Here’s how to make the $7.5 billion IBR project suck less

Advocates got a first-person view of what’s in store with the Interstate Bridge Replacement project during a bike ride last month. (Photo: Oregon Walks/Just Crossing Alliance)

“People should be aware of the realities of what happens on the Vancouver Waterfront, where the transit stations are at 100 feet. People can’t visualize that. They can’t make sense of that. That’s 10 stories into the air!”

That was Oregon Walks Executive Director Zachary Lauritzen during an interview with BikePortland yesterday. Oregon Walks is a member of the Just Crossing Alliance, a large coalition of advocacy groups working to “right-size” the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Program. The IBR will add new lanes to five miles of freeway and enlarge seven interchanges of Interstate 5 between Portland and Vancouver. It’s estimated to cost $7.5 billion and many (including Lauritzen) believe it will ultimately cost $10-12 billion.

With that price tag, members of the JCA feel like we shouldn’t settle for anything less than world-class cycling and transit facilities.

With just five days left in the all-important public comment period for the project’s Supplemental Draft Environmental Impact Statement (SDEIS), the JCA has released a four-page “Active Transportation and Transit Vision” (PDF) and they want everyone in the region to amplify their concerns via an official comment on the project. The vision document points out the inefficient use of space in the current design and the need to “future-proof” the biking and transit facilities.

Lauritzen and several other coalition members formed an Active Transportation Working Group (separate from the full JCA coalition) to take a closer look at the biking, walking, and transit elements of the project. Other members include The Street Trust, Bike Loud PDX, Bridgeton Neighborhood Association, and advocates from Vancouver.

To be clear, the JCA isn’t working to stop the project. They want to make it less bad.

That transit-station-in-the-sky Lauritzen warned me about, is just one of several things he and his group are deeply concerned about. The bike path for instance, is on the opposite (east) side of the new MAX light rail transit line and there’s no elevator to get folks from the Vancouver waterfront up to it.

If the project is built with the design currently being proposed by Washington and Oregon departments of transportation, people biking north and south would be forced one mile out-of-direction. That’s because the IBRP team has made the bike path route down a half-mile spiral ramp near downtown Vancouver and the waterfront. Lauritzen says they call it the “Vancouver dip.”

Looking south from Vancouver at official project illustration. Red arrow marks the half-mile ramp on the bike path. Note how bike path is on opposite side of the bridge from transit.

The JCA want the biking and walking path to be on the same side as transit (to take advantage of multimodal options) and they want the path to remain elevated all the way to the last transit station (at Evergreen Blvd).

“Those two things [bike and transit routes] have to be together. That path needs to be with the transit, so people can step off of the MAX and get on their bike, ” Lauritzen said. “It’s called ‘multi-modal transportation’ for a reason.” “What the plans are now is you step off the MAX, you go out of direction underneath the road, up some stairs, then on some ramps and then you’re on the path.”

There’s already an elevator the MAX station in the plans, which is another reason the JCA workgroup wants the bike path next to it. The IBR team has planned the bike path on the east side because of what they say are space constraints on the west side, where the new, wider freeway is already forcing them to demolish several buildings.

The Street Trust, Oregon Walks, and other groups helped lead a bike ride to get an in-person, up-close look at what the IBR plans have in store. Lauritzen said the group stood at a spot on Hayden Island and looked north at the highest point on the lift mechanism of the current bridge. “That’s where the new bridge is going to be, and people [on the ride] were just like, ‘It’s going to be that high?’ People were blown away.”

Another takeaway from the bike ride was that gaps in the existing bike network at the edges of the project boundary must be addressed. The IBR team likes to talk about the new protected bike lane on Expo Road, but on the other side of the project, the multi-billion dollar design would drop bicycle riders onto dangerous sections (“no man’s land” JCA says) of NE Marine Drive and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.

The IBR project team is leaning on transit and biking traffic to help meet its GHG and environmental goals, but the JCA Active Transportation working group believes it will take much better designs to get people to use those modes.

Lauritzen says getting a high volume of public comments into the official record is key to forcing the hand of the project team to address these concerns. His group doesn’t have the threat of killing the project to give them political leverage, but if enough people amplify active transportation concerns, it could give IBR partner agencies pause.

