Must agree. This is unusually stupid in that it goes beyond Shealy’s normal capacity for dumb ideas. Let’s jam more useless development in an already overstuffed city that you can’t even drive through and call it progress. Geez, you can’t even drive to Kuna these days as ITD and ACHD all seem to be working on every southbound road. Does anybody ever bother to check with each other? And Shealy expects these morons to take on a stupid project like this? We need to get someone in there that is grounded in reality unlike Mr. Shealy.

Aw, c’mon. Shealy had to be joking, right? He probably got mixed up on dates and thought it was April 1.

If the City of Boise goes ahead with Shealy’s plan, won’t that open them up to a lawsuit from that nut job psuedo Baptist minister with six toes on each foot from Kentucky or some place?

I see the transit tax has been mentioned… Something that happens with a public transit system is the daily violent crime (curently clearly contained to the west of Boise by the physical distance) will be in Boise via the system, because it’s cheap reliable and anonymous… If you disagree look at the crime patterns in a big city when something shuts down the system for a few days… The crime reverts to it’s place of origin. The mass trans pushers don’t tell you that part.

It should be a crime if even one penny is spent evaluating this idiot’s proposal.

Everyone who voted Shealy into office should be embarassed, and if it happens again, they should have their voting privilages revoked.

Not to deflect a well-deserved public thrashing, but Shealy is only bringing up a rather old idea first raised in 1992. In Spring of that year (three months before the Front/Myrtle project was to officially open) a team of young University of Idaho architecture students suggested that converting these two streets to high-capacity surface transportation corridors was a particularly bad idea – if you thought that downtowns ought to be pedestrian friendly.

Shealy appears to have taken these students’ rather intriguing conceptual idea, that of lowering Front & Myrtle to allow the north/south streets to run unimpeded and at-grade (and allowing pedestrians to cross at the old 8th Street alignment unharassed), and pushed it to an ugly and poorly considered conclusion.

The problem isn’t just with his idiotic comparison to Boston’s Big Dig; it also lies with his suggestion that the roads should be tunneled. This would exponentially raise the cost of the project by:

1) Taking what would be a relatively simple project with a series of vehicular and pedestrian bridges and converting it into a very wide, very long, and exceedingly complex structural problem.

2) Taking a roadway system that is currently powered by the energy of the vehicles driving the network (not counting the electricity to run the traffic lights) and converting it to a system that is completely dependent on very energy-hungry, massive air handling system. And, if the power goes out no one would be able to drive the tunnel because they would asphyxiate on carbon monoxide.

A major portion of the Big Dig involved removing an elevated roadway built in 1953, originally designed to move 75,000 vehicles a day – which at the time of its replacement was carrying over 200,000 vehicles a day. According to ITD’s traffic logs, the average combined eastbound and westbound traffic counts on the connector have never exceeded 68,000 vehicles in any 24-hour period (these logs go all the way back to 1992). This is still well within the roadway’s design capacity.

Keep in mind that the Big Dig project was built to replace an antiquated system that was forced to transport more than 1,000,000 people a day. Does anyone really think our delegates have enough political chutzpah (more than Ted Kennedy’s!) to convince Congress that the annoying street problems in Boise are almost as bad as Boston’s (which has a daytime population larger than the entire state of Idaho – and nearly double the state’s during special events like the Boston Marathon). And if we had such political geniuses, would we want to waste their talents convincing Congress to fund an idea as stupid as tunneling a 10-lane freeway beneath Boise?

Maybe Shealy is just trying to jump the gun. Not in some visionary way, but given that the Big Dig also has the Ted Williams’ Tunnel which runs under the harbor – Shealy wants to prove that his head is already frozen in a vat.

Solve the pedestrian problem by putting the crosswalks over or under the road…much cheaper than moving the road.

Solve the trafic flow problem by rearaging the flow on existing streets and reducing the number of lights/access points that cause the current flow to be choppy. Kinda like one of those amusement rides that never stops, but rather the cars are just removed from the track to load/unload. (I think the trafic engineer people call it a limited access road.) Some routes would be for entering the city and others for exiting.

The good news is they’ve had this problem figured out for years in many of the eastern cities that grew bigger years ago…the only people fool enough to do the Big Dig were spending someone elses money. Thank You Uncle Ted K.

Wouldn’t just running over pedestrians when you see them, solve the problem? What is so great about “pedestrian friendly design” anyway. Ever try to walk down the sidewalk at Saturday Market. People are everywhere getting in the way. Hello people, the price of gas is going down. SUV’s are going to be cool again. General Motors is on the re-bound. We should widen Front and Myrtle and SUV size all future parking. We need to come together as a country and be AMERICANS. Mass transit is an Old Europe idea. What do you guys propose, we impress the French?