From the CRC Watch


Local news on the Columbia River Crossing:

  • International Design Panel (one the project didn’t pay for) disses the project.

    I had a chance to listen to the audio today, and this is the most cogent critique of the absolute failure of imagination and leadership that this bridge is. A must listen – every minute of the 2 hours is informative.

  • A new panel of experts appointed by the Governors includes no Oregon representatives, but two from Washington State. I thought experts had to be from out of town?

    Seriously, I think where these folks live is the least of our issues. I’m much more concerned about what their professional backgrounds are and the fact that local leaders don’t appear to have had much (if any) say in their selection.


45 responses to “From the CRC Watch”

  1. Had the CRC process honored the spirit of the Governors’ I-5 Task Force vote in 2002 on an “arterial” option, the so called “6-2-2” which split the TF down the middle, we would be looking at an honest design for a new bridge that would handle local trips, transit and bike/pedestrian travel. The best the community can do now is elect a Metro President who will honor that vote, and then retire Rex.

  2. I whole heartily degree that the expertise of the individuals on this panel is important, but the fact that we can’t find a single “expert” in the entire State of Oregon says a lot about the shortsightedness of this decision. It seems that local governments will be continually slighted until this project finally dies. Perhaps the state DOTs and the Federal government will take a hint?

  3. The CRC is only a tip of an even larger problem: I5 through Portland is just not big enough. It was designed for 1960’s traffic and has not been updated since.

    We now have a congested freeway that barely meets any FHA codes plus endless congested side streets that receive spill over from the antique freeway.

    No amount of smart growth, bike paths, or light rail can substitute for a much larger freeway that, not only allows for distant commutes and freight traffic, but takes a load off adjacent neighborhood streets as well.

  4. I-5 should be removed and replaced with high speed rail and a bike expressway. It is a toxic river, and should have never been built. see Alan Claussen’s excellent piece in the NW Examiner on the destruction of city neighborhoods by I-405. Same goes for I-5. The Marquam Bridge was acknowledged as a mistake by Glenn Jackson, head of OHC, the day it opened in 1966.

  5. Lenny: sounds like a great idea for the small number of people who bike or ride transit.

    Im sure N and NE neighborhoods would love an additional 200k cars, trucks, and buses to pack their already maxed out street system.

  6. I-5 should be removed and replaced with high speed rail and a bike expressway.

    Great! So what will the other 92% of commuters and 100% of the freight traffic coming in and out of the Port of Portland and the UPRR switching yard do?

  7. Anthony, the fallacy of your logic is assuming that the number of cars is fixed.

    It turns out that continually widening freeways results in worse congestion on nearby streets during peak hours. See other cities’ examples, ever driven near Seattle’s 10-12 lane I-5 during rush hour? Way worse than near our 4-6 lane example. The lesson learned in Atlanta’s freeway capacity buildup in advance of the ’96 Olympics was that additional capacity does not shorten commute times, it shifts land use patterns to absorb the new capacity, leading to stable commute times but increased VMTs per capita. This pattern repeats itself across the country, cities that widened tend to have worse congestion nearby.

    More importantly, they also have higher VMTs per capita, and correspondingly higher numbers of people killed and injured. We also know this equals fewer people walking and biking, poorer health, and less cohesive communities. Check the national data for the safety aspect – NHTSA is a good place to start.

  8. ever driven near Seattle’s 10-12 lane I-5 during rush hour? Way worse than near our 4-6 lane example. The lesson learned in Atlanta’s freeway capacity buildup in advance of the ’96 Olympics was that additional capacity does not shorten commute times, it shifts land use patterns to absorb the new capacity, leading to stable commute times but increased VMTs per capita. This pattern repeats itself across the country, cities that widened tend to have worse congestion nearby.

    What do either of these two examples have to do with Portland in 2010? Not that I am in favor of significant widening of I-5…and certainly not the removal of it into a tunnel as proposed by Sam Adams and Rex Burkholder.

