Thanks for explaining. I question my sanity when I see lots of comments and can't tell what's so exciting about a black & blue dress you can change the lighting for.

The guilty parties (where known) are local heroes. The US has a bad reputation in much of the world.

> It really seems like they're throwing good money after bad.

When making rich people richer is the primary goal, it all makes sense.

They should default. A few years later the investors will be back the same as before.

And likely forevermore too. $10 to cross the lake round trip, increasing faster than inflation.

A $5 billion cost overrun is a decent possibility. That's about $20K for every worker in Seattle.

It could hardly have been more obvious that the cut and cover option (trench with a lid "tunnel") was the best choice for the public.

I was never convinced that the city needed anything more than a surface street. It's a little dicey putting any tunnel there against the waterfront in landfill in an earthquake-prone area. Moreover, it was never clear that the traffic patterns would have been improved by any sort of tunnel option. The whole thing always had the feel of a land grab for real estate developers, too. On top of that, a tunnel was really the worst for Seattle since it wouldn't help anyone get into or out of downtown, just through downtown.

I didn't support a surface street because it would have stop lights, in which case it wouldn't begin to replace the viaduct. (For some reason the US can't have Germany-style streets that dip below cross streets.)

> The whole thing always had the feel of a land grab for real estate developers, too.

Yep. A quote from the NYT article:

> “They’re talking about greenbelts and all that, but I think it’s a bunch of baloney,” he said. “I think it’s going to be all condominiums.”

I agree, the project is mainly about $700K 1-bedroom condos.

Yes, I thought about surface streets as well but I ended up feeling like it would be too forced. A cut and cover operation seemed like the best of both worlds - and hell, have surface streets on top of it for normal thru traffic. People passing from south to north Seattle on the viaduct path would zoom through with 6 lanes and no exits. If they want to go downtown, they can debouche west of Pioneer square - spend some money making sure that's a possibility. Anyway! Even surface streets would have been better than this ridiculous tunnel.

$700k would be a steal in Seattle for a waterfront condo.

For a 1 bedroom? Wow, guess I'm out of the loop on that.

Yes indeed! that superior plan was promoted as an alternate by the city folk and was totally squashed at the state level (i watched it happen in committee)

Which isn't worth much in some states, like Texas.

And if it goes to trial, the jury's likely to think in terms of compromising on the multitude of charges (rather than outright rejection), in which case the defendant still goes to prison for many years.

This is the problem I have with the contrarian's position in all of these threads. As usual, the answer is somewhere in the middle.

That's a nice chunk but insufficient nowadays. (The 24-year old in that article might've been able to make several $million in his remaining career.) The Lyft driver could still end up on the hook.

It's certainly possible, but it's unlikely. The Lyft driver's own assets are likely small, and most lawyers suing the driver would rather settle for an amount within the $1 million insurance policy, rather than risk getting nothing by going to court to try to get more than the insurance policy.

Even many doctors don't have malpractice insurance above $1 million (depending on speciality and state) -- most policies are $100K-$300K/claim, $1MM-$3MM/all claims (http://jop.ascopubs.org/content/3/5/274.full). So Lyft is providing more liability insurance than many doctors carry.

If you're demanding absolute 0% risk for the Lyft driver financially, this would not cut it, but very little anywhere is absolutely no risk.