Pierce counties. Except maybe the 2.

Next thing:

You're down there in Redneckistan, son. it's never gonna get better. Seattle, by comparison, is lit like a goddamn jewel. Spend 7 years in LA and tell me WA doesn't illuminate the fuck out of its roads.

Finally:

Ever been stuck on a bus that didn't know there was a parade going down Hollywood Blvd on Halloween? I have. Things can always be shittier.

Trust me.

tehstone  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Seattle has a lot of tunnels, you'd be surprised. The big issue with this one is that they decided to bore it with a single tube rather than a smaller tube for each direction of traffic. So they're using the largest tunnel boring machine ever built, and it's straight from the factory untested. Then it ran into... something. They've never really announced a convincing answer for what happened. So then they had to dig a pit to haul the tbm up to the surface and fix it.

kleinbl00  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Most of Seattle's tunnels are cut and cover, though. That allows you to bank and stuff. I-90? Cut'n'cover. 99 under downtown? Cut'n'cover. The drilling process they're using is the same one they used for the Brightwater conveyance corridor and that didn't go so smoothly.

tehstone  ·  3357 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The Beacon Hill, Capitol Hill and ULink tunnels were all bored. And back in the day they'd dig that shit out by hand with picks, shovels and wheelbarrows. Maybe we should go back to that.