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A
Support for the Big Dig comes from Safety Insurance, offering a variety of home insurance products to cover your home's increased value. You can ask an independent agent about safety insurance. Safety insurance will help manage life's storms. And also from MIT Sloan Executive Education, offering short courses on critical topics led by world class faculty. Professionals can get up to speed on AI innovation, cybersecurity and operational strategy. More at Executive mit Edu One of the perks of radio and podcasts is that you don't know what we look like. So I'm Ian Coss, host of the Big dig.
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B
I'm Joshua McNichols, co host of Booming
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A
and big hand to you all for filling this room on a Monday night to talk about highways. So. I'm Ian Coss and from GBH News, this is the Big Dig Highway Teardown Tour. So when I was recording these tapings, the very first stop on our tour was actually in Seattle, Washington. And I wanted to go to Seattle because of every city in America, they really did the closest thing to what we did in Boston. Tear down a highway and replace it with a tunnel. It's the other Big Dig. Essentially, they were the only city crazy enough to try it. So I thought we would just take a trip down memory lane, talk about that project, talk about how their tunnel boring machine hit a steel pipe and got stuck under the city for two years, which it did. But once I linked up with kuow and Joshua McNichols, who you heard at the top, I realized that Seattle has a lot more going on with its highways right now. So in this episode we are looking across time at two pieces of the same exact road to see just how much the conversation around urban highways has changed. We recorded this conversation at the beautiful public library in downtown Seattle, right where our first story begins back in the year 2001. And to get that started, we want to welcome up Mayor Greg Nichols. So there's a line that I heard a number of times about the Big Dig when I was studying it that there's really two things you need to get right when you're doing a big project. First, first you have to do the right project and then you have to do the project right. And I think there's a tendency to focus on the doing the project right because that's what the public sees. You know, they see the barriers and they see the cost overruns and there's a tendency to focus on execution and forget about the decision making. Doing the right project. The reason I want to talk with you is, Greg, is that you were the mayor of Seattle from 2002 to 2010, which were the critical decision making years. You were not there when the project was fully built out, but you were there at work and you're still here. Okay. You were there then and you are here now. And so I wanted to take it back. 2001.
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C
Okay. The day of the earthquake, February 28th, 11 o'. Clock. Amazing.
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A
It sets a lot of this story in motion. Where were you? What happened that day?
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C
Well, I was on the 43rd floor of the Columbia Tower. I was running for mayor and so I was dialing for dollars. And it was interesting. It was a law office. And as the building basically jumped, all the lawyers went to the windows. And I'm thinking, boy, is that stupid. Should I tell them? I did. So I then the county courthouse was a couple blocks away. And I kind of thought, I wonder, that's a very old, not very earthquake resistant building. Is my staff okay? Are the people in that? So I went over there. But that day, I felt like there was a huge opportunity that was created for the city of Seattle.
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A
And why is that?
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C
Because it's obvious to me. It wasn't obvious to everyone that the waterfront was a huge asset for the city of Seattle. Our connection to Elliot Bay and across the Salish Sea to the Olympic mountains is spectacular. And we had walled it off in 1954. And this was an opportunity to take down what was already a expiration date highway and replace it in some way, but open up the city to the water.
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B
Did you know that immediately?
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C
Yes.
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B
On the day of the earthquake?
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C
I knew it the day before. But I didn't have the opportunity politically to be able to accomplish that.
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A
So as you're backing away from the
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C
windows, you're thinking, I didn't go to the windows. That was the.
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A
So just to set the scene, the road we're talking about is the Alaskan Way viaduct.
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C
Yes.
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A
Right. It's a double decker elevated highway right on the waterfront. What kind of shape was the road in after the earthquake?
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C
Well, it got a new name. We never referred to it as anything but the Dangerous Alaskan Wave because it was sinking. There was a curve toward the south end and that area in particular was sinking. And we closed it every six months to measure just how much. And we came very close to posting it against heavy loads, against trucks being able to use the facility. And eventually we did posted so that the heavy loads had to be in the far right lane either direction.
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A
Wow.