“The bridge design has to be approved by all the jurisdictions — Metro, TriMet, City of Portland, etc., — and those entities have very specific active transportation, transit, climate and VMT [vehicle miles traveled] goals,” Lauritzen said. “We are saying, ‘If you don’t follow our recommendations, you’re going to get to the end of this project and you’re not going to be able to those partners in the face and say, ‘These are going to happen.’ So make those changes now, make these investments now in your design, so that on the back-end you can approve this’.”

Lauritzen says every comment counts. Even if it’s just a few sentences.

You can submit comments here. For a full guide to commenting created by The Street Trust click here. Deadline for comments is November 18th. If you’d like help making a comment, JCA is hosting an online town hall and teach-in on Zoom tomorrow at 6:00 pm. Register for that event here.

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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Sarah Iannarone
26 days ago

Jonathan,
Your coverage of this is perplexing. The Street Trust conceived the Active Transportation Working Group referenced here and then partnered with Oregon Walks (and 40-Mile Loop, Bridgeton N’hood, Cycle Vancouver, downtown Vancouver business community) to bring it to life.

We also published a very comprehensive set of recommendations out of that working group to support public comment, from which your readers might benefit. Why aren’t you sharing them?

For folks who are interested in the full set of Active Transportation recommendations they can find them here> http://www.thestreettrust.org/comment

Finally, as much as folks might think this project is a bondoggle or not, this NEPA comment period remains critical in the event the project is built, to ensure premier conditions for people walking, biking, rolling, and accessing public transit near and along it.

Thank you,
Sarah Iannarone
The Street Trust

Sarah Iannarone
26 days ago

Jonathan,
It’s not about credit, it’s about accuracy and priorities. As _BIKE_ Portland, the NEPA comment recommendations from the TST/OW Active Transportation Work Group (ATWG) is the primary link which should be shared among people who care about improving biking conditions related to this project per se.

I’ll drop it again for you > http://www.thestreettrust.org/comment

The JCA comment guide is more generalized about the IBR project writ large. The recommendations our ATWG developed are based on many months of research, meetings, and field studies; have been coordinated across jurisdictions and organizations (including but not limited to JCA and its members); and are more detailed and specialized for people who walk, bike, roll, and access public transit (aka active transportation users) on both the north and south ends of the bridge.

I believe you are doing your readers a disservice by not more directly focusing attention on this set of recommendations and encouraging folks who use active transportation in the progam area to submit as many comments as possible in alignment with them.

Respectfully submitted,
Sarah Iannarone

Sarah Iannarone
25 days ago

Thanks for incorporating the link, Jonathan – appreciate it. But need to clarify for the record that the comment guide was developed by the working group, not TST unilaterally. Zachary was our rep from the group who volunteered to talk with Bike Portland about it – not sure where the disconnect is coming from (his end or yours) but with only a few days before the deadline, hope we can clear it up and get that working group’s recommendation set toplined for your audience in time for them to submit comments accordingly. – Sarah

david hampsten
david hampsten
27 days ago

I wonder, what will the US Dept of Government Efficiency say about the whole IBR project?

Fred
Fred
26 days ago
Reply to  david hampsten

Elon will take over the project, promise paradigm-shifting improvements, and end up with a tunnel full of Teslas.

blumdrew
27 days ago

Four car MAX trains are a great thing to consider, but there are big issues surrounding actually making it work outside of downtown block sizes. While the original reason that the system was constrained to two car trains is the block size downtown, every platform on the system would need to be rebuilt to accommodate four car trains. On the Yellow Line (that would connect to Vancouver), this would be particularly difficult for the Kenton/Denver Ave Station and the Prescott station due to proximity of intersections and curved track. There are lots of ways around this (movable platforms for curved track, moving stations, having only some trains open doors at certain stations) but they all have pretty significant costs or drawbacks.

I have a lot of thoughts on the transit provision for the IBR – mostly that the MAX Yellow Line is too slow (15 mph average speed) to be a serious competition with I5 traffic, even in rush hours. I’m not convinced that traffic will get appreciably worse, especially since growth in the Portland region has generally slowed in the last 5 years. Make the bridge a tunnel, run the MAX on the newer of the old bridges, dedicate the extra lane to bikes, expand the sidewalks and call it a day. And then, if we are serious about quality transit service from Vancouver to Portland we can stand up a regional rail service on the BNSF line that has excess capacity and a >20 minute trip time.