    We could reduce VMT and probably increase both transit usage and bicycling, on what will become a dominant commute in our area, i.e. from anywhere north of the Forest Park ridgeline to employment in the evergrowing Silicon Forest area. This will take a new route from Hwy 30 to Hwy 26—completing the circle road route around the Portland Metropolitan region, which is standard practice, all over the world, in larger urban regions. To accomodate Clark Co. residents in this mix we need the third Interstate bridge over the Columbia—which can be built with money saved from the soon-to-be-defunct Columbia River Crossing project and from the future Freeway Loop project. The FL project can be replaced for far less money simply by building over the I-5 (as some other cities in the US have done) and reconfiguring the ramps in proximity of the Morrison Bridge.

  9. Unit, the fallacy of your logic is assuming that cars will magically appear to take up any new capacity.

    If I5 was widened, we would defiantly see a net increase in cars on the freeway, but they have to come from somewhere (they don’t just materialize). My assumption is that many of the folks who already commute in the corridor (such as interstate, MLK, etc) would take advantage of the new freeway capacity, and thereby reducing traffic on those neighboring streets.

  10. “They have to come from somewhere (they don’t just materialize).”

    Unfortunately, they also have to go somewhere. They don’t dematerialize either.

    But the number of cars on the road is not fixed, they are their because of their owners choices. And the more miles their owners choose to drive, the more road is required.

    Ron –

    I am not sure why anyone would want to live in Washington County and drive to Clark County to work. You seem to be proposing another massive investment in a highway that will stand almost empty in one direction half the day.

  11. I am not sure why anyone would want to live in Washington County and drive to Clark County to work. You seem to be proposing another massive investment in a highway that will stand almost empty in one direction half the day.

    I am trying to look ahead several decades. And this is a relatively simple plan, based upon projections of moderate growth. By contrast the plans being advanced by those like METRO and Sam Adams are predicated on a high growth rate. Furthermore, you seem to be seeing nothing but a multi-lane controlled access route like I-205. I have never said that, and don’t support that idea, although some in our group do. Also, I-205 does a lot more than serve commuters. Tens of thousands of people find it a useful feature every day of the year. You are just one person.

    FYI, people already live in Multnomah Co. and work in Clark Co. and vice versa. Since METRO is projecting the most urban reserve areas in Washington Co. are you saying that should be off-limits to commuters from Clark. Co.? And for those who would commute our concept shaves a fair number of miles off, broadening the appeal to those who don’t want to travel by car.

  12. See other cities’ examples, ever driven near Seattle’s 10-12 lane I-5 during rush hour?

    You mean the ones that bottleneck into 2-3 lanes because people complain about any option highway engineers offer to reduce congestion?

  13. Let’s just cut to the chase and build a no-speed-limit autobahn up the I-5 corridor. If I could drive 150 mph, I could commute up to Seattle, where the real jobs are.

  14. I think you’ll find that single-occupancy vehicles are mainly responsible for congestion because they make up something like 92% of traffic in general purpose lanes. If you watch near an I-5 ramp you can easily verify that this is true. We need to prioritize freight for the economy, and transit and carpools which more far more people per lane-mile than SOVs.

    There are studies; here’s a recent RAND one that found that the only long-term congestion solutions are road and parking pricing:
    http://www.grist.org/article/Fighting-congestion-RAND-style/

  15. Build it, and they will come.
    Tear it down, and they will go away.
    Without I-5 thru the heart of Portland, people will make different decisions about where to live, where to work and how to travel.
    As we shift from a commodity based economy to an idea based one, moving people efficiently becomes more critical than moving stuff. High speed rail from downtown Portland to downtown Seattle will be more critical to our economy in the coming decades than I-5 was in the last five.

  16. right on Finn, we once approached SF from the south on that 8-10 lane strip in our 5.0 mustang doing 80 in the 6th lane , a porche passed in lane 7 doing +/- 100 , and we were both passed by a ferrari in lane 8 doing something like 120….

  17. “I am trying to look ahead several decades. And this is a relatively simple plan, based upon projections of moderate growth. ”

    There are no projections for job growth in Clark County to exceed its population growth. I think you are looking backwards to the 20th century when we built freeways to spur development in suburban bedroom communities. That is what got us into this mess.