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C
So its days were numbered. And the question was whether we would take advantage of that with opening the city up, or if we would go the cheap route, quote unquote, and put up another double deck highway.
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A
So at that point, you're elected mayor the same year later in 2001.
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C
Yes.
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A
And what are the options that you're facing at that point?
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C
Well, it's a state highway, and so the funding for it comes through the state, much of it federal, but also a fair amount from the state. And both the house and the senate were supporting the idea of a replacement viaduct, which would have been wider because new standards are in place for how wide lanes are.
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A
Breakdown lanes.
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C
That's exactly right. It would have been huge compared with what was already an incredible barrier. So we decided that we were going to have to put on a campaign, literally a campaign to convince the legislature that that was not a viable option, that they did not want to go there. And I sent you a video that we did that talked about the committee to save big ugly things. Hi, I'm Matt Smith with the Committee to big ugly things. In the 80s, we stood by as the lower Queen Anne blob was torn down. In the 90s, we watched helplessly as our kingdom was imploding.
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A
So for context, it's like a spoof campaign ad by this fictitious group called the Committee to save big ugly things, which is attacking you for wanting to tear down the viaduct.
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C
Yes.
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A
Is that right? Okay.
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C
Yes. Now Mayor Nichols is threatening to take away the biggest, ugliest thing of all, the viaduct.
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A
Who. Who did you get to play the. The like spokesperson?
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C
A local actor and comedian from Capitol Hill. He was in Sleepless in Seattle. He was the mailman, and he was the narrator, if you will.
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A
Yeah.
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C
We say stop the madness and you can help save the big ugly viaduct. And consider this. If Mayor Nichols does get rid of the viaduct, you know what's next?
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A
Sorry, I have one other detail. Question in the video. Gives some other examples of big ugly things.
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C
Yes.
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A
But I didn't get the local references.
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C
They were local. The blob at the foot of Queen Anne Hill.
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B
What was that thing anyway?
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C
It was a dry cleaner, I think, originally, and maybe a restaurant at some
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A
point until it was torn down.
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C
It was torn down. It was burned down.
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Travesty.
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C
And then the kingdom was another one.
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A
That was the old baseball stadium.
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C
Yes. Yeah. Multipurpose stadium, if you will.
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A
Another loss of our architectural heritage right up there with Penn Station.
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C
The tagline on the video was, and if Mayor Nichols gets his way, you know what's next? And it was a picture of the Experience Music project.
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A
Sorry, you're gonna have to explain that one to.
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B
It's a Frank Gehry.
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C
It's a Frank Gehry, but we didn't get the best Frank Gehry. I think we got his. Maybe his renition time or something. Yeah. Because it's an odd. Very odd looking building. The top is supposed to be a broken guitar because the patron of it, Paul Allen, was a big fan of Jimi Hendrix. So the building kind of has that feel and look.
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B
Got it.
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A
So that's the pantheon of big, ugly Seattle things amidst which the viaduct sat.
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C
Yes. I mean, we were tongue in cheek. We wanted to use humor in what was otherwise a very serious debate.
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A
Yeah, sorry, I realize I totally derailed us on that, but. And so you're appealing to the governor at that point?
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C
No, we were appealing to the public.
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B
Yeah.
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C
And trying to get people to understand this opportunity that we had so that they, in turn, would let their legislators know, would let the governor know that there was public support for this crazy idea.
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A
And just how serious was the state government about rebuilding the viaduct? Bigger and better than ever.
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C
Very serious. I was invited to a meeting in the governor's conference room, where it was the governor, the speaker of the house, the majority leader of the state senate, the chair of the state house, and the chair of the state senate transportation committees and me. And they basically said, we're going to do a new viaduct. And I said, over my dead body, effectively. And they said, okay,
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terms accepted.
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C
And so I insisted that it go back to the voters. So my goal in that election was to kill the elevated, to make it absolutely dead end. And that was a very strange election. And I take responsibility for that.
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A
Can you explain how the ballot question was worded? What the.
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C
It was. You want A, you want B, do you want neither?
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A was replace the viaduct as is,
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C
not as is, but replace it.
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A
B was a tunnel.
