(Source: Independent Cover Assessment Report, 2021)
There’s been a lot of talk about the highway covers that are planned as part of the I-5 Rose Quarter project; but there hasn’t been much chance for the public to look under the hood and have a say in what might happen on top of them.
That will change this coming Monday, April 28th as the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) and the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) co-host an event dubbed, Future I-5 Highway Cover: Lower Albina Planning Session.
These covers will play a crucial role not only in what type of neighborhood ultimately emerges on top of them, but also in how the bikeway network connects on key surface street routes.
The event will bring together staff from PBOT and ODOT, as well as the Bureau of Planning and Sustainability (BPS). They’ll have an interactive work session with members of ODOT’s Historic Albina Advisory Board (HAAB) and Community Oversight Advisory Committee (COAC), and some invited guests. The session will be facilitated by ZGF Architects, the firm that helped prepare the project’s Independent Cover Assessment in 2021. Here’s more about the event:
“This session continues the exploration of how potential highway cover uses relate to public spaces and the surrounding street network, building on visioning work previously done by Albina Vision Trust in collaboration with HAAB, COAC, and community stakeholders.”
Meeting organizers will allow public comment at the end of the work session, which will be held both online and in-person. The event will be held at New Song Church Community Center from 4:00 to 6:00 pm on Monday April 28th. More info here.
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boondoggle –
noun
verb
This will be some of the most polluted real estate in Portland. I can’t imagine spending any amount of time here, much less living or working. Fine particulate pollution is extremely unhealthy.
Fortunately, as our vehicle fleet electrifies (especially trucks and other diesel vehicles), urban particulate pollution should fall significantly.
Will it be? Everything I’ve seen has said caps reduce reduce pollution near the freeway so it seems like the pollution on top of the cap wouldn’t be anymore than the properties adjacent to it. That mean properties next to uncovered freeways would be more polluted than the properties on the cap.
How much do the real estate developers in the AVT stand to make from all this? How much does Loretta Smith and her associates stand to profit from the freeway expansion project?
I remember attending a similar freeway capping event for I-405 in the early 2000s with lots of expensive pie-in-the-sky suggestions. Someone there suggested installing turbine generators on top of the caps to turn the resulting air pollution into power.
Metro Seattle has several freeway caps, including the long one over I-90 on Mercer Island that has a soccer field on it. I saw several recently in Atlanta.