8 ms·
Drone footage of Seattle's new 57 foot SR 99 tunnel [video]
- rdl 9y agoSeems crazy to spend as much as they did and only get 2 lanes each way. I'd love to see better road and rail infrastructure, but road construction, unlike road maintenance, doesn't seem to be WSDOT's thing -- I think due to how the plans have to be approved directly by voters. (Their pass-clearing operations on I-90, etc. are amazing, though.)
- techsupporter 9y ago> I think due to how the plans have to be approved directly by voters. Virtually no major road projects are put to the voters around here. (Highway 99 is the exception because it was so controversial.) You're thinking of transit projects in Puget Sound which usually have to go through two or three rounds of voting to get fully funded... To wit, the bill that authorized Sound Transit to hold its most recent vote included several billion in not-subject-to-a-popular-vote road projects. I actually prefer that our representatives control the budget; that's what we elect them to do. But this double standard of "roads are fine but transit...pfft, well, that must be ratified" is obnoxious.
- melling 9y agoWhat about convincing voters to build low-speed maglev? https://youtu.be/c8SqDVUdMtY https://youtu.be/c8SqDVUdMtY https://youtu.be/uqobD2XUAJU https://youtu.be/uqobD2XUAJU
- andrewem 9y agoGenuine question: what's the point of low-speed maglev? Seems like you could just use a regular electric train.
- melling 9y agoWhen have you ever seen a regular train used within a city for short distance travel? Do you mean light-rail or a subway? Much faster and much quieter.
- stuaxo 9y agoIn London. The south doesn't have much in the way of tube trains. Also, TFL has taken over some of the regular lines and re-branded them The Overground. These run regular trains. I've often commuted a couple of stops from London Bridge to Charing Cross, it's short enough that on the way back from work I would often walk or use a Boris bike. I preferred that route to taking the Underground as it's just nicer travelling above ground, I can't say that it made a difference to the travel time. These are regular trains at the end of longer routes to the South.
- melling 9y agoThe trip is less than 2 miles and takes 18 minutes? https://www.londondrum.com/transport/train-journey.php?from=london-bridge&to=charing-cross https://www.londondrum.com/transport/train-journey.php?from=... It’s hard to compare but the maglev seems to operate much quicker: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-06/15/content_29751447.htm http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2017-06/15/content_297514... “The maglev line will have eight stations stretching over 10.2 kilometers and will run at a maximum speed of 100 kilometers per hour. The whole journey will take about 20 minutes, including the time for passengers to get on and off”
- andrewem 9y agoSorry if I wasn't clear enough, I meant - why would one choose a maglev for low-speed transportation, rather than a non-maglev vehicle that runs on rails? (Fill in whatever terms you want in your mind, light rail, subway, tube, underground, tram, streetcar, EMU, I don't care.)
- melling 9y agoI answered with “it’s much faster and much quieter”.
- anonymous5133 9y agoTotal cost $4.25 billion for those wondering.
- pitaj 9y agoI'm guessing it's 57 feet in diameter, not 57 feet long. At first I was slightly confused.
- AmVess 9y agoIt is 2 miles long.
- interfixus 9y ago#metoo. Length is kind of the default dimension for a tunnel. Seeing one unspecified number, that's what we automatically assume it describes.
- mc32 9y agoWhy did they reduce the viaduct from six lanes down to four? If you're going thru the trouble for boring a tunnel, do it proper and either keep the same lanes or add (even a convertible lane --disabled vehicle/rush hour lane) But reduction? Except for earthquake proofing the roadway, this does not improve upon the traffic on SR-99. It reminds me of the Caldecott Tunnels --they had to bore a new one to carry all the traffic --but at least you can forgive that because traffic volume was lower when they orig built them.
- BurningFrog 9y agoTunnels digging costs are roughly proportional to the square of their diameter, if we take Elon Musk's word for it. So a six lane tunnel probably cost more than twice of four lanes.
