I-5 Bridge Replacement - Formerly Columbia River Crossing | Proposed

[PhillyPDX]

Originally Posted by aquaticko

The whole thing just shows how completely out of line state DOTs are. They're not public agencies dedicated to cost and resource-effective transportation systems; they're highway construction lobby groups.

Any sane examination of Metro Portland's long-term population trajectory would, given the already-existent bones of a regional rail transit system, figure out how to maximize its use (including, yes, significantly improving it). There's a big change in scope of how to make that happen, as it'd obviously have to tie in land use in a way that DOTs don't generally seem to now, but...transportation planning and land use planning are two sides of the same coin.

People rightly point out that ODOT loves to cry poverty while planning multi-billion dollar expansions of urban highways (which, sitting between Portland and Vancouver, this does count as), which are both incredibly ineffective transportation modes AND very poor use of relatively high-value land. No one debates the eventual necessity of replacing the very aged piece of crucial infrastructure that is the bridge, but no one with the power to change the direction of the project seems very interested in pointing out that planning for evermore car traffic on it is always a fool's errand.

Metro Portland is just too populous a region to have everyone drive everywhere without traffic snarls as a daily fact-of-life. especially with the geographic strictures of the Columbia and the West Hills. Additionally, Portland-Seattle is too populous a region to have everyone drive between them (yes, I'm positing that we could build a new intercity passenger rail alignment on this bridge, which I know isn't on anyone's radar and would be a massive-er change with complicated ROW discussions whether I5 or MAX-adjacent; it's all obviously hypothetical for now). There already exists certain amounts of infrastructure to begin resolving both these problems in ways that massively expands the practical population/transportation capacities of both these regions. Mode shift is not only the obvious solution, but the only one. Any infrastructure project that doesn't put that goal first and foremost is misguided.

Rehabbing infrastructure doesn't get you election points; new, bigger, best does. It works....at least until something fails catastrophically.