Left: Councilor Olivia Clark (top) and Councilor Loretta Smith. Right: No More Freeways Co-founder Chris Smith (top) and NMF Co-founder Joe Cortright.
It’s impossible to have a fair and productive discussion about an important issue when advocates and elected leaders can’t agree on the facts. Yet this is the situation Portland finds itself in when it comes to the $1.9 billion I-5 Rose Quarter megaproject.
So it’s time to try and set the record straight.
When advocates with the nonprofit No More Freeways presented their views on the project at a meeting of the Portland City Council Transportation and Infrastructure Committee on April 21st, they faced very skeptical responses from Councilor (and Committee Chair) Olivia Clark and Councilor Loretta Smith.
Yet Clark and Smith have not provided any evidence to back up their skepticism and they appear to be relying on blind faith in the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT).
Even before No More Freeways co-founders Chris Smith and Joe Cortright approached the dais, Councilor Smith referred to the group’s contention that ODOT might expand the freeway much more than they’re letting on publicly as, “misinformation” and “totally ridiculous.”
Clark raised eyebrows when she told Chris Smith that a key part of NMF’s presentation about the possible width of the freeway was “outdated” and that she wanted ODOT to come to the committee to “rectify some of the misunderstandings.”
For Councilor Clark to so flatly dismiss facts presented by Smith was surprising. Smith is not just any advocate. He’s been closely tracking the I-5 Rose Quarter since at least 2012 when he was a member of the Portland Planning Commission. Back then he was the sole “no” vote against adding the project to the City’s Transportation System Plan for many of the same reasons he remains opposed to the project today.
And as I reported earlier this month, Councilor Loretta Smith was even more directly dismissive of Smith and Cortright’s presentation. Emboldened by the remarks of Clark, Councilor Smith accused Cortright of being “really unfair” and “disingenuous” because he shared a document in his presentation that showed an annotated cross-section of the freeway width that could accommodate more lanes than ODOT says they’ll build.
When Councilor Smith asked Chris Smith a question about the project, she dismissed his answer as a “political, environmental plan” and then continued to disrespect him by saying, “I would appreciate, when you come to this this committee, that you give us real information and not what you would hope.”
So who’s sharing “real information” and who’s sharing “hope”?
In a phone interview after that council meeting, I asked Councilor Smith what evidence she had to prove her contention that Cortright’s document was “outdated.”
“How do you know it’s outdated?” I asked.
“ODOT said it’s outdated,” Smith replied.
When I asked Smith why she implied NMF’s views on the freeway width were “ridiculous” and “disingenuous,” she denied saying it and then made another claim.
“I didn’t say their ideas were ridiculous,” Smith said, “I said the information they put up on the screen… they said it was ODOT and it wasn’t from ODOT. They created that whole presentation. That was not from ODOT.”
When I pointed out that NMF’s documents did indeed come directly from ODOT and that the red annotations were added to clarify the measurements, Councilor Smith said, “It doesn’t matter.”
“Even the chair, Olivia Clark said [ODOT] is not using those documents and they are outdated, okay?” Smith replied. “And so when the chair tells you that, why won’t they accept it?”
I’ve made several attempts to contact Councilor Clark’s office for comment, but have not yet heard back. I’ve also reached out to ODOT, but haven’t heard back.
For their part, No More Freeways has provided a detailed explanation of their use of the document. In a three-page letter sent to all five members of the T & I Committee on Monday, Smith and Cortright addressed the provenance of the cross-section document, its currentness, and their concerns about what ODOT could do with the additional width.
NMF says they obtained the document via public records request that was spurred after they heard about an allegedly non-public meeting between ODOT and their Historic Albina Advisory Board in March 2023. When NMF requested all materials shared at that meeting, this cross-section drawing — showing the overall width of the freeway at 162-feet — was among them.
NMF acknowledges the document shown at City Council is two years old, but says they still use it because it, “clearly shows the project overlaid on the existing cross-section of the highway.” They also point out that a newer drawing currently available on ODOT’s official project website shows a proposed width of 189 feet. “The project only gets wider as it goes forward,” NMF writes.
NMF is disappointed that councilors Clark and Smith chose to focus on the authenticity of the document and not the nonprofit’s main concern: That the width of the new freeway would allow ODOT to stripe several more than the two lanes they are currently telling the public and elected officials about — new lanes they fear would induce demand of more drivers, and create more traffic on local city streets.
“ODOT will of course deny that they have any intention to do this,” NMF writes. “But our point is that the excessive width is causing unneeded expense to taxpayers and the potential additional lane is not accounted for in the environmental review.”
