The Buffalo NY Kensington Expressway Tunnel/Humboldt Parkway Restoration is being opposed over under certainties of it being subsequently extended north, under a false idea that the parkway's restoration should instead mean flanking it with expressway traffic, requiring wider surface roadways and hence little median space for Olmsted's vision.
The uncertainties of the Tunnel/Parkway restoration north of Sidney Street owe to the obstruction of the Scajaquado Creek buried conduit, a 24 foot wide x 14 foot deep concrete box, next to the overhead pedestrian bridge over the surface expressway.
To have a later project to extend the Kensington Expressway Tunnel, means having to rip out the current project's tunnel to surface ascent/descent transition, while maintaining traffic use of the tunnel.
The area is hard rock, time consuming to excavate. So would we have to close off at least one direction of the tunnel for the number of months to remove the material.
But what if, we instead had extended the initial (current) project's expressway tunnel excavation a few hundred feet closer to the buried creek conduit.
By doing so, the transition area would be upon fill material that would take a fraction of the time of removing than hard excavation.
And with the underground space nearer to the conduit, set up a mico tunneling operation, such as this:
https://newatlas.com/technology/petra-thermal-drill-robot/
Consider this applied to the Kensington Expressway Tunnel.
Establish an underground staging area for micro tunneling equipment.
Establish and fix in place a plan for the expressway tunnel/buried creek crossing, perhaps to replace 24 ft x 14ft box with a number of smaller diameter pipes to dissipate the water-flow and reduce the depth of expressway excavation, while avoiding a 1/3 of a mile long replacement downstream outlet.
Use the micro tunneling to drill bores for the 1400 or so feet northward. Do this in parallel to excavate, reducing the amounts required for more conventional methods. Establish an excavation that includes an underground off-ramp not marring the restored Humboldt Parkway, with an underground split to exit to Delavan Avenue that would be used for continuing upon the surface Humboldt Parkway, and a cut and cover tunnel beneath the northbound Humboldt Parkway for a subsequent Scajaquado Expressway Tunnel to a point west of Agassiz Circle).
Also consider:
https://cos-mobile.blogspot.com/2013/12/for-cast-iron-friendly-lower-manhattan.html
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