16 years after Portland's 'urgent' Freeway Loop study, where has our boldness gone?
bikeportland.org/2021/07/22/opinion-16-years-...
bikeportland.orgPosted Jun 14, 2022, 5:10 PM UTC
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bikeportland.orgI feel like i am obsessed over this lately hence my other posts, but any CRC work or I-5 "widening" absolutely needs to look at the bigger picture of what this freeway is doing to our city.
If you're ever biking or walking along the Eastbank, this becomes rapidly aware it's a total waste of space.
There's billions of dollars in land value all along this route, not to mention the ability to recapture the eastbank waterfront from OMSI up to the Rose Quarter.
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Fortunately the Rose Quarter project will reclaim land in the form of freeway caps.
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Lipstick on a pig at that point. Still leaves the eastbank a mess.
Most people don't go out on the Eastbank Esplanade or walk around the neighborhoods as a pedestrian. Once you do it's hard to unsee the problem it creates -- but also the amazing potential that would be revealed by undergrounding this infrastructure.
I'm not much of a quixotic person. I am about as practical as they come.
I cannot think of a more slam dunk, multi-objective measure the city/state/ODOT could endeavor on:
- More land sales real estate transactions and revenue to city.
- More buildable land for housing, institutions, and industry.
- More open space and totally new waterfront.
- Edit: cleaner air.
I'd leverage, TIF, LID, federal funds, state funds the entire thing (Pearl District was created from TIF).
Nothing like a big infrastructure project to distract us from problems.
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Big infrastructure projects can be great though-not distractions but ways to help solve those problems!
I mean: look at all the points you raise that would be good-all of those things would help the city at large and some of the issues we're dealing with because they'd inject money into the region and that's one of the things we need. And that only the Feds can really do for us.
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The Eastbank issue is going to become increasingly obvious, not only for the reasons you list, but also as more of the area east of it (inner SE former industrial like in Buckman) further develops. We'll have two well developed halves of the metro area with this ugly blight of the Eastbank Esplanade running through the heart of it. It's really a bizarre strip to walk through. It feels woefully abandoned compared to the surrounding neighborhoods it could serve to further benefit. Not to mention OMSI and other restaurants / businesses in the area would benefit having a renewed park bank.
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Not to mention OMSI and other restaurants / businesses in the area would benefit having a renewed park bank.
Thanks for the comments (mostly because I agree with them :-)).
OMSI's master planned area could only get better with the tunneling...
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Most people don't go out on the Eastbank Esplanade or walk around the neighborhoods as a pedestrian
I dunno, I rode in from vancouver to go down to division, and I rode the esplanade a few weeks ago when it was finally nice outside, and it was packed. People were fishing and grilling at the pier, lots of folks walking, biking, etc. It wasn't crowded, but it was definitely active.
I didn't know it existed, but now that I do, it's my straight shot to SE from vancouver by bike.
I'll agree that people aren't really walking the streets directly off of it, but that's primarily because it's almost all industrial and unhoused. There's nothing there to walk to outside of omsi and a few bars. It's mostly train tracks and warehouses, and to your point, a freeway.
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I too feel very strongly about this, opening up the east waterfront would create amazing opportunities. But why do we need to build expensive tunnels at all? Just remove i5 freeway south of i84 and marquam bridge, and reroute i5 to the existing i405 alignment. We don't need more car dependent infrastructure, if we are going to tunnel, it should be for a subway and not an inefficient, polluting transportation system
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This is the better way forward. Remove the 5 from the Eastbank. Tunnel the 405 under the river. Cap the 405 through downtown and through North Portland. Cap highway 30 from Nicolai to Wilson and run the rest in the 405 tunnel. Pay for it with a combination of development, TIFs, LIDs, Federal money, and tolls. Widen nothing; use the tolls to manage congestion.
In parallel to that, we need to figure out what to do with the 84 and 205
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Yes but it's going to cover the Eastbank with an onramp
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I thought that part of the project was eliminated.
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I thought that part of the project was eliminated.
The very idea ODOT proposed that as even an option shows just how out-of-tune they are. For those who don't know, just look at this image:
I have defended the Rose Quarter project as I believe the auxillary-land/"induced demand" is far overblown; but if we're throwing money at this project, let's do it right and doing it right means literally burying/covering I5 at least from the end of the Marquam.
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That's promising, thanks for the correction.