In the end, this is a matter of trusting ODOT, or not. As consistent critics of the agency for almost a decade, NMF obviously does not. The way councilors Clark and Smith reacted to NMF’s presentation on April 21st makes it clear ODOT enjoys their full and abiding trust (a far cry from their predecessor on council in 2020 who was so concerned she withdrew the City of Portland’s support).
I expect elected officials to be more trusting and sympathetic to other government agencies than to citizen volunteers; but with so much at stake with this project, and with ODOT’s well-documented accounting blunders, history of cost overruns, and lack of public trust, Portlanders deserve leaders who offer at least healthy skepticism and not just rubber stamps.
I’ll update this post if/when I hear back from Councilor Clark and/or ODOT.
CORRECTION, 5/1 at 9:27 am: The original post included a cross-section image that was not the same image NMF showed at City Council. Somehow the one I used had become distorted as it moved from various platforms and was re-saved several times. The post has been updated with the correct image. I regret any confusion.
Thanks for reading.
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Note that on Thursday, May 1 at 9:27 am I was informed by Joe Cortright that somehow the corss-section image I initially shared in this post wasn’t the same one he shared at City Council meeting on April 21st. The post has been updated with the correct image. Sorry for the confusion.
It seems like the original sin in this issue is ODOT’s release of incomplete/not-to-scale drawings, and the choice to try to add to-scale elements to them. That creates all kinds of confusion and ambiguity, and serves as a distraction from the real issues.
PS I don’t see the new drawing, unless it is only subtly different from the old one.
The only thing that’s different are the alignments of the red and white annotations (which make more sense than they previously did)
Congress has moved to rescind the Reconnecting Communities Grant Program. This doesn’t only affect Portland’s IRQ project (only funding for the caps), but more than 70 other projects across the US. Whether or not this will have any effect on Clark and/or Smith is up for question. If you currently reside in District 1 or 4, please consider writing to them:
District 1 Smith
District 4 Clark
I’ve looked at NMF’s annotated cross section several times and I can’t decipher what point they’re trying to make. I mean, I understand that they pasted in 10 blocks that are approximately 12 feet wide at the scale of the figure. But two of them cut through structural columns, so those aren’t even hypothetical lanes.
OK, so the columns can’t co-exist with lanes, and shoulders have to be adjacent to those. On the left side of the figure, that of works. You remove the column lane and there’s space for shoulders
But on the right side, it doesn’t work so since the column straddles two of their lanes. So now have you’d have to either remove two of their hypothetical lanes or reconfigure things to remove only one.
So after all of that we’re back down to 8 or even 7 lanes.
Hey Paul H. The more recent ODOT drawing on the right above shows 8 lanes (not 7). Based on the design that doubles the number at a minimum from the current 4 to 8 lanes. I think there’s also a misconception that shoulders are required by law. As far as I am aware, they are recommended as best practice, but not required in Oregon (please correct me if I am wrong on this).
I don’t speak for NMF, but it does seem very possible that 17′ of extra road space per direction (based on the more recent ODOT drawing) could easily fit an additional lane in either direction. Unfortunately, the fungibility of facts benefits both ODOT and people with money who will profit from this project financially. There are four important points that have been lost in the noise:
1) A simple re-striping the current design would easily allow for 10 lanes (at Bway/Weidler). That appears to be the “excessive” part of this project according to NMF. The use of the shoulder on I-5 for bus routes shows how quickly this can be changed by a simple policy decision.
2) The EA included the addition of “[two] auxiliary lanes and shoulders.” A highway expansion from 4 lanes to 8-10 lanes is not simply an addition of “auxiliary lanes,” it’s a colossal highway expansion.
3) The current caps may lose their funding soon. That means none of the project’s goals (e.g., reconnecting the grid, create community spaces, reducing congestion, reducing crashes, emergency vehicle response etc.) will be met in any meaningful way.
4) The track record for ODOT’s budget ranges from about 100%-300% in cost overrun on similar projects. The current budget is 1.9 billion. That means any conservative cost estimate would be ~4 billion (ODOT has $863m-$450m=~$413m currently).
Lost in the noise is that congestion pricing would actually mitigate congestion and cost a fraction of the IRQ project. That’s not really considered by anyone, because no one benefits financially.
“congestion pricing would actually mitigate congestion and cost a fraction”
As numerous people have pointed out, this project is not about reducing congestion.
I don’t understand this. I’m not seeing people point out that the expansion is not to reduce congestion either in this article or comments here, and reducing congestion has been the primary stated reason I’ve seen for the widening elsewhere. People saying this is the state’s worst bottleneck, etc. ODOT is clear that the point is to reduce congestion. “The purpose of the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project is to improve safety and congestion where three major interstates converge and to reconnect the Albina neighborhood through the construction of a highway cover over a portion of I-5.”
