Oregonians struggle to comment on Interstate Bridge project due to ‘make believe’ traffic data

Forecasts from Interstate Bridge Replacement Program versus reality. (Source: Norman Marshall, Smart Mobility Inc.)

With just 18 days left to submit an official comment into the Interstate Bridge Replacement Program (IBRP) Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement (SDEIS), some advocates say they can’t properly assess the project because its leaders are using bad data to analyze the design proposal. Allegations are swirling that transportation department staff and project consultants have “cooked the books” by intentionally manipulating traffic data to justify investing an estimated $7.5 billion on a wider freeway and seven new interchanges across a five-mile stretch of I-5 between Portland and Vancouver.

The IBRP is successor to the Columbia River Crossing (CRC), a project that many thought died in 2014. 10 years later, the megaproject is alive and well with a new name and a new legion of consultants and transportation department staff from Oregon and Washington committed to getting it built. The project has secured $4 billion in federal and state commitments, and while it faces fewer controversies and legal headwinds (so far) than the I-5 Rose Quarter project a few miles south, the IBRP still faces serious questions.

One big problem is that critics and project leaders don’t agree on the same set of basic facts. The ability of people to “meaningfully evaluate” the impacts of a proposed project form the bedrock of the federal National Environmental Policy Act the IBRP is obligated to follow. But experts and outsiders say IBRP staff make it impossible to evaluate the project because the numbers, models, and data being used by project staff are incomplete and/or wrong.

“This is all fantasy numbers,” said Chris Smith, a co-founder of No More Freeways, one of 36 groups in the Just Crossing Alliance coalition that wants to “right size” the project. “How can we meaningfully evaluate the impacts, which is what the EIS [Environmental Impact Statement] is supposed to be about, when it’s all make believe?”

I spoke to Smith a week after Just Crossing Alliance held a press conference to share a 29-page report by an outside consultant that looked at the IBRP’s traffic modeling. Models are used to estimate the future amount of cars, trucks, bikes, and transit users on a given piece of infrastructure. A major concern of advocates tracking the IBRP is that the model that underpins all assumptions about the current proposal is outdated. They say not only is the model bad, but that IBRP officials are manipulating numbers that come from it to suit narratives required to build a more expensive — and expansive — project than needed.

“Garbage in, garbage out.”

The report, Review of the IBR Project SDEIS, was published by Smart Mobility Inc. President Norman Marshall, an expert with nearly four decades experience in transportation demand modeling who’s completed projects with city governments across the country. Marshall says IBRP is solving for the wrong thing. His examination of traffic data shows the Interstate Bridge is not the bottleneck and that “widening the bridge would do nothing to improve I-5 congestion and could make it worse.”

By analyzing traffic flow and speed patterns, Marshall found congestion in the bridge area actually originates further south at N Lombard during the morning peak and at N Victory Blvd northbound in the afternoon peak. And he says new driving lanes and larger interchanges proposed in the IBRP will encourage more traffic because of induced demand — a proven phenomenon that the SDEIS “almost completely sidesteps” reports a story by The Urbanist this week.

The IBRP SDEIS says the bottleneck originates at the bridge; but Marshall proves in his report that that statement, “is simply wrong.” “The DSEIS fundamentally misrepresents existing northbound [and southbound] traffic conditions in the I-5 corridor,” he writes in the report. “And in doing so, creates an erroneous ‘need’ for the project.”

(Above: Pages from Marshall’s report.)

Marshall also blames Metro’s regional travel demand model (which the SDEIS is based on) for using a process that is outdated (it was created in the 1960s) and only considers traffic in a specific area (known as the “static traffic assignment” or STA process), as if traffic volumes within project boundaries are not influenced by traffic volumes outside it. That means known bottlenecks just south of the IBRP project area don’t figure into the analysis of traffic flow within the project area. That’s, “a plainly unrealistic assumption,” Marshall writes in the report.

And here’s why:

“Treating every roadway segment as independent causes the regional model to exaggerate the benefits of widening individual segments because it assumes that traffic throughput can grow on road segments even where traffic growth is prevented by upstream and downstream bottlenecks.”

Marshall also claims that the IBRP SDEIS estimates for future traffic growth under the “no-build scenario” are “preposterous” and that there has been no growth in peak hour traffic on this section of I-5 since 2005.

But how can governments justify a $7.5 billion investment without traffic growth numbers to back it up? Economist and freeway expansion skeptic Joe Cortright says the IBRP team “cooked the books” and simply adjusted numbers from Metro’s model to suit their needs. Here’s an excerpt from an article he published this week in City Observatory that claims project leaders (with the help of Metro’s model) “invented millions of phantom trucks to sell a wider bridge”:

“IBR and Metro inflated truck counts to exaggerate the current importance of trucks, and built traffic models that grossly overestimate the growth in truck freight.  In essence, these flawed traffic models mean that IBR is widening a freeway to accommodate that truck traffic that doesn’t now exist, and based on false predictions of future truck traffic growth–when in reality truck traffic has been declining.”