James
James
26 days ago
Reply to  blumdrew

You don’t have to be “convinced”. Transportation is a good, therefore supply and demand take effect. The DOT has known since 1962, that expanding roads leads to increased congestion and pollution. Regardless of the facts, people will continue to stuff themselves in tin boxes, and then complain while they are stuck in traffic. Meanwhile, people on the 15mph train will cruise on by to their next stop, or hop on their bikes.

blumdrew
26 days ago
Reply to  James

I’m not disagreeing with that, I’m questioning the validity of the models the IBR uses to determine that traffic will spike between now and 2045 if nothing is built

Vans
Vans
27 days ago

What a cluster, just gets better and better.

The obvious plan to not include any real biking/transit cohesion speaks more than the normal volumes of disregard for whats going on here.

Really glad some greater minds are taking this on, hopefully they gather enough juice to be heard and make a bigger difference.

dw
dw
27 days ago

where the transit stations are at 100 feet

If you’ve ever been to Seattle’s Northgate station, the platform is 45 feet above ground and it already feels like a trek to get there. 100 feet is insane.

John D
John D
27 days ago
Reply to  dw

It really is. Especially for the downtown station for Vancouver. It’s totally possible to have stations in areas that may be more difficult to access (ex: Zoo station is deep, and only accessable by elevator).

But if you’re building a major transit connection to the densist, most walkable area north of the Columbia you’d think you’d want to make it attractive.

I also think that 10 story description is also illuminating for how bike unfriendly it’s going to be. Sure, some folks will be fine doing the 10 story climb up the bridge, but I feel like it’s not going to be attractive to a large number of people.

I keep coming back to the idea of having a separate, lower bridge for walking, biking, transit, and local traffic, and leaving a separate high span bridge for the freeway, and Remove the interchange on Hayden Island. This idea that one bridge can rule them all (when designed by highway builders) is foolish.

John V
John V
26 days ago
Reply to  John D

How would the lower bridge work? Isn’t the whole point that it “needs” to be that high for large ships to go under? Are you thinking the lower bridge would, separately, be able to raise and lower to let ships through?

Fred
Fred
26 days ago
Reply to  John V

What an interesting, outside-the-box idea. The fatal flaw, I’d wager, is the IBR folks would refuse to spend the million$ on an accommodation just for bikes and peds – which aren’t *serious* transportation, after all.

Chris I
Chris I
26 days ago
Reply to  John D

A lower bridge would require a movable span. We really do not want to do that with a MAX line on that bridge.

This entire project should have been a tunnel. We wouldn’t be having this conversation.

Fred
Fred
26 days ago
Reply to  Chris I

Hear hear. But the engineer who demonstrated definitively that a tunnel is superior was silenced.

blumdrew
26 days ago
Reply to  Chris I

Moveable spans for trains are fine. There are movable spans on the Northeast Corridor that can handle an Amtrak train going 90 mph. The issue with the Steel Bridge isn’t just that it’s movable, it’s also ancient and very bespoke (but super cool). Bridge lifts are rare on the Columbia now and would be even rarer with a new bridge that will definitely be higher than the existing one

Chris I
Chris I
25 days ago
Reply to  blumdrew

Any amount of bridge lifts are unacceptable for a “rapid transit” system. The Northeast Corridor was built over 100 years ago, and no country would even consider a new build HSR line with a movable lift span.

This MAX line is being built for the next 100 years. We should be designing for massive ridership increases (4 car trains, 5 minute headways). Even a single lift can be incredibly impactful when you have short headways as it creates cascading delays across the entire line.

Note that Sound Transit had initially considered a moveable span for their Ballard extension, but quickly abandoned it after opposition from transit advocates and the maritime business community. High bridges and tunnels are a much better long term option.

https://www.theurbanist.org/2022/04/22/superyachts-push-ballard-bridges-soaring-to-new-heights/

blumdrew
25 days ago
Reply to  Chris I

Lifts on the Ballard Bridge are much more common than they are on the Interstate Bridge, and there are working shipyards and industry that would have been affected by a low bridge to Ballard. Honestly, a movable span could have been the right choice there too – depending on cost vs. a tunnel and number of lifts. And for the record, both Chicago and New York’s rapid transit systems have lift bridges and they function just fine (mostly anyways).