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Tunnels cost a lot of money. It’s why most of the Max is on the surface—$$. Early in its development the Max was envisioned as a subway, downtown at least. I think the intended station entrances still exist along portions of the line downtown. But it’s a lot cheaper to convert existing infrastructure (like roads)—so they did that instead. I’ll wager the FLAG group arrived at the same conclusion—tunnels were too expensive.
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Yes, tunnels are expensive, but so is lost land $$$. Think of all the property taxes and business income taxes NOT being generated because cars are consuming land -- tax free on top of?
The MAX is underground partially just out of downtown near the Zoo, just for the record. I believe the rationale was worry of more ice through the West Hills. Could be wrong, but that's why it's tunneled there and not necessarily downtown.
The MAX should legitimately be tunneled through downtown.
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I think the max tunnels under the hill because it can't go up that steep of a grade. But I'd love to see more of it underground, especially through downtown.
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So I just ran the numbers, and ballparking:
For a 90 foot wide highway, each mile (5280 ft) nets 475,200 sqft, or 10.9 acres.
There’s up to 3 miles of highway, so let’s call that 33 acres
Portland downtown real estate is going for up to $15 million per acre. So the city nets $400 million for real estate—not bad! That’s about… 5% of the replacement cost? Totally guessing here.
Still gotta cover the remaining 95%, right?
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I appreciate the numbers!
I believe the big land-get is being able to build closer to the roadway (or in some cases on top). So not only the out measurement you gave (personally, I'd bump that to 100' wide) but also the majority width of the roadway right of way system with off and on ramps that could be turned into usable space.
As an example of I5 through North Portland, N. Minnesota and Missouri Avenues could have buildable lots on their back ends for approximately 2.5 miles. Just totally guessing but that's 500 parcels of land that could be turned into nice 2,3, and 4 plexes that are "missing middle" housing.
One thing to note is parts of I5 and I405 are already sunken below grade, at that point it's a matter of covering the depressions and is less expensive than getting a tunnel boring machine and placing reinforcing/structure of the tunnel, or so I think.
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$400 million in upfront capital, plus property and business taxes that are currently being foregone.
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The rationale of the Robertson Tunnel
https://blog.trimet.org/2022/03/31/the-inside-story-of-the-robertson-tunnel-part-1-construction/
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grade rising 700 feet in a narrow and sometimes icy canyon next to the Sunset Highway.
Thanks for the link. Looks ice was part of that equation.
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The worst part of this is the choke point on I-5 by the Rose Quarter. This is why fixing the interstate bridge won't solve traffic problems, all it will do is more effectively funnel traffic to the Rose Quarter choke point. :(
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Replacing the bridge will fix half of the problem(going north), and adding the train will fix a small portion of the Rose Quarter choke point. Doing nothing also doesn’t fix it.
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Hot tip: the Rose Quarter freeway project won't "solve" traffic either
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Of course it won't. It will solve for 2022 traffic, take 10 years to complete, and be completely insufficient for 2032 traffic.
Change years as needed.
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Robert Moses can eat my entire asshole
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Robert Moses can eat my entire asshole
He fucked shit up, but let's not dwell and maybe we need a modern Robert Moses who champions big infrastructure projects that meet many objectives rather than catering to the car.
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I'd never give him that honor or that pleasure. 😉
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Portland is a motor city at its core that is just playing at supporting alternative transportation. Until SOVs are de-prioritized, car use will continue to grow.
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20 yrs ago the buses were packed at rush hour and biking was growing. I see empty buses and empty stops mostly now.
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20 years ago I could afford to live biking or bussing distance from work/school. I still bike/bus but it’s a solid hour commute.
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Yep. Public transit needs to be faster than driving to make this work. Expand the max and make it faster. Make express trains that bypass shorter runs at stops.
If it took 15 minutes to get from Gresham to Beaverton you can bet people would be riding public transit.
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Why do you think that’s the case? Generally curious. I live near and in downtown and have many reasons why I won’t take transit anymore. It honestly makes me sad because when I lived downtown hopping on the streetcar or max was super convenient but now I’d rather drive
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I think main two reasons are that security is too lax and the spoke and hub system is ridiculous.
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Our transit system seems specifically designed around everyone working downtown. I'm wondering what happens to MAX with the rise of work from home. People still need to go places, but they're clearly not going downtown in the same numbers.
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The bus system was altered from a hub and spoke to our current grid system long ago
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Combo of WFH and safety issues I think. It makes me sad too.