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C
Yes.
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A
Do you recall what the final vote numbers were on the two options?
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C
Oh, both lost. And what it did, though, was it cleared the deck so that we could start over as policymakers in trying to find a common ground and a solution.
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B
At the time, there were people talking about different solutions, including just not putting a tunnel underground. And some people wanted to have just, you know, basically a surface road.
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C
Sure.
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B
So sometimes I wonder, you know, why did you push against what seemed like the will of the voters at that time?
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C
Well, the will of the voters was to not do those two particular projects. I don't think it was to do nothing.
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B
Yeah.
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C
We studied the idea of surface streets, and we could not figure out a way to make it work.
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A
What did it come down to in the end? Why did it feel unworkable to you?
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C
Because anyone who attempts to use Interstate 5 understands that we have a very narrow city. It's kind of wasp shaped. And the capacity to be able to get north and south to places like Everett and Tacoma is really restricted, Particularly as one or another of the corridors is out of action for some reason. You need to have some alternative, and I'm not sure how many we convinced that the tunnel was the right alternative. There was, I think, a split between people who would rather have tried to make the surface system work. But imagine how much wider Alaskan way surface street would be if we had done that and other arterials through the center of the city. I think the day that we cut the ribbon for the waterfront park, I think we won about every heart and every mind, and that's what that tunnel provides today.
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A
Yeah, I think maybe that's a good cue to look ahead to a future project for the city of Seattle and think about how much has changed in the last 25 years since the day of that earthquake and how much maybe hasn't changed. So big hand again for mayor Nichols. As Mayor Nichols said, the state did ultimately come around to building the tunnel using the largest tunnel boring machine in the world, called Big Bertha. Just like with the Big Dig in Boston, there were unexpected challenges. There were, of course, cost increases. But about a decade after the final decision was made, the tunnel was complete and the viaduct was torn down. The waterfront park Nichols mentioned was just completed last year in 2025, right around the time of our taping.
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C
And.
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And it's pretty impressive. There's this grand staircase covered in bushes and trees that leads you down from the famous Pike Place market all the way to the water's edge with views across the sound to the Olympic mountains in the distance. It really is stunning. That said, the questions about the tunnel itself have never entirely gone away. Did we actually need to spend all those billions on a new underground highway? Or could we have just removed the viaduct and not replaced it at all? Could we take that more radical step of simply eliminating an urban highway? At the time, that option was pretty far outside the political mainstream. But not anymore. That's coming up. Support for the Big Dig comes from classic Harborline, offering family friendly cruises, corporate gatherings and sightseeing day sales throughout the summer in Boston. More@classicharborline.com and also from the Maine Maritime Museum. Their new exhibit, Resounding highlights the resilience and traditions Of Maine's indigenous and black maritime communities, Featuring both historic artifacts and contemporary art. Mainmaritimemuseum.org. So if you drive south through that tunnel we've been talking about on State Road 99, as you get towards the end of the city, you pass through this neighborhood that I had never heard of before a few weeks or months ago called south park. And it's interesting. It's the same exact road, Right? It's State Road 99. But it's a very different part of the city. We're no longer in downtown. This is a residential area. And south park today is facing the same basic question that the waterfront was facing 25 years ago of what do we do with this highway? To talk about that question, we've got two guests with us. Casey James is a strategic advisor with the city of Seattle. Jose Manuel vasquez is a member of the group reconnect south park. Give him a warm welcome.
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D
Thanks for having us.
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A
Jose, you grew up in south park. Can you give us a little sense of the neighborhood?
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D
Yeah, happy to. Yeah. If you're not familiar with south park, we're one of the southernest Most neighborhoods in Seattle, over the decades has been the highest latino population. So it is the latino barrio. It's where my family found a home when we arrived in the early 90s. We're surrounded by a lot of industrial zoning and a dump. I grew up right next door to T117, the Superfund site. We've had the least amount of green spaces for community, Historically low income, but at the same time, it's a neighborhood that I'm very proud of because it's been my home. We have a lot of rich cultural traditions, celebrations, from fiesta patrias to the posadas we hold every year. It's a neighborhood that I'm very proud of, and it's why I'm so deeply involved here in the reconnect south park campaign.
