spent nineteen thousand dollars just to get his message out about a better alternative to the alaskan way viaduct de petri today on public exposure welcome day thank you dave i got to thank you  for spending the money to get this message out but let's just go specifically into real briefly what it is that we're talking about here as an alternative to the last i thought it i was treating some friends from the  midwest to fish and chips that ivers fish bar in august of one nine hundred ninety five we couldn't talk to each other we were yelling so loud so i grabbed a napkin and a ballpoint pen and i sketched out a scheme to fix the problem of the noise and to improve everything about of the water front and if you imagine one of these little trains that goes around the christmas tree and you took a shoe box and cut the ends out inverted the shoe box and set it on that that would cover the the train track and you could put a park on there in fact you wrote the perfect solution for the viaduct in the seattle p i in two thousand and six and this is something that i  this which i thought was really interesting this option avoids horrendous cost and allays and can be financed easily by funds and tax streams already available that's my opinion yes we have enough money by the what we save if we stop the  anyway so they shelved it but there's there's a lot of pressure out there the city council when i talked to them on the twelfth of january i postulated a scheme where we we could remove it and put the alladin it's places like a free trial like yes to use a very took words out of my mother what the public try it for thirty more days and then had a public vote there wouldn't be one vote favoring the board tunnel yeah that's right that's for sure but you know what think the public is in right now other they're listen to this and they're saying well who is daid petri how does he know anything about this tells a little bit about unity i was working for the atomic energy commission where we went out and we talk and we set off three nuclear weapons we built a model of a russian city an aircraft plant and and also a trigger for the the h bomb which was just coming and i was in new mexico and i got homesick so i sent boeing an application and i found the boeing had just started a new division called the pilotless aircraft a vision in which we were building a missile that was the size of the f one hundred six and was meant to intercept bison the bear bombers that were theoretically coming over the polar cap to drop nuclear weapons on us and therefore full of curb laws they said we want to shift from a liquid propelled booster to a solid like fourth of july fireworks and i'm  this and the public is saying what does it have to do with transportation well you asked my background aerodynamics the said you couldn't build a missile to do this it was against the rules and i said the hell you say because i was afraid in  this and so i put on an article in the control engineering showing how you can stabilize a unstable vehicle and the principle operation is no different than if you take a broom handle and put it on a stip the bristles up it will fall over but if you put it on your fingers and hold it you could stabilize and that was the principle is a very valuable contract to boeing well i got the reputation and boeing of being a go to guy when they wanted some innovation and some some turning the stones to look deeper into a subject and because of that i was assigned to see what digital computers could do for commercial airplanes and i put together a crew of twenty five people engineers and computers data bus and waiting to get on to their play to take them to early paris and i asked the what do you think of the flight management system and they said it's done more to reduce the fatalities in commercial aviation any single aviation innovation that we've had in years and it's lowered the fatality rate from thirty three people per billion passenger miles to thirteen and so that's kind of reputation i had as the go to guy for anything required to bump the box thinking so when i saw this and came up with the alad and the name by the way was came from my my artist tom boatman and he says we've got to get a catchy name so that when people are down on the olive oil they'll say hey joe meet me down here  over past number three and but it stands for alaska live and that's pointed out in my article but that's that's my background is i'm known for that kind of thing and i know what it i know i'm good at it and so when i the perfect solution and that was a slap in the face to our city transportation department and they they said no way that doesn't meet our requirements and you know we're going to do we're going to talk about the what the city but let's let's talk about a little bit about what we it has less access to downtown and the toll is going to be three dollars and fifty cents one way are you saying that allen has a better alternative than that absolutely on every count every want to see this is why aren't we doing this and but i'm a small voice and i need to have someone i'd like to find a man who was who was popular in the business community and and or in a big technically it guy that could be the champion round up the public well but the but the public has voted to spend money on this project i mean the alaskan way tunnel is something that the public is supposedly for or are they well we have one councilman in the city change his mind on the tunnel to be able to get him to do anything differently in fact just very recently there's a big celebration because birth actually moved by the way as we do the show it is february twenty second two thousand and fifteen so just a few days ago bertha was able to break through i guess to be able to get it repaired that's window dressing what is what does that mean that means that people who are in favor of that will say hey we're making progress but the masses out there do not want the first place and they aren't getting their message reflected in what our what our government is doing and the lynchpin on this is the governor he could mandy that they stopped