Happy Bertha-day 2.0

Last year I took to these pages to note the solemn occasion of the one year anniversary of the the tunnel-boring machine dubbed “Bertha” getting stuck barely 10% of the way through her assigned task of cutting a 1.7 mile deep bore tunnel underneath downtown Seattle. I’m sure you’ll all be shocked to learn that the then-projected restart date of “March 2015” turned out to just a touch over-optimistic. The new projected date to resume tunneling is December 23rd, a date perhaps strategically selected such that when the next inevitable delay occurs, not many people will be paying attention to the news (bad news about Bertha seems to consistent come out late Friday afternoons).

While Bertha did not resume drilling in the last year, the access tunnel was completed, the machine was removed, discovered to be much more extensively damaged than previously thought for reasons that aren’t well understood, and returned to her previous position. Other noteworthy 2015 events included the “lawsuit phase” beginning in earnest, as Seattle Tunnel Partners was sued by eight different insurance companies as well as WSDOT (and with no clear plan to pay for cost overruns, lawsuit season is assuredly far from over), and more alarming, poorly explained ‘settlement’ of the existing viaduct–the existing highway Bertha’s tunnel is meant to replace, which was originally scheduled to be closed and torn down in 2012. I don’t have the stomach for a full blow by blow of Bertha’s second lost year but Sydney Brownstone has a blow-by-blow for those interested in rubbernecking “one of the wildest infrastructure tragicomedies of our time.”

The other tunnel-related news of the the day comes from Zach Shaner: there’s a proposal on the table to study the removal of a key carrot dangled in front of transit supporters back in 2009 to get them on-board with such a car-centric project. Recall that this tunnel, amazingly, is designed to bypass downtown Seattle entirely, even though a majority of current viaduct trips are either to or from downtown. What about express buses that use 99’s downtown access now? The plan was to build a boulevard from the tunnel’s Southern entrance to downtown that would include dedicated transit only lanes. The new plan under discussion is to remove those lanes, to decrease the width of the new road. In the highly unlikely event that anyone was actually paying attention to my unhinged anti-tunnel rants in 2009, they heard me predict exactly this would occur: dedicated transit only lanes pretty much always face an uphill battle in Seattle, as political forces that would claim that space for other purposes have generally had greater political clout then transit riders. (In this particular case, it doesn’t help that many of the inconvenienced riders would be coming from not the particularly wealthy neighborhoods of White Center and Burien.) It’s not certain this will happen–Seattleites should consider following Shaner’s suggestion of contacting public officials and yelling at them about this–and of course this only matters if the damn tunnel ever gets finished.

Earlier this month, Seattle re-affirmed its appetite for taxing themselves to improve transit with the passage of Move Seattle, a substantial property tax levy that will pay for a variety of bus (and pedestrian and bike) improvements. From what I gather a number of key supporters and insiders convinced themselves this was unlikely to pass, but it won comfortably, despite the low turnout of an off-year election. Unfortunately, a lot of the resources that could be used to help move Seattleites to where they’re actually going will go to a project that, if it is ever completed, which is far from certain, will provide its greatest benefit for people going through Seattle, rather than getting around it.