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B
What is the highway like going through south park? What is the neighborhood's relation to the highway of State Route 99?
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D
Yes. Yeah. The highway literally cuts the neighborhood in two. It cuts right in the middle of the neighborhood. We have concord elementary, which is the only elementary school in the neighborhood, Right next to the highway. And kids literally have to go through a path called the scary trail. I mean, government has been recognizing this little path as the scary trail since I was a kid.
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A
Like, you can find government documents that refer to, quote, the scary trail.
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E
I've written a few of those.
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C
Okay.
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D
So to me, that's just A non starter. The fact that kids have to take a path called the Scary Trail to get to their elementary school.
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A
And the Scary Trail goes along the edge of State Road 99.
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D
Yeah, it's just a really unkempt, a lot of overgrown bushes and trees. And then you have to go over a little crosswalk bridge over the highway and hear all the trucks going underneath you and then a block and you're at the elementary school.
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A
Wow. When you were young, did it ever cross your mind that that highway could be removed entirely? Is that something you could imagine?
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D
Honestly, no. Because to me, relatively speaking, I come from Mexico City, which is a concrete jungle, if you're familiar. So to me, coming from that concrete jungle, the highway wasn't a big deal. And then the airport, then the dump, and then another highway, and then surrounded by industrial. So to me, that was normal.
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A
Casey, could you talk about the road itself? How was it built? Why is it there?
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E
Yeah, absolutely. So back in the early 1900s, South park was a well connected community. It had a fully developed neighborhood street grid. It was linked to downtown with a streetcar. It was home to a lot of immigrant farmers at that time. And a lot of the produce that was sold in Seattle's famous Pike Place Market was coming from South Park.
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A
Back then there's actual farmland around there.
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E
There was sort of like a connected neighborhood, and then there was farmland sort of surrounding it.
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A
Got it.
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E
And back in the 1930s, South park was redlined. And then after that, industry started moving into the Duwamish Valley and the city. Actually, in the 50s and 60s, there was a plan to remove the south park and neighboring Georgetown communities entirely. And we were just going to replace the entire Duwamish Valley with industrial land use.
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A
Wow.
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E
And SR99 was planned through south park during that time, but the neighborhood fought back and they were successful. They were able to stop the industrial rezoning of the neighborhood, but they weren't able to stop the highway.
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A
The highway planners were operating under the assumption that there was no neighborhood.
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E
It was basically a dual plan to just displace the community and replace it with industrial.
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D
Yeah, it wasn't the original plan. Before i5, it was going to be the highway to connect north and south.
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E
Yeah. So it was originally planned as a U.S. as a federal highway, but it
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A
ended up being a state road. It didn't get the interstate designation.
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E
Yeah. Yeah. So let me get to the i5 section in a bit. But let's start with when 99 actually first came in. So when the highway came to South Park, I can't really imagine, honestly, a more destructive way that a highway could be built through a community. So it went at a diagonal to the neighborhood street grid, and it's a limited access highway, so that means there's no intersections. And also it's built at grade, so it's not elevated or sunken. That meant through this neighborhood, it created 22 dead end streets. 22 dead ends out of previously connected
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A
streets in a pretty small area.
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E
Yeah. So in this sort of three miles that we're looking at. And then it only really left two crossing points in that entire section that you can get across on foot, and pretty much nothing that anyone would want to bike across. So it really disrupted the neighborhood, cut people off from their neighbors and from parks and schools and so forth. And those impacts still really impact the community today.
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A
But I feel like you hear this story in every city of, like, the highway came in and they rammed it through the neighborhood and they severed, you know, and that is true. That did happen in virtually every city that I know of. But looking at this thing on a map, it is really bad. Just the amount of connections that were cut off and the very few connections that do remain across that highway. Like you said, even among urban highway projects in this country, it really does stand out.
