West Seattle Bridge stabilization project
On the afternoon of March 23, the West Seattle bridge suddenly and shockingly closed to all traffic. The structure was in danger of imminent collapse, and the cracks were rapidly accelerating.
For the past 9 months, the closure had a horrible impact on travel to and from the peninsula, with drivers enduring long city street detours and delays to reach the freeway or get downtown.
The bridge is in such bad shape, it must be stabilized before it can even be fixed or replaced. That work has been going on for several months.
We like input and consensus in Seattle, so a community advisory board was formed and the discussions and studies went on all summer. And there was no lack of opinion, everything from ferries across Elliott Bay to a bicycle-only structure. Who needs a car, anyway?
And now, after a long wait and much input, we finally have the answer. The mayor announced last week that the bridge can be repaired. Yea!
We could be driving over it again sometime in 2022 (with tolls, of course) even taking into consideration the usual Seattle "planning fallacy."
"The planning fallacy is a phenomenon first proposed in 1979 by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that says that you tend to underestimate the time it will take for you to complete a future task, which represents an optimistic bias, meaning an overconfidence in your ability to complete the task within the given time."
Anyway, we finally have a light at the end of a long tunnel. Oops, I better not jinx it with the T word-- remember that 2.8 billion, 12 year project, starring Bertha?
By comparison, surely this repair is a piece of cake? Time will tell.
The "new" repaired bridge is projected to last between "15-40 years." Which sounds like just a big old guess. But the mayor mentioned hopefully that by then, everyone will use public transportation anyway.
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