in fact it was legislation planned to stop the big bertha operation because they didn't have faith the mayor is worried about the shifting pressures and had trouble on thirty percent of the of the board totals throughout the world when really when you say you know what does that mean settling really is the thing that bothers people because you're disturbing the soil and all the pressure from those  building there the mayor's afraid that something going to happen and we're going to be liable for it and he's uncomfortable with this is a lot of people and there's no tunnel of that you have to have some small tunnels in the alley to go into the north portal which is already being built and i visited that last friday and let's get to the let's get to the allen right now your design is it something that can be put into place now even though we've gone so far down the road with this board tunnel yes a professional business where they're going to change the sign on something i don't care what it is there's been cases where skyscrapers have been built and torn down when they decided it was in the wrong location so the idea of stopping this project causes we all feel uncomfortable about this because but that's what he said but heard others say let's just bury it yeah but you can do anything if you make up your mind to do it even though it seems it's an ugly thing to to have stop what's going on and change things around but they need to go to their engineers and say what would we do different if we adopted the al it has got one of your artist drawings on the screen in the allen itself something i've you know found really interesting  hundred fifty thousand vehicles a day you're saying that the that it is the capacity and the capacity of the board tunnel is less than the viaduct itself and this hundred fifty thousand vehicles a day is more than the viaduct viaduct presently has the capacity and it is transporting one hundred five thousand vehicles a day but that's the traffic from ballard magnolia as well as the traffic from the state route ninety nine and this has six la instead of four three each direction and the tunnel has to this way in this way and they're located one above the other in the tube and they have to be turned this way to go in and out of them of the tunnel but the capacity is  greater in the olive than it is in what the board tunnel will provide so well i'm just i guess i'm just shocked in the state wouldn't just say hey we need to we need to increase capacity rather than decrease capacity and and especially since it's significantly less cost but the feeling is with by our legislators that we put this money into this and no one likes to throw money down the tube but that is what we're doing long as we keep this operation going we're sending paychecks out to all those workers and if we give them a new order i don't think we should tell them right away we're going to pull the rug out from under we should quietly go to our engineers and and put together a plan what we see what's been done with what needs to be done and make it work you think anything's going to be quiet about this project well i think you could develop a backup plan and i recommended that a backup plan be done though the question is though when we go from three lanes to two lanes which is what has happened from the to the tunnel how many you know what does that do to the capacity the viaduct right now has a capacity of this passing on hundred five thousand cars a day and it has basically two there's other ladies to get us off the sen and get us off to magnolia and ballard but the basic throughput is a two lane system each way and this is a system at the major part of the waterfront highway yeah and the tunnel itself  capacity well from a view standpoint though isn't the board tunnel better because everything's underground or in the water depending on your point of view but no if you walk around on the waterfront just one hundred eighty fo minutes if you're a first avenue and you and your friend decide to go to have lunch on the waterfront take a two minutes to go through a stoplight free path through the overpasses down to the waterfront you can't get there that fast today no you can't because you've got to go to a stop light like you do at the embarcadero and like we presently have that there's no stop lights barring anybody going from the down just like the marion street overpass that takes  to the ferry from first avenue same idea but the b six of those something else that i found was really interesting about the proposal is the way that you bring in the technology itself you talk about the surface tunnel segments or can be sixty three and the lift these sections they wouldn't look that way but similar and they can track them down the long of a mile long waterfront and set them up and put them together like  set type of thing and much simpler it's above the water table nothing like the big bertha which is right through the glacial fill the sand of the grit which has caused the damage to the seals now tunnel and when you wanted to switch over you could just do some so as a lawyer the brunt of the idea a lawyer on the stakeholders committee and he was the stakeholders it was a committee that was formed in two thousand and eleven to try to resolve this issue it was  a big kettle of fish people didn't know what to do and i had already figured out in august of one thousand nine hundred five when i was feeding some friends of fish and chips where the idea came to me and and we could hear each other answer thousand and five as well you also have some you know very fun parts to the proposal to the south and you know restaurant ampitheater swimming pool the kinds of things that others have talked about and you've got to be in your plan as well we've got nine acres you can do all kind of the you can have a dog park a kiddie park of all the ball court long skinny park all looking out over the water to the olympics about the dirt the construction itself how how would you detour people around i mean right now the detour is not fun but it's working well the detour now they're running it where the