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E
Yeah, I mean, when you put all those things together, you can't really. Because there's the river on one side and then there's a bigger Highway 509 on the other side of the neighborhood. So you can't go a half mile in really any direction within south park without getting cut off by something. But yeah, we were talking about i5, and I was just going to say that after i5 was built, that became the new highway. So it was really just a few years that 99 served its intended purpose as this federal highway. So just shortly after traffic moved over to the modern highway, 99 became obsolete and was decommissioned. So at that point it became a state route. And since then, a lot of the other segments to the north and south have been further downsized. So just south of south park is the city of Tukwila. And the Tukwila segment of 99 became Tukwila International Boulevard in the early 2000s. So it was put under local jurisdiction so they could plant more street trees and integrate it into their community. So actually, most segments of 99 to the north and south of this one look more like city streets. They have intersections, they're much narrower and so forth, and actually most of them carry more traffic. So this is in some Ways you can kind of imagine this segment as really an overbuilt remnant of a former highway system. It's not really carrying the traffic that it was originally built to carry, but it's still carrying all of the harm on the community.
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A
Right. How busy is it? Like if you go walk along the scary trail, is it kind of sparsely used? The highway itself?
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E
Yeah. So it carries traffic that's pretty similar to like a busy city street. Not similar to most other highways, but
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A
it's like a divided limited access highway.
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E
Exactly, yeah.
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A
So what are the. When you're approaching a road like this in your role at the city, what's the menu of options on the table for this project?
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E
Yeah, so when we first started, we were able to think of several different possibilities. So one thing would be removing the highway entirely. We looked at converting it into a boulevard. We considered putting it underground, making a tunnel and doing more mitigation, so sound walls and so forth. The first thing that we did with our technical studies was to do a feasibility screening. We looked at just basic environmental and engineering considerations. And through that we figured out that a tunnel option wasn't really feasible to continue studying. There's just a lot of different concerns and risks between soil contamination, underground utility conflicts and so forth. The other three were all considered feasible, and those are the ones that we're continuing to study.
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A
So it's boulevard full removal and mitigation. Yeah, I get the sense with projects like this, there is this phase early on where it's like every idea is a good idea, everything's on the table, and then things get serious. At some point, the real money is on the table and the options start to narrow. And I'm wondering if what's your sense of the project at this moment? Like, do you feel like the fully remove the road and don't replace it is like a viable option on the table?
- [27:21]
E
Yeah, I mean, I do think that removal is definitely a credible option to keep considering. And we've been hearing a lot of positive feedback around this option from the community. And it's makes sense why. I mean, we'd be looking at freeing up 100 acres of new land for housing and parks and new businesses. It would greatly reduce traffic, pollution in south park and also throughout the whole region. So we're seeing a lot of benefits that people are feeling really excited about with that possibility.
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D
An example is we have a Duwamish Valley Sustainability association, an organization and community who's building a biodigester. And now they're actively looking for land to Find a permanent home for that biodigester to create a circular economy project. We're like, what if some of this reclaimed land becomes that biodigester? We have the Duwamish Valley Affordable Housing Coalition also looking at land to build more affordable housing. So that's another exciting opportunity about envisioning a future south park without a highway. What can we do with that land?
- [28:29]
B
Yeah, you know, hearing this description and comparing it to the way you May or Nichols were talking about the, you know, the viaduct removal, I'm just thinking about how the sense of possibility has changed. You know, you couldn't figure out how to get traffic through without maintaining that tunnel. And here, in the case of south park, you're talking about removing it. So what. What has changed or what has allowed this to change?
- [28:59]
E
Yeah, I would say that there's a few things that are a little bit different about this road that kind of change the circumstances here. So when we're talking about traffic, that's certainly a concern with that people think about with the removal option. But the impacts are actually maybe a lot less than one might imagine. And there's a lot of different reasons for that. One important reason is that there's four other north south highways and arterials that run parallel to this route route within just a mile. So there's a lot of other options that drivers have today for other ways to get around.
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A
And just say that one more time.
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C
Four.
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A
Four arterial highways.
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E
Yeah, arterials and highways moving in the
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A
same direction, parallel, within a mile.
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E
That's it.
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A
Yeah, making sure I got that.