On the Columbia, the number of lifts that occur is relatively small and a higher (but still movable) span would reduce that further. Operational impacts to transit are just one thing to consider, and while I think a tunnel would be a good option, I’m partial to bridges as a rider.

We should be designing for massive ridership increases (4 car trains, 5 minute headways)

Yes, but we should start our investments on corridors that actually need additional capacity. To me, this is clearly the East-West spine (Gateway to Beaverton), not the North-South. The North-South lines are both far too slow even outside of downtown, see much lower ridership, and are rarely capacity constrained. I like these lines and ride them frequently, but it’s foolish to imagine that 4 car trains and 5 minute headways are enough to actually compete with driving. The Link in Seattle is massively successful in no small part because it’s faster than driving on I5. There is no time of day where this is true for the MAX Yellow/Orange line.

It’s a good idea to future proof the stations built for the IBR for 4 car trains. But a movable span would likely not have catastrophic operational issues, and would allow for much better a station location on the Vancouver waterfront. Maybe a tunnel would be the best choice, but I think it should be clear that a high span + a station on the waterfront is ludicrously stupid.

blumdrew
27 days ago
Reply to  dw

it would mean that the MAX have both a deeper deepest station (260 feet below street) and higher highest station (100 feet above street) than the New York Subway (-180 feet to +88 feet) and the London Underground (-191 feet to +59 feet). Just sort of wacky trivia I guess, but 100 feet above the ground is truly exceptionally high. Apparently, that highest station on the NYC Subway is the highest rapid transit station above street level in the world too. Incidentally, this station (Smith-9th Street) also is where the line crosses a navigable waterway (the Gowanus Canal).

This entire project is very clearly not designed around sensible public transit, nor is it designed around sensible walking options. There’s a reason that where other rail transit lines that cross navigable waterways they do so on movable spans (Chicago), lack stations directly adjacent to the high span (Philadelphia, New York), or they do so in tunnels (London, New York, Shanghai). It’s just not good design to have everyone go 100 feet into the air to catch a train

Daniel Reimer
26 days ago
Reply to  blumdrew

Technically a station in Chongqing is the tallest in the world https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hualongqiao_station

But your point still stands. If the tallest station in North America by a wide margin is being built then that should be a clear sign its not a good idea

david hampsten
david hampsten
26 days ago
Reply to  Daniel Reimer

Maybe it’s meant to be a unique and major tourist attraction, North America’s tallest mass transit station and bike path? Think of the view from up there, in the tall alpine concrete jungles of Mount IBRia, 10 stories above the river – see the picturesque smog over the airport – Mt. St Helens, Rainer, Hood, the lofty Fremont Bridge (which is even higher) – you could even add one of those pay-per-view devices they have on top of nice viewpoints in Europe.

Fred
Fred
26 days ago
Reply to  david hampsten

Um, no – it should be functional. As a commenter said above, they should be building a tunnel, not a bridge.

guy
guy
26 days ago
Reply to  david hampsten

I say put a helipad on top reserved for billionaires and their underaged escorts. After all, they’ll pay loads of money for the exclusive and breathtaking views, and then some of the money left over from that after furnishing the ODOT director’s beachside villa in the Hamptons can go towards funding operations of normal facilities for the great unwashed masses. Because nothing could scream worldclass public transit better.

blumdrew
26 days ago
Reply to  Daniel Reimer

Ooh thanks for that, I love looking into Chongqing stuff. But it is basically cheating if you are looking for superlative things relating to height above street level, it’s so outrageously hilly. Also the fact that that station has a direct connection into a skyscraper probably means it’s a way better station than the proposed IBR one too

Chris I
Chris I
26 days ago
Reply to  blumdrew

Another item that they are probably not considering: this thing is going to be a suicide magnet. Expect the entire transit zone and MUP to have very high safety fencing. This isn’t going to be a tourist attraction. It’s going to feel like a prison yard.