Did you mean the point of the caps isn’t to reduce congestion?
Well, the caps certainly won’t reduce congestion, but the purpose of the project ODOT gave at the outset was to improve safety by reducing lane changes between I-405 and I-84. As they faced increasing pushback, they broadened their stated goals to include everything under the sun (congestion, racial equity, air quality, community building etc.), but the fundamentals of the project haven’t changed that much.
Many people have predicted this project won’t reduce congestion, and they may be right. That’s fine, but it’s not strong grounds on which to oppose the project, because that’s not what it’s really about (and so the suggestion that the project goals can be met by imposing congestion pricing don’t really hit the mark).
The page you linked to does indeed mention congestion. In ODOT’s list of bullet points about project improvements, the second is about congestion (containing two of the page’s three mentions of the word), but the first is about “economic opportunities”. This project was never about economic opportunities, just as it was never about congestion relief.
I oppose this project, strongly, so it pains me to see folks getting wound around the wrong axle.
I believe the only way to stop this project at this point is to convince the Trump administration to withdraw funding for the lids (perhaps dragging things out to give them more time to realize what this project is really about), and at that point the whole coalition advocating for the project will blow up. Of course, that means allying to some degree with Trump, which may prove more distasteful for some folks than expanding the highway.
Once we’ve scraped away all these distracting issues, we can focus on the merits and demerits of the project itself, where I think it will fail.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
The 2 of the 8 lanes in the figure are exit lanes, so it’s still generally a 6-lane configuration.
You probably don’t need shoulders, but in tunnels they’re nice to have (assuming we actually get the caps — color me skeptical on that).
According to ODOT, there are only 4 highway lanes, 2 of which are “auxiliary lanes” and the other 2 don’t count as lanes. So when you see 8 lanes it’s only 4. When you see space for 10 lanes, it’s still only 4. This is where everyone blinks, twitches a little bit, stops looking at the actual numbers, and nods in agreement while saying, “YES!”
Here’s the dead link to a study ODOT uses to sell auxiliary lanes as something that is not a highway lane.
Anyone who is willing to step back, look at reality without using euphemisms, special jargon or overly-rosy language, knows that this is simple gaslighting.
It’s a clever card trick to move from talking about highway widening with the goal of handling more overall traffic to splitting hairs about which lanes are thru traffic, and which ones are auxiliary and the benefits in safety and congestion those auxiliary lanes are supposed to bring. Urbanists might be tempted to take the bait and get into technical arguments with experts who know the research and will win on the facts as narrowly defined in the terms of that bait-and-switch. We would do well to not miss the forest for the trees on this (or the Interstate Bridge replacement); the whole point of this project is to allow the interstate to handle more cars and trucks on a daily basis than it is currently able to. You can concede every point ODOT tries to make about auxiliary lanes to them without giving up that important central theme, which is that ODOT wants to deliver more cars to downtown Portland. Auxiliary lanes help safety and congestion, so that more vehicles can travel through the corridor.
They don’t actually care about the safety or the congestion at all, except when it is in service to that ultimate goal. If they did, you’d be able to tell, because instead of endlessly going around and around on how best to configure the Broadway/Weidler interchange, they’d just get rid of the interchange altogether. They won’t do that, though, because that would run counter to the goal of facilitating motor vehicles to and from the area via the interstate, i.e. in technical terms they’d be decreasing, rather than increasing, the level of service. If they cared about congestion, they’d be considering more effective alternatives to private motor vehicles to meet transportation needs, such as trains, buses, and bikeways. They’d consider alternatives to trucking through the heart of downtown, such as additional freight rail capacity or working with the feds to re-establish barging down the Willamette River. But they’re narrowly focused on meeting the political mandate of the Oregon Transportation Commission, which is to spend state money to support the trucking industry and the public’s access to luxury private transportation from origin to destination, so they only ever consider additional lanes for those private vehicles.
COTW
Such a smart comment, Michael. What has always bothered me about this project is that no matter the stated aim, the solution has always been WIDENING.
Let’s stick with my getting-fat metaphor:
Fred, you are getting fat!
Then I absolutely need a bike with a bigger frame and tires and saddle.
Well, you could try eating less.
No, I just need a bigger bike.
Or you could try eating less-caloric food, more fiber, vegan etc.
That’s okay – I really need a bigger bike.
How about you get a gym membership and a personal trainer.
No – my bike needs to get bigger and bigger to accommodate my increased size.
you only going to continue to get fatter!
Oh, congestion pricing is certainly what NMF has asked for for years.
2 of them cut through structural columns?! That’s embarrassing. I guess I can see why Smith and Clark weren’t buying what NMF was selling.