    “I-205”

    Is a multi-directional highway with heavy use in both directions along almost the entire corridor. It is not empty in one direction.

    “FYI, people already live in Multnomah Co. and work in Clark Co. and vice versa.”

    Sure they do, but not in even close to the same numbers. A highway from Washington County to Clark County is going to work the same way. Congestion southbound in the morning, congestion northbound in the evening. A huge investment in lanes that are nearly empty for all but a couple hours a day.

    “Since METRO is projecting the most urban reserve areas in Washington Co”

    Again – I think you are mistaking the meaning of that designation. The bulk of land designated for future development is on the east side of the region, not the west. And Damascus is projected not only to have residential development, but new employment as well.

  18. And if people live only a few miles from their employment, many of them are going to drive anyway. Just cuz. Bicycling might become a more popular option, but I would guess much less so in the wintertime. If they were living only a few miles a way I’m sure most of them would not opt for the bus or light rail.

    Our real problem on roadway spending is that roads get resurfaced much too frequently. I’ve seen this happen so many times, I’m sick of it. Fix potholes and damaged areas, yes. Repave the whole thing to ultra smoothness, ridiculous.

  19. “I-205”

    Is a multi-directional highway with heavy use in both directions along almost the entire corridor. It is not empty in one direction.

    Are you implying that I-5 is empty one direction, cause I-5 backs up badly southbound in the afternoon. It’s not like what northbound traffic faces, but it’s taken me over 20 minutes to get from downtown Vancouver to Jantzen beach at 5 pm before.

  20. I thought the notion of my asking the community to spend billions on an autobahn to Seattle for the convenience of my commute would be obviously ludicrous, but maybe not. =)

  21. Die Zeit der Autobahn ist vorbei; jetzt brauchen wir eine ICE Bahn zwischen Portland und Seattle.

  22. Isn’t there any way to learn the major points and follow their analysis without taking a half hour to download the file and then spending two hours listening to it? Did anyone write up the conclusions?

  23. Building more lanes does not solve congestion. In fact, it never has. You invite more congestion when you build capacity for SOVs. Tolling, flex-rate parking, light rail, and active transportation infrastructure are much cheaper, sustainable solutions that will solve the issues on I-5. Nothing about the proposed CRC is in line with our city’s environmental goals.

  24. Steve: so when you build a bigger sewer pipe, do people go to the bathroom more? Does the construction of maternity wards increase the birth rate?

    A little logic never hurt anyone.

  25. A little logic never hurt anyone.

    And here’s a greatly simplified version of how the logic goes:

    1. A typical working human being will tolerate a commute of a certain period of time (rather than distance). Studies vary in the exact figure, but do show an upper limit beyond which people will seek out new employment or new living arrangements. Time, not distance, is the primary factor in what is called “commuting tolerance”.

    2. Increasing roadway capacity, in the short term, reduces travel time. But, this available capacity is filled by those who can now live further away from the workplace (but within the commute tolerance threshold), where (at least initially) land and housing is cheaper.

    3. The increased demand on the roadway from longer-distance commuters eventually negates any congestion mitigation because people are now traveling longer distances.

    Now, if your goal is to engineer society so that people can live further from their workplaces, commuting greater distances, and facilitating new low-density housing developments, then increasing highway capacity logically follows as a way to facilitate this.

    However, if your goal is congestion reduction or energy savings (setting aside land use planning, walkability, sustainability, etc.), then engineering society via the widening of highways is not a way to achieve those long-term goals.

  26. JHB: I suppose it would, although consumption of other foods would go down as people would be too full from the cake.

  27. Bob R., is your model based upon traditional land use patterns. i.e., single family homes on individual parcels? I think the equation is changing and will continue to change, particularly in scenic areas like the Northwest. It used to be the mark of success (materially speaking) to live on “top o’ the hill”, a pattern which is repeated everywhere from big cities to small towns. However, high-rise construction offsets that trend.

    In a city like Portland there are plenty of places that the successful can have a status symbol or smart investment, without moving far out of town (assuming the preferable spots in town are already occupied.)