Middle o the Road Guy
Middle o the Road Guy
27 days ago

We need a new bridge.

There will always be groups who cannot be placated and their arguments shouldn’t be given much weight.

Ross Williams
Ross Williams
26 days ago

You are right. And placating the folks who want a new huge expensive bridge has prevented it from getting built. This has been going on for a over 30 years and the barrier to a new bridge has always been the demand for more lanes, more traffic onto Portland streets and more federal dollars to build it. The cost of the bridge is a feature not a flaw.

Chris I
Chris I
26 days ago

That’ll be $7.5 billion dollars, please.

JaredO
JaredO
26 days ago

We “need” lots of new bridges across Oregon.

We don’t actually NEED a new bridge. We could seismically retrofit this bridge, and many other bridges that need fixing, for the cost of this one highway project.

It’s fundamentally not a bridge project – that’s less than half the cost.

Anyone who calls this a bridge project cannot be trusted and their arguments shouldn’t be given much weight.

Granpa
Granpa
26 days ago
Reply to  JaredO

Ahem. The existing bridge footings are timber piles on sandy/silt soils. An earthquake would liquefy the ground underneath the bridge. The foundational structure of the bridges are not conducive to a seismic retrofit.

david hampsten
david hampsten
26 days ago
Reply to  Granpa

Even before starting on the previous CRC debacle, there was a study on the cost of simply replacing the existing bridge supports – perfectly feasible, less than $200 million at the time, that sort of work is done routinely nationwide.

chris
chris
26 days ago
Reply to  david hampsten

I keep hearing that number, $200 million, but I think it was a ‘back of the napkin’ calculation. I also don’t think it included the cost of reinforcing the pilings. Wasn’t it just the cost to make the bridge and lift towers earthquake resistant? Unfortunately, I’m not able to find the original information from the CRC.

John V
John V
26 days ago

You’re glossing over a lot of important details of course. It’s easy to “just build a bridge”. Lets not blow a generational change and billions of dollars doing something stupid like is currently planned.

SolarEclipse
SolarEclipse
26 days ago

Since what appears to be the biggest conflict is thinking MAX is the only option for public transportation over a bridge. The expense of the MAX should give everyone 2nd thoughts for a tax payer funded project. For the cost of adding the MAX there could be numerous buses traveling over the new bridge with plenty of money to spare.
TriMet has repeatedly shown they are incapable at doing regular maintenance on the trains and tracks so why would we continue to think MAX is a good/only option?
Just stick with a dedicated bus lane, and at least then if a bus breaks down, unlike the MAX, follow-up buses can go around.

aquaticko
aquaticko
26 days ago
Reply to  SolarEclipse

The solution to the problem, “public agency X is incapable of providing greater public good Y” should never be “don’t provide greater public good Y”. Expecting competence from government agencies should be our baseline, a condition to require, not a hope to give up on.

Ross Williams
Ross Williams
26 days ago

“The IBR project team is leaning on transit and biking traffic to help meet its GHG and environmental goals”

I think that is misleading. Its using them to MODEL meeting its GHG and environmental goals. When they widened I5 at Lombard they used transit to model major reductions in traffic at both the Rose Quarter and over the Fremont bridge. That showed the project having a positive impact on air quality in Portland. Of course that isn’t what happened.

WalksInPortland
WalksInPortland
26 days ago

RE: “That was Oregon Walks Executive Director Zachary Lauritzen during an interview with BikePortland yesterday”

Jonathan, will you be sharing your interview notes in a post, or are you planning to release it as a podcast?

P.S. I stepped away from Oregon Walks a few years back (long story), but I’m thinking about rejoining. I’ve liked what Zachary has been doing.

WalksInPortland
WalksInPortland
22 days ago

For the record, here is a copy of my short IBR testimony that I submitted this morning: “Quick note as I’m currently trekking and traveling in Portugal. As a Portland resident of 40 years and someone who worked in downtown Vancouver for 10 years, I came to know the Interstate Bridge very well. Long story short, I can’t support the current IBR design. For an alternative approach, check out the bridge on the A4 in Portugal. I’ve attached a screenshot for reference—it’s worth considering!”