I thought the structural columns would be removed when the bridge is rebuilt. Isn’t that one of the cornerstones of this project? (rebuild to improve traffic flow).
Not really, but the way they represent it on the annotated engineering documents makes it look like they’re trying to put a hypothetical lane through the columns. In reality, it’s ODOT’s choice not to draw the cross-section to scale that distorts the reality and makes it seem like NMF are unserious cranks when they point out the problems of ODOT’s analysis. Looking at the actual dimensions and pulling out a trusty calculator shows that NMF are actually correct on this count, at least at this specific cross-section, the Broadway/Weidler interchange. Going from left to right on the drawing, the first road section is 81.5 feet from center of the column to center of the column. ODOT wants to put three 12′ lanes with 7′ shoulders on both sides in that space, a total of 50 feet of used right-of-way. NMF points out that it would be relatively simple to restripe that to provide five 12′ lanes with two 10′ shoulders, a total of 80 feet. In the opposite direction it’s almost an identical situation: 81′ 2″ column to column, allowing you to fit the same 5 lanes with wide shoulders. Even the two 12′ lanes and 8′ shoulder on the 59′ 2″ ramp leaves an additional 25′ 2″ for ODOT to play with, should they wish to add another lane or two in a decade.
That image was not the one he showed at council. The one I initially uploaded for this story had somehow become distorted. I’ve swapped out the image and it is now the same as the one Cortright showed. See the correct image below:
Thanks for clarifying this. This version is much clearer
If you look at the NMF drawing, there are 14 boxes. They are clearly not counting the boxes that align with the column in their 10 lane count. NMF’s graphic lines up basically exactly with ODOT’s graphic to the right. The major difference is that ODOT’s more recent graphic is actually 7 feet wider than the NMF graphic.
I wasn’t counting their 10-ft (shoulder) boxes as lanes. The 12-ft boxes are depicted to be potential driving lanes. As Jonathan mentions above, the annotations were distorted (misplaced) on a previous iteration of the figure.
For the record, this isn’t just No More Freeways pointing out the excessive width: ODOT hired ARUP, respected international engineers to look at the proposed Rose Quarter freeway expansion. ARUP said it is vastly too wide: “. . . no comparable highway project in any other city includes the 12-foot inner shoulder lanes that ODOT has included in this project.. . . an alternative cross section could achieve over.40 feet in total cover width potential reduction . . .consistent with the FHWA guidance . . . as well as consistent with current practice for highways with cover structures or tunnels.” https://i5rosequarter.org/pdfs/independent_cover_assessment/AppendixI_CostAndConstructability.pdf.
This, by the way, was part of No More Freeways testimony to the City Council Committee on April 21.
Thanks for all your work Joe. You work is invaluable!
The fact that ODOT uses Orwellian language like “auxiliary lanes” is enough for me to know that I can’t trust them. It is WIDENING objectively. Why can’t they just admit it?
It’s true! They been using the term “auxiliary lanes” since at least 1984! I’ve seen it in numerous ODOT highway plans from that time, why over 40 years ago now!
I’m not getting a pot belly – I’ve just added some auxiliary corpus in my midsection.
“Auxiliary lane” isn’t Orwellian. It has a formal, engineering definition.
Auxiliary lanes connect on-ramps to off-ramps, but don’t continue past the off ramps.
I don’t know if the full design is faithful to that definition. But there’s no need to pretend they’re making up new terms.
The conflicts of interest of Loretta Smith and others involved in this project are very concerning. It has been disturbing to see AVT change from being genuinely concerned about environmental impact and scale of the project to boosters for “build at any cost.” AVT has a number of consultants and people who benefit from the highway slush fund guiding this latest push. There should be a fair and transparent accounting of conflicts of interest with AVT and city council. ODOT and metro as well.
Exactly! This needs to be more closely scrutinized. There is big money involved and there seems to be a huge conflict of interest with Loretta Smith. She should recluse herself immediately and AVT needs to come clean about the huge money their big developer associates stand to make on this freeway project
Just a day ending in Y when a local politician takes advantage either for personal or family.
Remember when Kafoury was so adamant about not using the Wapato jail and insisted it be sold? Her cousin worked for the real estate firm that later sold (and of course with a hefty profit) it.
What well-connected, well paid person isn’t a cousin of a Kafoury in Portland?
I’m not in favor of freeways, but Loretta Smith probably reflects a majority of her consitituent’s views on this expansion.
It’s just a guess because the new voting system will rarely tell you what the majority thinks.
Portland democracy isn’t about the majority anymore–its about justice–as defined by people who specialize in justice–unlike you who might only be a waiter or a programmer.