CRC Peer Review Unlikely to Convince Skeptics


Saturday’s Oregon reports on the presentation of a peer review panel of “leading traffic forecasters from Seattle, Atlanta, Dallas and Sacramento”.

The panel’s conclusion:

A bridge with double the current number of lanes would have “minimal” impact on growth, the panel concluded, even though the project would nearly eliminate the evening rush-hour for commuters from Clark County, one of the fastest growing areas of the region.

But Metro President David Bragdon wasn’t necessarily convinced:

“So then it comes down to, what’s your faith in modeling?” asked Metro Council President David Bragdon, later citing the growth of urban regions where highways grew and sprawl followed. “Especially when you’re constantly being asked to … ignore the lessons of the last 50 years?”

Meanwhile, significant funding for the project doesn’t appear to be on anyone’s short-term priority list.


19 responses to “CRC Peer Review Unlikely to Convince Skeptics”

  1. “It’s not helping the people who live out in northern Clark County, so that’s why it’s not promoting induced demand in further areas,” Outwater said. “You haven’t really changed the capacity for those kinds of trips.”

    This is really baffling to me. How can it not induce demand in those areas?

    Doing a little modeling in my own head, I imagine being someone who’s exploring the possibility of buying a house in northern Clark County, with the intention of working and/or shopping in Oregon. I look at the current state of traffic on the bridge, and I think: no way in hell do I want to deal with that. No sale.

    Now if a fancy new bridge comes in, for the window of time in which it lives up to its promise of reducing congestion, the drive over the Columbia suddenly looks a lot more feasible. So I buy the house in northern Clark County.

    Or will people in northern Clark County not ever work or shop on the other side of the Columbia?

  2. What’s wrong with someone wanting to live in a larger home with a yard? Portland doesn’t offer that choice at an affordable price so it forces people to live in Clark Co.

    I thought you all were about providing people with “choices?”

  3. Nothing wrong with wanting to live in a big house with a yard. Just don’t make me subsidize your “need” for thousands of square feet with my tax dollars that can be much more efficiently spent in Portland. A taxpayer funded 12 lane CRC is welfare for sprawl.

    Portland has plenty of houses with yards available for sale or rent. No one is “forced” to live in Clark County except the residents of the county jail. And no one has a right to force other taxpayers to fund their unnecessarily long single-car commute when affordable, closer housing and public transportation options can be paid for much more cheaply.

  4. “This is really baffling to me. How can it not induce demand in those areas? ”

    I can understand why your baffled.

    You don’t know that “Induced Demand” is complete bunk.
    One of the many concocted notions used to increase congestion.

  5. The most telling bit in the story was at the end where it was noted that the consultants are not even looking at or evaluating the impact of tolling the existing bridges. I think we all know that tolls now…with HOV lanes for rideshare, transit and off peak freight…is the low cost, environmentally friendly solution across the Columbia.

  6. A handout provided at a recent CRC open house on the traffic effects of 8,10 and 12 add/drop lane bridge scenarios from the traffic model endorsed by our ‘peers’ from those transit friendly cities of Dallas TX, Atlanta GA, Seattle and Sacramento, produced some strange conclusions.

    It showed that I-5 bridge congestion with 8 lanes will be 7 to 9 hours but only 3.5 to 5.5 hours with 12 lanes while daily transit ridership remains the same at 18,900.

    According to this logic, not one commuter will switch from car to public transit in the face of twice the daily congestion.

  7. Looks like the “Fix” is in on the CRC. Why not build a bridge for MAX, bike/ped, and local traffic…then see what happens on the existing spans.

  8. The CRC needs to be considered in a 100 year
    timeframe. If we build this bridge today it will be used by one group in 10 years , another in thirty years , and another in 75 years. It is foolhardy to build too small of a bridge today because of some concern about sprawl. If you want to control along those subjective lines , then build a 12 lane bridge and don’t open 6 of them yet. We have to build the best bridge we can , and leave social issues to the future generations. Sprawl may not matter in 20 years when we all have pollution free cars and our food is grown in factories.

  9. At the CRC open house, the modeling done by objective professionals clearly demonstrated that a twelve-lane bridge was not only safer with 60 less crashes per year than a ten-lane bridge and 100 less crashes than an eight-lane bridge, it also demonstrated that a twelve-lane bridge would, add the least amount of regional VMTs as compared to the other two options due to less traffic diverted to the I-205 bridge. Sam Adams and Metro ought to be jumping with joy and supporting the wider bridge. Additionally there will be less EITs (engines idling it traffic and going no where) with the wider bridge.

    As for Lenny and other that think the fix is in for the CRC, a person only needs to look at any modeling for bicycle infrastructure, modeling for the bicycle infrastructure component of the Sellwood Bridge, modeling done for streetcars and other transit infrastructure, and any bias-politically motivated modeling done by Metro to truly observe where the fix is really in.

  10. Seattle, Atlanta, Dallas and Sacramento?

    Could we pick cities with any less credibility on this issue? You can’t make this stuff up.

    Why not add Detroit, Houston, and LA to the mix? And as long as there’s no screen for success here, let’s throw in Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Miami as a nod to their collapsing real estate markets. Maybe they have some advice for us.

    Next we’ll be turning to Baltimore and New Orleans for how to run our police department.

    Who picked the peers? This walks, smells, and quacks like a fix.

  11. Quoting John E.:

    ‘You don’t know that “Induced Demand” is complete bunk.’

    Bunk? Maybe we’re not talking about the same thing. I think of induced demand as: “if you build it they will come.” If you build a particular infrastructure, people will make use of that infrastructure, for fun and profit – usually to the point when it fills up to the point where it’s no longer fun or profitable.

    Like what happened in Bend, where 97 – a busy highway – went through town, which then attracted businesses, which then bogged down the traffic, which then required the construction of a new freeway to bypass the old highway.

