A thing I thought I would never say

So, this week I drove through the Seattle Waterfront Tunnel.

Given all the sturm und drang that has accompanied this project - from the controversy over design options to the two-year delay when Big Bertha, the drilling machine, broke down - troubles that continue even now - I honestly never expected the tunnel to be completed. I thought it would be another  mirage that evaporated into nothingness, taking with it scads of taxpayer money, just like the notorious monorail project.

But, for good or bad, it's there, and I drove thought it on the way to SeaTac to drop Coco off for a trip to Hawaii. We had jumped off I-5 at Crown Hill on the advice of the GoogleMaps to save a little drive time; congested 99 was not much better than the crawling freeway, but it was nice to see the changes to the strip. There were some bigger box-buildings, but overall the Aurora Avenue stretch of the state route looked as depressed and depressing as ever, shabby and grimy commerce at its worst, with dilapidated structures, weeds, and ugly signage.

That traffic was miserable was not a surprise or even a disappointment, since we had no expectations; it was just a drag. It was exacerbated by our failure to understand the lane convergence as 99 crossed the Aurora Bridge and headed south: there was only one lane for southbound traffic for a long time, as the left lane was exit-only to Denny Avenue in south Lake Union and the right lane was bus-only. The lane changes and merging as vehicles joined the flow from Queen Anne access points brought us all to standstill over and over again.

We were surprised by the tunnel, to tell the truth; when we left Seattle for Bellingham in 2015, Bertha was still comatose. We had heard that the project was active, but honestly hadn't been following it closely. Traffic didn't speed up until we were out of it, so we had ample time at single-digit mph to experience the engineering.  One thing stood out for both Coco and me:

The wall was covered with exit markings, big graphics and arrows, lots of them. There seemed to be an exit every 600 feet or so, with numerous marking in between each. Having grown up riding through the Holland and Battery Tunnels in New York City, I had always been intrigued by the exits and personnel stations along the walls, and wondered about what subterranean - or subfluvial - world they led to. It was Coco who pointed out that the stick people on the wall were running.

These are emergency exits.

Now, remember the tunnel exits because of an earthquake - the 2001 Nisqually quake was the final blow the the seismically under-prepared viaduct that the tunnel replaced. The Seattle waterfront has always been a major concern in earthquake planning - much of the waterfront is landfill, and in a major quake a lot of the ground is expected to just liquefy. But the Department of Transportation says the tunnel is built to the most up-to-date seismic standards and might even be the safest place to be during an earthquake. And perhaps it is.

But all those emergency exits still make me nervous.