- [29:44]
E
So, yeah, people have lots of different ways to get around this corridor. And what we found is that pretty much anywhere you're coming from or going to one of those options is just as fast or faster than taking 99 today. So when we're studying the impacts of removing it, what we're seeing is a pretty even distribution across these other routes. So when you have all that regional traffic funneling right through the heart of the neighborhood, right next to the school and so forth, that has huge impacts on that community. But then when you take that same level of traffic and you spread it out through these regional networks, but we're expecting is about a 3.5% increase overall in traffic on these other routes.
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D
I remember a conversation we had with a local Uber driver, a gig economy driver who uses that route regularly to get from Seattle to i5. It's literally a shortcut to i5. And when we were having this conversation, he told me, like, yes, this highway is important to Me, it's my livelihood. It's the route that gets me the fastest to my destination. We're like, great, let me capture that. Let me get that feedback. And then we started talking about the impacts, the kids having to go through, the scary trail, the environmental impacts. Once we started in that conversation, he took a step back and he said, you know What? An extra 15 minutes isn't that bad if it means a kid has a safe way to get to his school. So I just wanted to bring that kind of. That larger context besides just the transportation needs. It's more about the community deserves a holistic approach to this. And we don't know what that is yet, but that's kind of the conversations that we're having right now with the community.
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A
And that's. I mean, going back to the viaduct project a quarter century ago, that sense of. It's so hard to look past the systems that we've lived with our whole lives and imagine something different. Yeah, no, go ahead, Casey.
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E
I was just going to say.
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C
Absolutely.
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E
I think that there's such massive infrastructure that they really shape our entire experience of our built environment. They shape our daily routines as well. So trying to imagine life without them, it feels like a permanent fixture. But we have to remember that they're not. They're based on these intentional decisions that were made in the past, and somebody decided to create this thing, and we could make a different decision in the future. Right.
- [32:12]
A
I think we are at time. But I wanted to close with one last question, which is we can now go down to the waterfront and see the results of that project that began 25 years ago. If you imagine South Park 25 years from now, and you walk through that neighborhood, what do you see?
- [32:38]
E
What I could imagine is this. This area of the neighborhood that currently divides folks, that currently creates all these problems, all of a sudden becoming this new spine of community life, you know? Yeah. Kids biking to school. You could see families picnicking where there used to be, you know, overpasses. Right. You could see new businesses opening up. And to basically have this piece of infrastructure that paved over so many acres of fertile river valley and divided this community, this generational mistake become a generational act of hope and repair.
- [33:15]
D
Yeah. The culver leaf, which is at the southernmost end, that could become a beautiful park. That's something we need more in South Park. More green spaces for community to enjoy. And I know this project is. I'm probably not going to see the benefits in my lifetime. Maybe so. Who knows? But we're definitely excited and definitely being intentional about including the youth in our community because they're the ones that are really gonna help shape this project and see the true benefits of what comes out of this. So who knows? I think it's right now just a huge opportunity for us, but for now, it's no highway for me personally.
- [33:52]
A
Thank you all. So. Next up on the Highway Teardown Tour, Portland, Oregon, the home of the original Highway Teardown. That's right, Portland did it first, and we're going to take a look at that history. But plus the current highway debate that has pitted neighborhood activists and environmental activists against each other. Thanks again to the whole team at KUOW and their booming podcast, especially their co host Joshua McNichols, who joined me for this conversation. For more on the ever changing landscape of Seattle, find booming wherever you listen. And of course, for more on the topsy turvy world of Boston politics. And check out the other seasons of this podcast. There are three out now and more coming. The Highway Teardown Tour is produced by Fiona Boyd and myself, Ian Coss, with support from Isabel Hibbard. Our editor is Lacey Roberts. The executive producer is Devin Maverick Robbins. The artwork is by Bill Miller. The Big Dig is a production of GBH News and distributed by prx.
- [35:24]
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Sam,
- [35:55]
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I really hope you're enjoying the show and before I let you go, I just want to drop in with that constant podcaster's reminder to please rate the show. Leave us a review, subscribe, and of course tell a friend. All that stuff really, really does help us keep the show going. Thank you so much
- [36:16]
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from prx.