- mc32 9y agoThat's a great point, I failed to realize. This is a two-deck tunnel, so the price increase might not have been as steep. In any event, some of the original proposals were for six lanes --wished they'd carried that out.
- pygy_ 9y ago> Tunnels digging costs are roughly proportional to the square of their diameter Given a constant length and homogeneous ground composition (conditions that apply to the current discussion)... It makes a lot of sense that the cost is proportional to the volume being removed.
- KGIII 9y agoI just looked and can't find it. Big Bertha had stopped and it came up on Slashdot. Having some familiarity, I was the resident expert. So, I tracked down all the project info and was able to find the person who'd modeled the traffic - id known him for years but he died before the project was completed. I can't find this at Slashdot. I went on for hours and answer a ton of questions. A couple of days later, I was still answering questions. More and more info piled in and we were able to find online documents squirreled away in strange places. It was a neat write up and a bunch of people helped and asked questions. I'd link it, but it seems to have gone missing. Either way, it was a hell of a project. I had nothing to do with it. I do know some of the folks involved but was retired before this and I mostly worked East of the Mississippi. Ah well... There is a lot that goes into infrastructure. It was awesome getting to see it. My favorite work was field work. I'd escape the office and do field work out of dinghy hotels. Someone has to collect the data. So, I've seen them tunnel, blast, pave, line, and more. I've helped sign crews and driven a grader. None of that was actually a part of my job, but I am a five year old. Either way, boring holes is tough and things break a lot. Equipment is often single use or rented. It's pretty fancy stuff. It is really just a bunch of men with heavy equipment playing in the dirt and mud - which is as awesome as you might imagine. I used to get a police escort as I'd drive our data car down the highway. The reflectometer grabbed the data from the lane markings and stored them in the computer in the trunk. I can do that for hours. But, I digress... You can watch documentaries and see how they bore tunnels. That's like watching a cooking show. If you get to go see it in person, that is pretty sweet. I wish I could find my previous writeup. Oh well... The gist of it is, it is loud, dangerous, smelly, and appears to be pretty hard work. I was never allowed to touch the machine, which is for the best. It's like a monster that we've commanded to eat a hole in a mountain. That's pretty impressive. So, if you are thinking you're burning out, maybe you can go work for the highway department for a few years. They will teach you to drive some pretty awesome stuff.
- semperdark 9y agoReally quite cool to read about. Thanks for posting!
- pauldavis 9y agoThe Tunnel Boring Machine is called Bertha, not Big Bertha.
- dredmorbius 9y agoFor the project: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacement_tunnel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaskan_Way_Viaduct_replacem...
- __mp 9y agoHere’s a 360 degree video of the gotthard base tunnel: https://youtu.be/i0kdT5oEN2Q https://youtu.be/i0kdT5oEN2Q In contrast to the Seattle project there are two tunnels running side by side. More information: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel
- cft 9y agoI wonder how it was flown such a long distance without GPS? Also for consumer DJI drones the signal range in the tunnel would not be sufficient I think.
- y4mi 9y agoUrm, most drones are controlled by a person holding a remote. Said person could've just ... walked along? There were quite a few cuts as well, so I don't see any challenge there
- PhasmaFelis 9y agoIt's almost certainly being piloted manually. It's moving slowly and there's a lot of cuts, so the controller probably just walked along with it.
- iaw 9y agoThere's a point where it switches from a lower level to a higher level, seemed pretty clearly manual to me.
- cyrusshepard 9y agoOh, the magic of editing. True story: I loved the movie Cocktail with Tom Cruise. I set out to learn all his bar tricks from the film, including lighting a match with one hand. Took me two months and many burned fingers before I mastered it. Then, I re-watched the movie to make sure I was doing it right, only to realize it was an editing trick and he never really did it. Oh well. I learned a skill for life.
- thisacctforreal 9y agoI like Jackie Chan’s philosophy w.r.t that sort of thing, I’m sure he would have spent the time, and that means a lot when the scene plays :)