YAY!!!
High-Five Sarah !!

sarah....sarah.... ?

The waitresses at Hooters had never heard of the CRC when I asked last week. They were startled to hear the restaurant will be torn down. A manager had to be summoned.

soooooo excited that we in Oregon get to pay for the privilege of subsidizing the residents of vantucky's super easy access to tax free shopping on Hayden Island. that will be the ONLY benefit that this project will provide. it will most likely make traffic on our side of the Columbia WORSER.

thanks fuckers.

@eric cantona, don't worry, the traffic on this side of the river will only be worse until our entire freeway network is widened and expanded at great expense to accomodate the extra traffic the CRC will dump into it.

Oh great another waste on $3 billion to choke at Oregon exit 300 or so

If they would fix I-5 through the RQ first, there would be no problem with the existing bridges, except that they are getting old.

@Eric and @Anylanding -

There are a lot of good arguments against the CRC, but I've never understood the complaint about moving the bottleneck.

The bridge is currently the worst bottleneck on I-5. So sure, fixing it and crossing it off that list would move the Rose Quarter area into the "worst bottleneck" slot. But just because they're both problems doesn't mean that fixing one of them isn't progress - and we can't fix EVERYTHING all at once. What's so bad about fixing things a piece at a time? Just because it doesn't solve the whole problem in one go...? That seems like a nonsensical argument to me.

@Pok - Come on! There are a lot of good reasons not to go forward with this plan, but that one at least should not be confusing.

I'm sure you're upset that it'll take so many years and cost so many billions to build this bridge, right? That should answer your question, right there. Bridges are so expensive and take so long to build that you should always design them big enough to last you a long time. That's why it'll have more lanes than the freeways on either side - so that the bridge will last 30 years. If we built it the same size as the current bridge, it'd be over capacity next year and we'd have to go through all this again.

@Reymont - There are at least five segments of I-5 in LA that are considered worse bottlenecks than the one around the Interstate Bridge. In fact, the approaches to the Interstate Bridge don't even make the list of the "100 Worst Bottlenecks" as found by INRIX.

Because I am a nerd, here is the link to my source:
http://scorecard.inrix.com/scorecard/Top10…

Thanks, Wookie. But I think the topic is stuff we can fix here in Portland, right? And local traffic problems?

(I'll restate that I don't like the CRC plan! I just don't understand those two common arguments!)

Are we really starting to compare bottlenecks in the huge metropilis of LA's I-5 to up here in Portland with our much smaller population? Is this even a reason not to attempt to fix our own portion of the I-5 bottleneck?
Another argument I have a hard time with is the notion that simply having a larger bridge will cause more pollution. As if the population isn't expanding.
And we really don't know what types of engines will be powering the cars 50 years from now. Maybe they will be mostly electric, we don't know.
This congestion is only going to get worse with population growth.
These attempts to stop the CRC seem short-sighted.

@ Reymont - this is a cluster-fuck because of the way these mega-projects get funded. You may have already seen this option:

http://portlandtransport.com/archives/2011…

of course it will never happen because it couldn’t get all the federal funding needed to assist ODOT/WSDOT. but it does succeed in pointing some of the fallacies related to the "need" to do this. I'd be curious to see figures on the percentage of crossings that come from WA and end up on Hayden Isl or the Delta Park area. take those out of the mix and onto a local bridge and what does that get you?

again, it won’t happen because of the funding issues. but to my mind that is a systemic problem that needs to be fixed. throwing our hands in the air and saying "oh well, I guess we have to build it" is defeatist and expensive. And, as you mention, it just means we’ll have to spend another billion sometime after this is complete because of the increased congestion it will cause at the rose quarter/I84 area.

@Eric - Either I'm not reading you correctly, or you're not reading me correctly. I sure hope it doesn't happen in this form - think I was pretty clearly against it! But I don't think that building a bigger bridge will "cause" increased congestion at the RQ, either...

@ Reymont. gotcha. I think I was reading into your comment about "fixing things one piece at a time". the point I'm belaboring is that there are alternatives to the ODOT/WSDOT notion of how to "fix" those problems without resorting to a $4b boondoggle.

re: the RQ - think of it this way, if the CRC allows better flow through Vanc., across the Columbia, and over Hayden Island (FYI: the bridge only accounts for a little more than half the budget, I think) that means we'll be shoving more vehicles into that pinch point faster. having congestion at the RQ and at the bridge actually help meter the downstream traffic to some extent. take one away and you increase the problem at the other.

and just in case it's not super-duper clear, I am also against it.

Spoken like a true transportation expert.

@Reymont -

The shifting bottleneck indicates the CRC as planned will have all sorts of consequences (unexpected to some, eagerly anticipated by others) beyond, say, making commuting from Vancouver to Hillsboro a minute faster.

By pouring more traffic into the stretch of I-5 through NoPo, it'll make it so that after the CRC is built (but long before we're done paying for it) the freeway boosters will have a shiny new excuse to engage in a whole new round of expensive freeway construction through that neighborhood.

Residents of North Portland may not welcome a massive expansion of I-5 through their neighborhood, and they may not realize the CRC will cause that to happen. So that's worth pointing out.

Basically, the CRC will end up costing way more than they say it's going to cost. And its negative impacts could very well offset its worth.

The question is: does this city want to embark upon a program of endless freeway-building or not?