    It’s like the natural life cycle of infrastructure, and it seems pretty self-apparent to me, as obvious as the nose on my face, which if you could see it, you’d probably agree is a fairly obvious nose.

    Quoting Anthony:

    ‘What’s wrong with someone wanting to live in a larger home with a yard? Portland doesn’t offer that choice at an affordable price so it forces people to live in Clark Co.

    I thought you all were about providing people with “choices?”‘

    Good luck coming up with one single thing this bunch is “all about”…

    For my own part though, I’d say I’m about making the *right* choices, especially those that benefit my beloved Portland, for which I’m bursting with civic pride.

    And as for wanting to live in a larger, inexpensive home, that’s fine with me – want whatever you want. But like bc said:

    ‘Nothing wrong with wanting to live in a big house with a yard. Just don’t make me subsidize your “need” for thousands of square feet with my tax dollars that can be much more efficiently spent in Portland. A taxpayer funded 12 lane CRC is welfare for sprawl.’

  12. I think we all know that tolls now…with HOV lanes for rideshare, transit and off peak freight…is the low cost, environmentally friendly solution across the Columbia.

    As soon as we pay back the feds for the money given to us to include it as part of the Interstate Highway system, or replace it with a better route (I-205 doesn’t count, since the feds paid for that too) we can do it.

    I still think the better answer is to connect N Portland Rd to Vancouver via the BNSF rail corridor, with new capacity for rail, light rail, pedestrians, etc as well.

    I’ve been trying to find another state line with a major river in it that divides a metro region, and other than the NYC/NJ area I’m having trouble finding even one that doesn’t have some local bridges. And they have quite a few more transit options than us. (And more bridges/tunnels.)

    Even Davenport IA/Moline IL has more bridges, and local bridges, and that whole region only has about 375000 people.

    We definitely should be looking for more options, and not just for transit.

  13. A lot of people will see CRC as ‘infrastructure’ awaiting federal approval. Yes, the old bridges must go, but transportation infrastructure must be more comprehensive than freeways alone. MAX should reach Vancouver first, not last, as I’ve said all along and will keep saying to stop the Detroit juggernaut before it’s too late.

  14. Trying to reduce traffic by building bigger roads is the same as trying to lose weight by buying a bigger belt.

    I have never been to a place with 8, 10, 12, 14, or 16 lane freeways that didn’t still have congestion.

    Atlanta, Dallas Metro, LA, Houston, Phoenix, Minneapolis/St. Paul – they all have horrendous traffic congestion. They have not been able to build themselves out of it.

    But I have been to New York City – which also has terrible congestion. The difference, is that in NYC you don’t have to drive in it. You can get around without a car, easily.

    Congestion will exist as long as we have cars. It doesn’t matter if it is 1 lane or 100, driving patterns will adjust to whatever is comfortable to use.

    But the highway network is a system. You never get rid of bottlenecks, you just move them around. It is a never ending cycle of spending trying to chase congestion around the region.

    Big places have congestion, even small places have congestion. Some of the worst congestion I have ever seen was in Montgomery, AL – at the time it had a metro population of 250k.

    Congestion is a factor of automobile use. Not of road size.

  15. John Reinhold says: Congestion is a factor of automobile use. Not of road size.

    Congestion is a factor of centralization. Centralization is the problem. The problem with “urban sprawl” is not the “sprawl”–it’s the “urban”.

    Personally, I don’t support the CRC–it seems like an egregious waste of money. If we really want to improve things, we need a third freeway bridge over the Columbia, on the west side. This would improve mobility between Washington County and Washington State, and significantly reduce congestion on I-5 through Portland. The $4 billion proposed for the CRC could go a long way toward this.

    Consider that Idaho is widening 250 miles of US 95 from two to four lanes for only $1.2 billion–through some rather mountainous terrain, too.

  16. It’s odd that anyone still brings up LA as a place building its way out of construction, when other than I-405 and I-105 they’re almost all 50+ years old and 2-3 lanes, at most.

    Instead of building most planned freeways, they’ve invested in transit. They have quite a large rail network throughout the city, as well as bus service, and commuter trains to Orange County and San Diego, as well as Riverside and the Inland Empire.

    The transit hasn’t done a thing to reduce the traffic, but it does give you another option. It seems to be what Metro’s plan is for Portland as well.

  17. To be honest, an uncongested city is a dying city. Portland had a taste of that in ’81-2.
    Reducing congestion is a fool’s errand. Transit and Trail investments give people transportation choices…drive or take transit or ride a bike. For those choices to be real, the each options must be safe, reliable and cost/time competitive.
    Currently across the Columbia folks are driving, especially in the peaks, who do not want to be driving, but they have no real choice.

  18. Currently across the Columbia folks are driving, especially in the peaks, who do not want to be driving, but they have no real choice.

    Yes, we should include transit improvements on any bridge construction, but why not give cars (and more specifically, trucks) a way to move also?

    New road capacity along the N Portland Rd corridor would likely not cost even close to 1/2 the price of the CRC, and could add transit, rail, and light rail capacity across the Columbia.

    It would mainly serve West and Downtown Vancouver, Hayden Island, and N Portland, (most directly the industrial areas of each) which are currently all under-served by non-Interstate motor vehicle and transit routes, and that would be served by a CRC as well.

    It could even be a lift bridge designed to match up to the current I-5 bridges, which would likely reduce cost and footprint.

    I bet overall (with the closing of the Jantzen Beach I-5 N entrance and I-5 S exit), between commute times, freight times, cost, accident reduction, bridge lifts, etc, rebuilding the BNSF as a true multi-modal corridor (2 MV lanes each way, peds, trains and LRT) would probably be a much smarter option.

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