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I stopped commuting by bus due to WFH, but I stopped taking the bus after having way too many sketchy situations. I'm not risking it. We need transit security before we need another foot of system expansion.
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How has the median income of residents changed during those 20 years? Is there any correlation between rising incomes and lowered public transit ridership?
My gut says yes but I am dataless.
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High income earners still ride transit in NYC and Chicago, among other cities. And especially in well-run Asian and European cities. The key is making transit more efficient, which means prioritizing transit ROWs instead of cars (dedicated lanes, signal priority, etc.), and very importantly it means having good enough transit security and cleanliness that you don't deter people who could otherwise afford a car but don't want to deal with smoking on the bus, yelling, assaults, human waste, etc.
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High income earners ride transit in NYC because its extremely expensive to own a car there.
Most of Portland is single-family home with a driveway so its just never going to be that expensive to own a car.
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I think they should change it to a one-way loop, use the outer lanes for local traffic and the inner lanes for traffic that needs to bypass downtown entirely. It would require re-engineering, but it would keep the footprint as it is, rather than expanding anything.
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I think they should change it to a one-way loop, use the outer lanes for local traffic and the inner lanes for traffic that needs to bypass downtown entirely. It would require re-engineering, but it would keep the footprint as it is, rather than expanding anything.
That's actually an intriguing idea.
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Why should downtown have a bypass at all? Through traffic shouldn't come close to being within city limits
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Because interstate 5 exists…
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But it shouldn't. Its clear that pollution, noise, wasted space is a much bigger downside than being able to support through traffic
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But it does. And nothing is going to change that because what you want and think works, doesn’t work to move goods across the west coast.
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Which major American cities don’t have a major interstate running through the middle of them?
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Are you actually suggesting just tearing up I5 or just moving it 20 miles?
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The population has more than doubled from when the freeways were originally built and this piece wants less roads so they can build more bike lanes.
How many tens of millions have we put into building bike lanes? Has the overall ridership gone up or pretty much stayed the same over the past decade?
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The population has more than doubled from when the freeways were originally built and this piece wants less roads so they can build more bike lanes.
Exactly. The only way to ease traffic congestion is to give people more convenient alternatives to driving.
How many tens of millions have we put into building bike lanes
Not enough. Most of our bike "infrastructure" are just lines painted on the road, which does nothing to make bikers feel safe biking. The more bike lanes like what just got installed on Naito, the better.
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Or ya know... more lanes to accommodate the population. People ain't gonna be biking 10+ miles to commute to work.
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Or ya know... more lanes to accommodate the population.
That sounds logical at first glance, but has proven to not be attainable in reality. Personal vehicles are just too space inefficient for there to be enough room for roads and parking to be capable of accommodating a city's entire population while still maintaining enough space for those people to live and work there.
This image does a pretty good job illustrating the amount of traffic that gets freed up with public transit.
People ain't gonna be biking 10+ miles to commute to work.
Good thing I never suggested that. I believe what I said was:
The only way to ease traffic congestion is to give people more convenient alternatives to driving.
That's not just bike lanes, but also busses, trams, and trains. Not to mention making neighborhoods walkable so you don't need to take as many trips. The key is to have a variety of viable options. The more options people have, the less of a burden each one has to bare.
The more you try to force everyone in to a car whether they want to or not, the worse you're making your own commute.
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That's just not really viable for anyone who lives in the outer metro area. Commute times matter. Saying people can take mass transit and it will only take them 90 min to and from work vs 30 in a car isn't acceptable to most people.
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That's what buses and trains are for, silly. A private vehicle for every single commuter is the least efficient system possible.
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Commute time matters. Telling outer metro voters that they will have to spend an extra hour or more on a bus to get to work every day isn't acceptable.
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A few of the cyclegentsia on this sub actually tried to argue with me the other day that Gresham to downtown is a reasonable distance for a bicycle commute
They're living in their own little fantasy world out there in the Hawthorne district
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There are people that do it. It's a long distance for a bike commute, but it's not at all unheard of.
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How many tens of millions have we put into building bike lanes? Has the overall ridership gone up or pretty much stayed the same over the past decade?
Not much. Paint and signs aren't very expensive and that's about 99% of our bike "infrastructure".
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looks at Tilikum Bridge
It's an amazing feat to build that out of paint and signs.