    In other words I don’t think in our area that it would be axiomatic, anymore, that “those who can now live further away from the workplace (but within the commute tolerance threshold), where (at least initially) land and housing is cheaper.

    As for those who move further away because it is more affordable, that could have been a reasonable choice when composite vehicle operation costs were low, (like in the 1960s or 70s) but a lot of that has changed, also. So, lower income people may start re-evaluating their economic choices.

    In a mild climate locale like Portland, these changes do translate into more amenable conditions for alternative transport. But maybe not so much in places with harsh winters and hot, humid summers. Although—cost-effective public transport could be very useful anywhere. If the costs are brought to a reasonable level, then even subsidizing the ticket costs, to encourage use, would make more sense. Yes, it’s a type pf social engineering—but a taxpayer-friendly type.

  28. They need to widen that stupid bridge! They also should widen I5 all the way through Portland down to Wilsonville and add another lane to Eugene! I’d also like to see a freeway replace current 99W and extend 217 across the river to I5. It’s time to start planning for this so-called population explosion we’re about to experience in Oregon and quit limiting progress through asinine things such as land-use and so called “smart-growth”…..

  29. They also should widen I5 all the way through Portland

    It might surprise you that I favor targeted bottleneck removal in order to balance the load of the transportation system. This could include capacity improvements to the central portion of I-5.

    But if the CRC seems expensive, just wait until you see the price tag for expanding I-5 capacity in Portland. From what I can tell, nearly every interchange and overpass will have to be completely rebuilt, and there’s dozens of them, including the approaches to the Fremont bridge, and, depending on how far south you want to take this, the replacement of the Marquam bridge.

    A problem we tend to have is that the outer regions of the freeway system get upgraded capacity first because there is plenty of undeveloped land and little existing infrastructure, so the cost is less (seemingly). But this puts additional capacity burden on the older, more central portions of the system, which cost much more to upgrade.

    The balanced approach would be to upgrade the central portions first, in a thoughtful manner, but the price tag on this is always a deterrent.

    But if a 10 (really 14) or 12 (really 16) lane CRC gets built, it won’t be long before the resulting traffic jams closer to downtown Portland call for a mega-project to “fix” the problem.

    This is another way in which the true cost of the CRC is not currently reported.

  30. So if it’s such a pain and it’s going to be expensive anyway, maybe they could add an upper deck to I5 all the way through downtown Portland? I like my idea of extending 217 northward to join back up to I5 in NoPo. If they don’t want to sacrifice any of the Forest Park they could just build a tunnel underneath it? They build tunnels under huge mountains in Europe, why can’t they do it underneath a little hill?

  31. Greg, just for the sake of argument, if we were willing to do that to our City, how much of an increase in your Oregon gas tax would you tolerate to achieve it? I suspect we could be talking on the order of magnitude of a dollar a gallon.

  32. To expand Greg’s idea further, what if the tunnel from US-26 to US-30 was tolled, and the portion over the Columbia River? It might end up being a good way (with the addition of HOT lanes on the existing 217) to get a bypass of the Portland metro area. Would anyone be willing to spend what it would cost? Is it maybe not a solution to use now, but to keep in mind for 50 or 100 years from now?

  33. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the problem with a connection between 26 and 30 (whether a new bypass or extending highway 217) that it serves no existing trips. So where does the traffic come from? And where does it go?

    Highway 217 is already heavily used for access to the communities along it. That’s why there are so many interchanges along it. The traffic engineers, who see highways’ function as moving traffic, think eliminating those access points as way to “improve” the highways performance. But in truth, the function of transportation facilities is to give people access to services, employment and recreation. And “limiting” access defeats that purpose.

    Many people who move to Portland from elsewhere bring their expectations with them. They buy a house in Lake Oswego and plan to “zip” out to Intel on 217 and 26. By Bay Area/Seattle standards, that IS a relatively short commute. But after living in Portland a couple years, they realize that there are a lot of better alternatives in the Portland region. They can live in Lincoln Heights and be ten minutes from downtown with a much shorter commute to Intel. They can even live downtown and use the Max.