Without traffic numbers they can trust, many advocates are scrambling to share impactful feedback during the SDEIS public comment period.

“The air quality and health impacts of this project are directly related to the level of traffic. We need accurate data to confidently assess these impacts,” said Neighbors for Clean Air Co-Director Nakisha Nathan.

Chris Smith echoed that frustration in our conversation earlier this week. “How is any organization like us — that’s trying to really understand the environmental impacts — how are we supposed to do that when there’s nothing in there [the DEIS] we can believe?”

“They tell a wonderful story,” Smith added. “That has no basis in any kind of rigorous analysis.”

— I’ve reached out to the IBRP and hope to share a response or follow-up on these issues soon.

Jonathan Maus (Publisher/Editor)

Jonathan Maus (Publisher/Editor)

Founder of BikePortland (in 2005). Father of three. North Portlander. Basketball lover. Car driver. If you have questions or feedback about this site or my work, contact me via email at maus.jonathan@gmail.com, or phone/text at 503-706-8804. Also, if you read and appreciate this site, please become a paying subscriber.

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Jake9
Jake9
3 hours ago

Its a good thing this is coming out before election day. Clearly there is value in NOT voting for an incumbent. The IBRP is apparently popular with the current political ruling class as how else could it still be ongoing in its current form?
As far as the problems with pretend data? It will keep on happening as long as the major focus of the bridge is wealth distribution from taxpayers to the construction/developer/union friends of the political class. The only numbers that matter to them are the dollar amounts.
You can continue to focus on the piddly details that apparently no one in power cares about, or cut to the heart of the matter which is changing the decision makers in Salem and Portland.

Dave Farmer
Dave Farmer
2 hours ago

More lanes mean less congestion and less air pollution. The Light Rail extension is too expensive to build, maintain, and operate.
Bridge tolls are unfair and inefficient. Our whole modern life requires good roads. Everyone pays for public schools, even if they don’t have students in the family. Freeways are the same. Roads are for the entire state, so everyone should help pay. Not just the drivers that use the bridge.

Nick
Nick
2 hours ago
Reply to  Dave Farmer

more lanes means more driving and more pollution

dan
dan
1 hour ago
Reply to  Dave Farmer

Huh, sounds like communism to me. All god-fearing Americans should pay their own way, otherwise they’re socialists, which we don’t care for here in these United States. Having said that, I’m open to waiving tolls for car pools and creating a dedicated lane for car pools and freight.

Andrew S
Andrew S
1 hour ago
Reply to  Dave Farmer

More lanes mean less congestion and less air pollution.

False and false. https://www.ucdavis.edu/magazine/does-widening-highways-ease-traffic-congestion

The Light Rail extension is too expensive to build, maintain, and operate.

Compared to what? The added interchanges that come with the proposed freeway expansion are expected to make up about $5B (66.7%) of the total project cost. Given that this expansion is unlikely to actually reduce congestion, the light rail extension seems like a bargain seeing as it actually provides an alternative to sitting in traffic.
https://www.interstatebridge.org/media/xdbdhl4x/ibr_rivercrossingoptions_final_remediated.pdf

Bridge tolls are unfair and inefficient.

  1. This is opinion. I live in Portland, and would expect to drive this bridge maybe a few times a year. Why should I pay the same as people who use it daily?
  2. Tolls are fine from and efficiency standpoint. There are significant tolls along I-95 through the NE corridor, and it remains one of the most economically productive regions of the country. https://tetcoalition.org/i-95-facts/

Our whole modern life requires good roads.

False. Many people here get by just fine without driving on a regular basis.

Everyone pays for public schools, even if they don’t have students in the family. Freeways are the same. Roads are for the entire state, so everyone should help pay. Not just the drivers that use the bridge.

Unfair comparison. Public education has a significant benefit to the public, whether or not you have students in the family. The article here and sources provided demonstrate that the economic arguments for funding the highway expansion piece of this project simply don’t hold water. There’s going to be little benefit to the highway expansion for anyone in or out of a car. If drivers want to pay more to sit in traffic, that’s on them, but as a taxpayer, I don’t want to pay for you to continue to sit in traffic.

It’s really easy to be stuck in traffic thinking “someone should do something!” But the reality is that any of the proposed fixes will cost a whole lot of money and won’t actually reduce your travel time from A to B. I don’t see how it is at all fiscally responsible to bankroll the highway expansion part of this project.

Surly Ogre
Surly Ogre
1 hour ago

It is stupefying that forecasts from 2005 are so steep an actuals (Figure 12, 14) are more sideways, flat or DECREASING.
IBR needs to stop telling lies

Granpa
Granpa
11 minutes ago

The article point out falsehoods I ODOT’s metrics, but is itself omitting the fact that the existing bridges are old and deficient and do not have safety shoulders, are not seismically structural and do not provide acceptable bicycle or pedestrian routes. These bridges need to be replaced. I don’t have an answer as to how to satisfy the many conflicting demands on the crossing, but both sides of this debate seem to argue using lies of omission