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You mean the bridge that was primarily built to move the MAX over the Willamette River? I guess they've spent a lot on bikes when you consider all public transit and pedestrian projects "bike" projects.
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Allright
points to the pointless better naito project that added separate bike lanes next to waterfront park
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I'm confused. Sure the bridge was made for moving MAX and streetcars, but they didn't HAVE to add additional funding to ensure we get bike and pedestrian lanes to it, yet they did. Aren't they also adding a bike/pedestrian only bridge across 84? And I seem to recall part of the Division overhaul was safer bike lanes and intersection crossings?
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The population has more than doubled from when the freeways were originally built and this piece wants less roads so they can build more bike lanes.
I can't comment about anything about "restricting" capacity. I personally don't fall under the binary cars=bad or cars=good.
I would not support tunneling that wouldn't build roadways that had modest capacity (i.e., make Rose Quarter that same width throughout I5).
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Move to Houston cager
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You mean a city that's more than twice the population and 4 times the GDP?
Being Houston isnt a bad thing
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Can I help you pack?
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Too hot in Houston. Besides, family has been in Oregon for about 150 years.
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And traffic volumes have remained mostly stagnant in the past dozen years because there are alternative forms of transportation and urban densification
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Hard to really compare the past couple years due to the lockdowns. Also keep in mind that with Terminal 6 being closed a lot of semis were added to the roads to make up for the freight that was being shipped out.
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I said past dozen years not past few years
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16 years ago traffic wasn't much of an issue
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16 years ago people could afford to live closer to their jobs. And there were less people.
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We need to tear down the highways so we can knit our neighborhoods back together with bike routes. It's absolutely unfathomable that so many people choose to commit climate murder by choosing cars over bikes every day
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I-5 on the Eastside will be buried eventually
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I’ve always thought that 205 should be turned into I5 and the existing I5 north of Tualatin should be 205. Send through traffic around the city!
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Like most of our Freeways, they got routed through Downtowns AGAINST Eisenhower's wishes which was to route them around major cities but as usual BUSINESSES screamed they would be destroyed by routing all traffic around established businesses. They also turned the program into yet another "Urban Renewal" program that failed just like every one did before since they were all based on tear down small old mom a pop neighborhood shops and replace them with Malls, K-Marts, Wolco's and WalMarts. So we are left with a crappy system that bottles up Interstate travel when the Freeway hits every major urban area. UGH
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Can bike Portland articles be thrown into a tag or something so we can hide them? They do not conform to any conceivable non bias criteria and are all the same thing - destroy roads - make commuting hard and fuck people who dare to wish to buy a house and therefore not live right next to their job as opposed to live in a condo
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The irony is most of the people who peddle bikeportland's crap are already homeowners living in the heavily gentrified parts of the city.
Its classic “fuck you got mine“ style nimbyism with a coat of bicycle paint slapped on it.
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I've been riding to work weekly (not every day) for 16 years, but there's a shit ton of rich, cycle-sexuals who moved here from LA or NYC after reading about a bike utopia in Portlandia. Their identity is just as tied to a single material object as ammo fetishists, and they're about as interesting as that crowd.
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Oh, I always pictured them as the 6 people to a house roommates like my old neighbors before my wife and I moved further out so we could afford a house. I'm surprised they could ever ride their bikes because their head was so far up their ass praising themselves on their "green" life style but your narrative makes more sense.
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LMFAO, both of you painting utterly opposite pictures of who people on bikes are, just thinking they *must* fit the caricature of someone universally hated and can easily dismiss. Just total head-up-your-own-asshole shit! Keep the content coming, this is fantastic!
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How so?
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Whatever helps you sleep at night.
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They do not conform to any conceivable non bias criteria and are all the same thing
Literally labeled "Opinion". Right there as the first word of the headline.
(Also FWIW that post is almost a year old, not sure why it's getting shared here now.)
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I get that this is labeled opinion so it should get latitude since - opinion - same as an editorial- but even bikeportlands normal articles (ie the ambulance post) are pretty strongly slanted with the exception of like traffic change articles, which is ok in small doses but it's not small doses which is why I'm just asking for a tag, not like a removal or something.
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I guess? But also, it's a blog. For years it was just one guy's blog. I mean it's named Bike Portland, it's not like it's trying to position itself as the neutral observer of Oregon transportation or something.
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Just log off, dude. Nobody is forcing you to be here. Or scroll past. LMFAO. The irony of complaining about bikers wanting to "conform the city to their preferences" when you're doing the exact same thing, but for articles posted on this sub. Just absolutely perfect self-awareness, 10/10, no notes!