    I find it hard to understand why anyone would want to invest huge amounts of money to encourage people to live further from work by making that choice more attractive. The only way to avoid that, and preserve capacity for “through traffic”, is to deny access to the freeway. If there were no interchanges on 217 between I5 and 26 and between 26 and I5, then through traffic could use 217 as a bypass. Same with I205. But “through use” is a small number of the current users. They would be getting served at the expense of the actual current users of the highway, including a lot of the economic activity in the region.

  34. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the problem with a connection between 26 and 30 (whether a new bypass or extending highway 217) that it serves no existing trips. So where does the traffic come from? And where does it go?

    That’s obviously true, JS, because there can be no existing trips where a route doesn’t exist.

    I don’t know exactly where, but I read from reliable sources that Silicon Forest businesses have a substantial number of Clark Co. employees. How would they get out there now, except via I-5 and US 26, thus making those routes congested? Is it coincidence that congestion on I-5 exceeded a tolerable level during the same era two other factors kicked in: job growth in the S.F. and population growth in Clark Co.? Furthermore, they are not too likely to go out the smaller roads, like Cornell. And I have also observed the traffic turning from I-405 southbound to US 26 westbound. A lot of Washington plates—probably 20-25 percent when I was there at 8 am.

    I do have some METRO data that shows where commuters from each of the four counties in our region end up, by percentage.

    You make statements with no backup.

  35. …Silicon Forest businesses have a substantial number of Clark Co. employees.

    And we should spend our hard-erned money building roads and bridges to encourage this sort of thing? This is the kind of commuting we ought to discourage.

  36. Highly recommend Allan Clausen’s piece in the NW Examiner…they must have a web site… on how destructive I-405 is on close in neighborhoods. It virtually wiped out Goose Hollow and severely compromised the West End and NWDA. Think of all the property taxes lost to the City with ODOT’s expropriation of the right of way!
    re the earlier Nazi comment: the irony is that our Interstate freeway network was modeled on the Nazi Autobahn system that Eisenhower admired. But not even the Nazi’s ran these highways thru the middle of cities, wiping out neighborhoods.
    Germany rebuilt its bombed out cities after WWII, while we destroyed ours all by ourselves with parking lots and freeways. Let de-construction begin, and a new city flourish.

  37. Ron –

    I don’t know where you read that. But it isn’t true if you are talking about substantial in terms of its effect on the traffic on I5. The other obvious route is I-205 if you are coming from the east.

    “Is it coincidence that congestion on I-5 exceeded a tolerable level during the same era two other factors kicked in: job growth in the S.F. and population growth in Clark Co.?”

    Yes. To quote from a Oregon Department of Employment report ( http://www.qualityinfo.org/olmisj/ArticleReader?itemid=00003071 )
    based on 2000 census data:

    “What’s notable is that of the 25,000 additional commuters heading in to Multnomah County since 1990, almost half came from Clark County. This represents the largest absolute growth in the number of workers commuting across county lines in the six-county Portland metro area. ”

    In other words, the obvious explanation is the correct one. People who live in Clark County mostly commute to Portland, as you would expect, and that explains the increased traffic on both I5 and I205.

  38. If anything needs to be discouraged it’d be foreigners from California and Massachusetts moving here and telling us how we ought to live. Hypocrites … They should just go home and stop overpopulating Oregon!

  39. Hey, its the new residents that have made this place interesting. As someone who remembers the 50’s and 60’s in Portland, the word that comes to mind is “boring!”

  40. Portland has always been a great place to live. Yes, there have been some positive changes; but I am happy enough with the mix here now. More people in Portland also means more people in the state and more rules and regulations than we have now. It means rapidly rising prices in property values and general cost of living. It also means a widening gulf between rich and poor.

    When I was a kid our family would get the six dollar a night, bayfront motel in Taft at Siletz bay and still have an enjoyable time. By contrast, I recently was an employee on the construction of a project at Cannon Beach where the suites with views would be renting for somewhere around five hundred dollars a night.

    While I agree this city has become less boring there is a definite downside to population growth.

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