When Twitter user ColumbiaBridge followed me two days ago, I thought the feed must be part of the Governor’s new outreach effort to boost support of the controversial Columbia River Crossing (CRC) project. The user joined Twitter on January 11th and signed up to follow 670 people in three days, introducing a CRC-centric hashtag #i5bridge. That rapid ascent, attempt at cohesive messaging and tweets repeating pro-bridge arguments the Governor’s office and CRC staff have been pushing for months made me think this was an official, state-funded outreach effort.
Nope. The Governor’s office denies the feed is theirs. ODOT didn’t know what I was talking about. CRC staffer Carley Francis said, “We’ve been talking here about ways to do outreach through new media, so we think it’s a super cool idea. But it’s not ours.”
The mysterious Twitterer has some sass. The feed’s sidebar reads, “Vancouverites and Portlanders, hipsters and neocons, truckers and bicyclists: stay up to date on how your $3-4 billion will be spent.” I messaged the ColumbiaBridge account about who’s running the feed and though they wouldn’t cough up a name, the user responded, “Just a citizen feed. Not run thru CRC, ODOT, or WSDOT–though, wish they would tweet abt CRC. This is in response to them not being on twtr.”
It’s important to know that the feed isn’t official because while it includes some info that’s genuinely interesting (for example: the Oregon Dept of Transportation fires noise cannons annually at birds on the bridge), some of its tweets are completely wrong:
- Poyourow quit the CRC team in frustration last September
So what mysterious person who would go out of their way to create a Twitter account and follow over 600 people just to post links about CRC news? I just can’t imagine someone would commit to such wonkery without getting paid. My guess: it’s a rogue CRC staffer or ODOT employee who wants to break ground on the bridge and is annoyed that their agency can’t figure out the Internets fast enough.
Or, perhaps it’s a citizen working for one of the major construction or engineering companies. Even in this age of digital transparency, it’s easy to stay anonymous.
My favorite tweet from this account is about the river bottom liquefying in the event of an earthquake to a depth of 75 feet causing — wait for it — “damage to the bridges.”
A couple years ago there was a WashDOT employee that was trolling PortlandTransport citing similar talking points.
Any earthquake that takes out the I-5 bridge is guaranteed to take out the rail bridge since it is in worse shape, which one do you think screws our economy more… Lets see cars can still use the 205 bridge if they have to, do we have another rail bridge? Oh yeah right we don’t… Let’s fix that one first.
The next Cascadia earthquake will almost certainly disable/destroy those bridges along with most of the older spans. That said, making a more sustainable city that does not rely on everything coming from may hundreds of miles away would put us on a much better footing than most urban areas.
Besides, I am not against a CRC, just any of the proposals for it I have seen. How many American Cities clearly illustrate what happens when you add freeway capacity . . . nearly all of them. Amazing that we even have to have this debate . . . except for the Vancouver Effect.
I wonder if the twitterer is connected to a new “store” on N Lombard that is full of “3rd Bridge Now!” signs in the window and promises to be “opening soon.” lots of weird proclamations that sound consistent with these tweets. whoever it is took over the vacant building that used to be a secondhand clothing store on the corner of Lombard and, I think, just north of Fiske.