parking lot used to be underneath because i was there yesterday and i have a similar plan which there is where i propose that we turn last get away into a stoplight free freeway and because he still have to get down to the feed cars on to the ferry and to service all the business when i was down there yesterday there was this huge gulf and it's really torn up but they are getting the seawall part of it fixed before they have to fix everything up the as we go further i guess towards battery street is that what this picture per hour was using battery street in this but with the with the new portals that i saw being built for the board tunnel it would be better with we use that and feed the traffic from the surface road that i'm proposing into that by by there's another drawing somewhere in here but that shows the marion street overpass which is similar to what we have on the to get from the downtown to the waterfront  of this graphic which shows escalators at the end so let's something that you have for people as well yes that's the way you get down to the promenade from the the higher elevation of the park so in and in addition to providing greater vehicular capacity you've also got greater pedestrian access absolutely as well very interesting what was it that was driving you when you when you created this idea in the first place well as reputation i had and it was just it's in my blood i do that i do it for everything and when i was talking to my friends while we're eating fish and chips i was irritated i had to shout at them like they had to shout at me you know well saw us that was the that was the start of it you've also incorporated something else in and it's the drawing that's on the screen right now if you can take your the atlantic street interchange it you're talking about how how would this work with could take the traffic from aurora avenue and get it over to the waterfront and build this viaduct thing they could increase throughput has been a very handy way of increasing the throughput north to south and i saw this as part of the i saw other things as a weakness to improving throughput and it was an adjunct it isn't directly connected to but i saw the thought of the trucks coming out of the the new port and you'll see on their port of seattle a container terminal all that came in cars can get on ships and that is an adjunct put it that way so all of these the wonderful ideas that you have worked on before they've been in the private sector mostly or as working as a private sector as a contractor for the government this time however you're kind of in a political atmosphere and in two thousand and five the mayor mayor nickels at the time he pretty much responded didn't like it didn't like it at all and interestingly the worst person who signed the response to you was the seawall administrator as opposed to someone from the viaduct i have two letters in which the city explains that my plan did not fit their requirements and what were they any the said the people have to walk down the hill to just one thousand foot wall and climb up stairways and then go across on these overpasses and then down the other side that's crazy that is the way it works because nobody's going to down there on that particular spot because there's just there's a bicycle shop and there's furniture refinishing little shops along there no one needs to go down there normally but the way a person visits the audi as they come in and they park in the robotic garages which have a very high density for robotic parking is not new it's not new but it hasn't widely used yet not in the united states but in europe and asia he has seen them in both places how do they work well you drive onto a pallet you get out of your car and you go do your shopping you visit the waterfront whatever you want to do and when you come back and you get two hundred feet away you want your cell phone or you dial in and say you want this car and system looks like a bunch of bicycle chains and  your car from this pallet which is its vandal prove nobody can get in nobody can steal anything and in a robotic right for the you can stack them but that car will be waiting for you all you've got to do is get in and swipe your card pay for it and where you go  got up on the screen right now possibly the best drawing that mr boatman did when he did his drawings for you would you explain this drawing itself it's an overlay picture basically what i took out of the city is a brochure on what the waterfront will look like with their country cover this is for cut and cover what the mayor nickels liked and so we overlaid that to show what the album ok like and the traffic down below wouldn't be there except for alaska and we  and you see those direct passage ways to go to the so the they don't know what they're talking about when grace twenty can enter who wrote these letters explaining what they didn't like about my plan and in fact this plan similar to this has worked before in city that if i get get royalties for this because i've got a copy writer to the library of congress i will use that royalty money to fund a study and i've talked to this the man is in chicago but he knows the cab and taxi which was developed in germany but  levon point five mile circulator around downtown it goes up to the university of sail university up the pill hill to get down to the to the stadiums up the space needle to all those facilities in the south of the lake union and you can you can you can actually drive to work and walked to work from where you park your car in that plan but it's an interesting adjunct to the city not part of the but  guess my question is how do we get this to happen the lynchpin on this is the governor i was i spent my life in the industrial sector and i know the confidence of the people i work with in the industrial sector would do it the way i described it where they would make a study of what do we do to make this happen and you're talking about the political side which i'm relatively that's why i was so desperate ad to go out and put this ad in the paper because i couldn't get a voice out there with that we're going to let