Proposal to Put a Park and Affordable Housing on Top of Seattle Highway | Hacker News Reader

Proposal to Put a Park and Affordable Housing on Top of Seattle Highway

fastcoexist.com

27 pointswallflower18 comments

Munich has covered most of its inner city beltway: http://www.muenchen.de/sehenswuerdigkeiten/orte/120326.html

The article is in german, see before-after visualizations at the bottom of the article under "So soll es bald aussehen: Vorher - Nachher".

Current status is that traffic runs through the tunnel. Above ground, work is in progress to make things look like in the visualization. I might go and take some photos of what it currently looks like if anyone's interested.

Seoul did a similar thing. http://grist.org/infrastructure/2011-04-04-seoul-korea-tears...

Unless I'm misreading it, Seoul simply removed the freeway

Here in Melbourne Australia they're looking to do the reverse, raise rail 30 feet above ground and put shared public areas below.

Initially some of these crossings were scheduled to be run below ground but have been reconsidered due to cost.

That sounds fine. There are several 19th century versions of this in London, where a railway line was built next to or through a park [0]. Depending on the elevation, the park may continue underneath all the viaduct arches, or just some.

But, rail noise is considered much less annoying than road noise (British noise pollution regulations recognise this, and allow for more rail noise before sound barriers etc are required). I used to live on the 3rd floor overlooking a major line in London, and the students on that side of the building complained far less than the ones on the other side, overlooking a middle-sized road.

A highway is a different matter though. There will be fumes from pollution, and noise and vibration from vehicles. It's no wonder it's "affordable housing", no-one who can afford better will want to live there.

Zoom out a couple of steps from [1] and decide if you'd want to live next to a highway. Or, to a lesser extent, a railway with diesel trains, which have faint lines compared to many roads, but electric railways don't show up at all. (I can't find an equivalent map for Seattle.)

[0] http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/4062888

[1] http://www.londonair.org.uk/london/asp/annualmaps.asp

Interesting, I would have guessed trains were worst for noise but highways could be as bad if not worse. Maybe it's that people living next to highways is so common that we don't think twice about it.

The USA could be different, I've not lived there.

In the richer parts of Europe, rails will be continuously welded and many or most trains will be electric.

Noise is obviously worse with diesel trains, although trains are so efficient that the engine will be idling a lot of the time. Poorly maintained clackety-clack track is probably more annoying, perhaps from vibrations more than sound.

I believe noise trains make is more regular than car and trucks accelerating discontinuously. And they come and go less than cars. Highways have this characteristic permanent low humming with permanent « wheezing ».

Right it varies all over the map. We lived on 'Triangle Place' which was a triangle because of the railroad tracks cutting across the neighborhood in a ditch behind the house. First night, 2AM, the train came through with that huge searchlight panning through the trees, then the steam horn "Waaaa, Waaaa, Wa, Waaaaaaa!"

We both sat up in bed like the dead rising, stiff as boards. After a moment I said "Oh, Train." She said "Oh." We lay back down and went instantly back to sleep.

Strange thing is, we never heard that train again. OR rather, it never woke us again. It went by every night for the next year that we lived there, but it never bothered us.

I woke up twice at night when I lived next to the railway in London.

The first time was at 06:01, when there was a deep rumbling. I assumed a freight train had stopped outside for some reason, and was now accelerating hard.

The second time was a short while later, when my bedroom smelled like a bus depot and the sky had turned purple.

It turned out a fuel storage depot had exploded: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buncefield_fire

I fled, to my university library in central London, which fortunately wasn't covered in smoke.

pretty certain that they're tearing this part of the highway down already? the wired article doesn't actually say where the proposal is for.

i used to jump off its other end (probably 40 feet to the water?) near the arboreteum. which was dope! but having an additional north-south highway would probably be better. seattle desperately needs to resolve the transportation issue.

No, you are talking about three different distinct highways. They are planning to tear down the viaduct, sr-99, on the west side of the city. This proposal is for covering i-5 through the center, and you are talking about jumping off sr-520 ramps (which I believe are now gone) in the arboretum on the east edge of the city.

Does it have to be a highway? It might be better to add high-speed rail between Sea-Tac and Everett. Otherwise we just end up building more garages until our new highway is full again.

on a larger scale if you can convince companies to move outside seattle, then sure - but seattle was planned with 3 north-south highways in the city, and the commuter-based congestion is a result

Dallas recently built a park over part of a major street (which was actually built below street level). It worked quite well. It also attracted a lot of food trucks, which means several smaller businesses got a quick boost of publicity and customers. Everyone wins!

How about getting a police force and law enforcement infrastructure that actually works you bums.

Please don't comment like this here. There's no substantive view that can't be expressed civilly.

So they want to undertake a massive and expensive engineering challenge in the middle of a busy city and then specifically not generate revenue with the results?

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