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Add more freeway capacity.
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Blame lake Oswego
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why?
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there should be a bridge across the river into milwaukie there, but rich lawyers in dunthorpe don't want the traffic, so they shoot it down via politics and NIMBY. The East West river passage in portland is dependent on bridges, and it is a long shot from sellwood to OC.
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there should be a bridge across the river into milwaukie there, but rich lawyers in dunthorpe don't want the traffic, so they shoot it down via politics and NIMBY. The East West river passage in portland is dependent on bridges, and it is a long shot from sellwood to OC.
I recall the county (Clackamas) didn't want to pay for one.
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I mean they didn't pay for Sellwood even. We had to up our car registration fees to make up for it. There's zero chance they'd pay for another bridge.
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how dunthorpian
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Not that it matters, but dunthorpe is technically unincorporated Multnomah county, it's not part of Lake O
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Yup. We wouldn’t have the awful interstate circle if they could’ve built through LO. But, ya know, rich white people.
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That's got to be run down and old dunthorpe. Bet WAVERLY COUNTRY CLUB has more influence about that. On the east side of the river.
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there is a bridge right next to waverly
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This has to be one of the worst loops in all of US cities. It's too tight, on ramps are too short and congested, and a major interchange happens on a bridge where the majority of I-5 North traffic needs to get to 84E. So we are left with a city that has the traffic of 5M+ metro even though we are 2.5M metro.
I wish we had buried our freeways in tunnels like a lot of european cities (ditto for Max and for electrical wires)
Imagine how amazing the east side waterfront would be if it wasn't dominated by a giant, shitty car sewer.
I-5 should never have been built anywhere near downtown, let alone right on the waterfront. I honestly think it should be bulldozed and replaced with an arterial network. People just passing through can go around the city, and people originating or ending trips in Portland can use surface streets or connections to Trimet.
I broadly agree with you, but I think your assertion that "I-5 should never have been built anywhere near downtown" ignores the economic importance of downtown and close-in businesses and industries, like Swan Island, which really benefit from being close to national transportation systems. Plus, Trimet didn't exist until after the highways were built, let alone systems like the MAX. A system where I-5 looped around Portland like the 205 does today would probably cause business to migrate further east, which is great if you like more urban sprawl. You're speaking with the benefit of hindsight to judge planning decisions that seemed rational at the time.
Get signatures for a bond issue. I am certain the Multnomah County voters will pass it.
What's a thread talking about roads without bicyclists winning hearts and minds using hyperbolic terms like car sewer?
Y'all gotta learn from vegans that just having the moral high road doesn't mean shit if everyone hates you and thinks you're crazy because you can't have a reasonable discussion without coming off like giant assholes.
Come on - I don’t bicycle and I can still admit that it’s a bummer to have I5 where it is
I thought "car sewer" was a marked and conciliatory rhetorical step up from "Satan's lower intestine," geez, tough crowd...
Yep. Imagine if drivers talked about bicyclists in the same ways. Let’s not pretend all bike riders are law abiding and polite, but mention any of that and the biking-is-my-personality crew becomes unhinged. We’re also supposed to pretend like cars are going away if we just add more bike lanes and busses.
How do buried freeways mix with earthquakes
Seattle figured it out.
As did SF
they withstood a subduction quake? When was that? I must have slept through it.
Let's not play like I5 would even hold up with the Big One.
Japan and European Alpen countries do it just fine.
do you really think the current mess of viaducts along the east bank would fare much better?
Most earthquakes do their damage above grade. Surprisingly, things that are below the surface are usually quite safe in an earthquake.
They are fine if not built on a fault line.
I lived in Boston during "the big dig" era https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig
cliffs: They buried the entire highway under the city. Now granted Boston is a lot larger than Portland population wise, but city size is relatively similar.
There are a LOT of reasons it won't happen here. The first is that it's bowing to car culture way too much. The second is the main draw for the project was the airport traffic. Going to Logan used to mean HOURS of time, planning, diverting, or transfers via train/bus. So there was a huge financial impact to getting people to the airport on time and seats on airplanes filled, so the airport helped fund the project. Here its more just getting to/from work traffic, and its not impeding a single business that has clout/lobbyists to work the city into the project and help with funding.
Most European cities just don't have freeways anywhere near downtown.