New Zealand Family's Seattle Visit Reminds Me Of Fort Worth's Infamous Trinity River Vision Boondoggle

I blogged about that which you see, in the above screencap, on my Washington blog, in a blog post titled Visiting Seattle With The New Zealand Family.

Click the link to read the reason I was visiting Seattle with the New Zealanders. And how I came to know this family of four.

The reason I am making mention of this on my Texas blog is because one part of the video made me think of something in Texas which has bugged me for decades now.

The Trinity River Vision Boondoggle.

Ironically, the very day I posted the blog post about the New Zealanders visiting Seattle, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram had a long article about the current sad status of America's slowest, dumbest, most inept public works project.

I'll blog about this latest piece of distorted Star-Telegram propaganda later.

Back to the above screen cap of the mom and dad New Zealanders. They are walking on the re-built Seattle Waterfront.

This video, which you can see via clicking the above link, is the first time I have seen video of the new Seattle Waterfront. To say I was impressed is to understate. I was super impressed. Gone is the double decker elevated highway, replaced with a wider road and wider promenade, and other features.

That and a new transit tunnel under downtown Seattle, replacing the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

The rebuilding of the Seattle Waterfront was a complex engineering feat, involving removing a highway, digging a tunnel. And other things.

All of which began about a decade after Fort Worth began its pitiful Trinity River Vision, a supposed vitally needed flood control and economic development scheme. So vitally needed the Fort Worth public was never asked to vote to support a bond issue to pay for it. The bizarre vision was touted as being transformative, creating a Fort Worth waterfront, with an imaginary island, connected to the Fort Worth mainland by three little freeway overpass type bridges, which took an astonishing seven years to build.

Over dry land.

If I remember correctly, the Seattle Waterfront project was started around the time Fort Worth had a TNT exploding ceremony to celebrate the start of constructing those bridges, with Seattle's waterfront renovation completed well before the seven years Fort Worth took to build those three little bridges over dry land, with, years later, those bridges still waiting for a cement lined ditch to be dug under them, with Trinity River water diverted into the ditch, creating the imaginary island, with the three bridges connecting that imaginary island to the Fort Worth mainland.

I can't imagine how long it might take Fort Worth to try to do something like dig a transit tunnel under its puny downtown. A half century?