James
James
26 days ago

I think we can all agree, the MAGA oligarchs are not going to be funding this bridge.

Chris I
Chris I
26 days ago
Reply to  James

We won’t have to worry about this after the FTA, FHA, and NHTSA are eliminated by Elon.

Ross Williams
Ross Williams
26 days ago
Reply to  James

I hope you are right. But electric cars need roads too. So big highway projects may not be on Elon’s list of wasteful government spending.Are there any people in Clark County still opposing the project because it includes light rail?

Lazy Spinner
Lazy Spinner
26 days ago
Reply to  James

I disagree, They WILL fund this bridge under the guise of needing it for national defense (the original impetus for the federal interstate system) and trade (read: trucking industry wants it). The feds will force it on Oregon and Washington by threatening to withhold federal funding for other projects and repairs in those respective states.

The bike, pedestrian, and mass transit stuff will be cut as “wasteful” and cost bloating.

Ross Williams
Ross Williams
26 days ago
Reply to  Lazy Spinner

I think anyone who thinks they know what Trump will do is fooling themselves. Trump doesn’t even know what he will do over half the time. There are a series of competing memes that he will have to resolve. I think that may have more to do with personal whim than weighing competing interests. But if the project is going to get scaled back, the decisions about how are below his pay grade. So the personal whims of Elon Musk may have more to do with it or some lower level DOT officials.

Alex
Alex
26 days ago
Reply to  Lazy Spinner

Exactly, they’re not bothering to come up with reasonable proposals for the parts they’re planning to value engineer out anyway.

Lenny Anderson
Lenny Anderson
26 days ago

I served on the Governors’ I-5 Task Force for the Interstate Bridge twenty years ago…1999-2002, and was the lone NO vote on the recommendation for a 10 lane bridge with light rail. At the time data showed that one third of the traffic over the bridges was local…trips less than a couple of miles, and that an eight lane bridge along with a two lane arterial bridge would “skin the cat.” I doubt that much has changed to that mix over the years, and that your project is way too much freeway and not just about a new bridge…a sad prospect in the time of global warming.
 
Had the DOT’s twenty years ago contented themselves with just addressing the historic twin bridges, a new one would be in service today. Ironically, once tolls are in place to help pay for this proposed overreach, it will prove itself totally excessive. And were we to just impose tolls today, traffic would diminish as SOV drivers find more cost effective options, and an income stream would come into play for a seismic retrofit of the Historic Twin Bridges. Attention could then be paid to the real transportation link vulnerable to earthquake…the even older railroad bridge. 
The whole thing is just nuts! 

PS Hey Ross…trust you are doing well. L.

Guy
Guy
26 days ago

The fun part is that, with a “transit station in the sky”, everybody will get to enjoy a big celebration on each of the two or three days out of the year that the elevator is fully operating and the station is accessible.

Guy
Guy
26 days ago
Reply to  Guy

I should have added, provided you’re not like me, and unafraid of catching some dreadful respiratory disease while crammed into the elevator.

Watts
Watts
25 days ago
Reply to  Guy

Speaking of which, the Bob Stacey elevators were out again this weekend.

blumdrew
25 days ago
Reply to  Watts

It’d be news if they were operating honestly. So shameful how often they are down

Rufio
Rufio
24 days ago
Reply to  Watts

We all take a drink!

Angus Peters
Angus Peters
25 days ago
Reply to  Guy

Yeah the elevators at the Bob Stacey overcrossing have been such a success (frequently broken, grafitti and feces filled).
I avoid them like the plague.
https://bikeportland.org/2022/02/16/as-frustrations-boil-over-city-of-portland-gives-no-timeline-for-repair-of-bob-stacey-crossing-elevator-348653

dw
dw
25 days ago
Reply to  Angus Peters

Last time I went over the Bob Stacey crossing one elevator was broken and the other had a group of 6-7 people in it passing around a straw and a piece of foil.

