Carless in Seattle references the idea of a bored (as opposed to cut-and-cover) tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct broached here by Cascadia Prospectus.
One interesting challenge for a non-waterfront downtown tunnel is that there’s already a maze of tunnels through downtown. In addition to the Bus Tunnel, which most people are aware of, you’ve got the Battery Street tunnel and, even less well-known, the freight rail tunnel that runs the entire length of downtown from Alaskan & Virginia to the King Street Station. CP’s parent organization, the Discovery Institute — which actually does a lot of great transit research when it’s not obsessed with hawking questionable intelligent design “theories” — actually came up with one of my favorite transit-projects-that-never-happened, the University Street Transit Hub:
The idea here is that you’d be able to build, at relatively low cost, a Sounder stop right in the middle of downtown, as opposed to just the one at King Street.
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