The revived plan to replace the I-5 bridge over the Columbia River between Portland and Vancouver has been hammered by two liberal transportation experts in Portland. New Urbanist Joe Cortright calls it “vastly oversized and over-priced.” David Bragdon, former president of Metro, one of the agencies that wrote the original plan, documented years of falsehoods perpetrated by planners and called the proposal the “most expensive, stupid something” that could be done in the corridor.
As I noted recently, the plan called for a 12-lane bridge to serve a six-lane freeway. It also included a bridge for light rail even though voters in both Portland and Vancouver had rejected funding for this light-rail extension. Piling stupidity on stupidity, the plan called for a bridge that couldn’t open for ship traffic, and because light-rail trains couldn’t go up a steep enough grade to allow such traffic, planners proposed to buy out several existing shipping companies rather than leave light rail out of the plan.
Predictably, Cortright complains about the 12 lanes without ever mentioning the light-rail boondoggle. Bragdon only mentions light rail to suggest that the Washington Department of Transportation planned to stab Oregon in the back by deleting light rail from the project after it was approved. The reality is that both the 12 lanes and the light rail were insane and planners were crazy to propose a project whose 12 lanes would alienate the New Urbanists and whose light rail would alienate fiscal conservatives. Continue reading
