Twelve lanes of shame will be the legacy of Portland City Council decision to approve the mega lane solution (aka the "aircraft carrier")for the Columbia River Crossing. The decision could not even wait for Metro to conduct the congestion modeling study it approved just two weeks before.
The "management plan” appended to the approval and offered by two mayors is a panacea for avoiding the hard choice to limit freeway sprawl. And it is sprawl -all 460 feet of concrete deck (2.5 Portland city blocks wide )over the Columbia River.

The “management plan” creates a crossing authority established by two cities in charge of a Federal Highway over which they have little jurisdiction. It is like the City of Portland approving a Port masterplan to double the size of the airport conditioned on managing the number of flights (and attendant noise and pollution) by a committee overseeing the airport tax. A "thermostat" it is not.

In 5 or 10 years, City Council chambers and Metro Chambers will again be packed with roadway interests insisting on widening the I-84 interchange and then all of I-5 through the central city. Repeating the same canard that between the Canadian Border and the Mexican border the flow of freight is tied up in the Rose Quarter- (except, by the way, LA and Seattle), they will insist that safety, congestion, and commerce depend on a bigger highway – bigger shoes for a bigger tommorrow. The fable resonated this time for the Columbia Crossing and it will be much harder to resist in future as the congestion moves south.

Vancouver, BC recognized the challenge and proposed the obvious and simple if politically difficult solution. They control freeway sprawl and health impacts by limiting bridge lanes and excluding freeways in their city.

Meanwhile Portland plays sucker for hardball highway interests that threaten our core livability goals by accepting faulty analysis and failed vision that mock our “green” livability goals.

Portland’s reputation is rooted in limiting freeways and calming streets. Tolling won’t stop the southbound flow or northbound sprawl or the shameful legacy of failing to learn from the mistakes of the past. "Oregon" solution? – 1950s style.