Jim h
Jim h
25 days ago

We will have the most expensive railway in the world.

blumdrew
25 days ago
Reply to  Jim h

I doubt the dollars allocated to this MAX extension would make it more expensive than the Channel Tunnel, Gotthard Base Tunnel, the Tokyo-Nagoya maglev, or even the future Hudson Gateway project. Most of the cost for the project is related to highway stuff

SolarEclipse
SolarEclipse
25 days ago
Reply to  Jim h

Yeah we could save a ton of money if the MAX was nixed from this project. “Build It and They Will Ride” has never worked for MAX before, why anyone would think it would now.
A dedicated bus lane makes a much better solution and a fleet of buses could be purchased with tons of tax money saved instead of the train.

Steven
Steven
25 days ago
Reply to  Jim h

Still cheaper than car infrastructure.

Watts
Watts
25 days ago
Reply to  Steven

Is that in absolute terms, or per user?

blumdrew
24 days ago
Reply to  Watts

The entire MAX light rail system was built for less than $6B in today’s dollars. It’s carried something like a billion riders since its inception, so that’s about $6 per rider (over ~40 years). How many more trips will the IBR carry over it’s replacement, and at what cost per user? If we look at the financial reporting and traffic projections we can expect to spend $7.5B to carry a projected to carry 175,000 cars/trucks a day.

Considering that traffic is currently in the ~140,000 a day range, that’s a net gain of 35,000 vehicles/day. For those vehicles to reach a similar $6 number as the MAX, it would take about 100 years ($7.5B / (35k vpd * $6/vehicle) ~ 35,000 days). So that makes the IBR project about half as useful as the MAX light rail system in terms of dollar per user. I did ballpark the MAX total ridership data, but I think 1B is reasonable based on the historic ridership data (works out to 26M/year). The marginal cost to add a few travel lanes is truly astronomical here – and while a bridge replacement may be needed, it needs to be designed by someone with a stronger hold on the financial realities at hand.

It’s also obviously more expensive in absolute terms.

Dan Packard
Dan Packard
24 days ago

This is my submittal for the IBR public comment:

I have reviewed what I could of the lengthy Interstate Bridge Draft Environmental Statement and the numerous supplemental statements and videos.

I am concerned how the design of the bridge and thoroughfare impedes easy and non-cumbersome access to pedestrians and bicyclists while drastically expanding motor vehicle lanes and convenience, simultaneously destroying existing businesses, property and greenway sections along the route of the project. 

The Interstate Bridge project adds four additional motor vehicle lanes (going from 10 to 14) to I-5 under Evergreen Blvd. in Vancouver, expanding the super wide ribbon of concrete by 28%! This removes more greenery and vegetation adjacent to the downtown Vancouver library and introduces more harmful air pollutants, tire byproducts and intrusive noise into the core of downtown Vancouver and the historic lush and beautiful Fort Vancouver areas.

The awkwardly designed bicycle/pedestrian access ramps in Vancouver and Hayden island spin active transportation users around in circles to reach the soaring height of the bridge pathway and rail stop, 100 feet in elevation, (10 stories tall) on the Vancouver side. This will be the tallest from ground to bridge height bike/ped crossing structure in the United States. The pathway crossing will have huge wind impacts, loud vehicle noise and scorching temperatures from the summer sun with no protective greenery or shading.  The design discourages those that choose active transportation modes of walking, running and bicycling to cross the Columbia river.

The wider ribbon of motor vehicles lanes and concrete on Hayden island removes and displaces numerous thriving businesses, increases harmful air and noise pollution for island residents, elevates maintenance costs and contributes to a sad future of heavier congestion throughout the I-5 transportation corridor in Vancouver and Portland.

To those wanting to just get directly south to Portland, the south access bicycle / pedestrian points to North Portland seem to show a circuitous route of veering and detouring east or west. A much more difficult route than the direct line provided for motor vehicle traffic thru the corridor on the Interstate bridge sections. 

In summary, the new Interstate Bridge crossing and associated roadway expansion negatively impacts human health and development in the region, expands motor vehicle use, increases noise and air pollution, multiplies construction and maintenance costs, adversely affects climate goals while providing meager advantages to active transportation modes of walking and bicycling.

The project needs to be drastically downsized to reflect accurate declining vehicle usage trends and enhanced for active and light rail users and anyone that lives and functions in the region.

Nelon
Nelon
21 days ago

We should wait for the current bridge to fail and then go back to ferry service. 🙂