Yesterday I posted a comment on Ron Buel's Blue Oregon piece about the proposal to bury the Eastbank section of I-5, saying that getting rid of the hideous Marquam Bridge and redirecting North-South traffic to I-405 (Kari Chisholm's alternative) was a great idea.
I also mentioned that then-City Council member and now Congressional transportation guru Earl Blumenauer opposed messing with the freeway when the Council seriously considered moving it away from the riverbank. It turns out, thanks to stumbling across this post by Portland Transport's Chris Smith, that my memory was fairly accurate.
Smith's post links to this Oregonian article by Randy Gragg, who chronicles the long history of freeway politics in Portland. In the late 80's, the activist group, Riverfront for People, agitated to move the freeway. It came down to a vote over a direct access Southbound ramp to I-5 for the Eastside industrial district:
"Despite pretty pictures of bold new development between the then-newly rising Oregon Convention Center and OMSI, the City Council voted to build the ramp, 3-2. The deciding vote: then-city commissioner, now-Congressman Earl Blumenauer."
The ramp was never built. Vera Katz wanted the money for the Eastside Esplanade. The bottom line is that we're still stuck with the urban freeway bottleneck of the Eastbank I-5. And the hideous Marquam Bridge.
Building and expanding freeways, especially in urban areas, is a fool's errand. Freeways create, rather than relieve, congestion. As I said yesterday, the fewer of them the better. That's why I approved Kari's idea of simply taking out the Marquam Bridge/Eastbank section of I-5.
Gragg's piece does cite the recommendations of PSU's Nohad Toulan who favors the tunnel approach to fixing the I-5 bottleneck. Toulan dismisses the critics who raise the specter of another Boston "Big Dig" here in Portland:
"To those for whom a tunnel conjures images of the Boston's wildly over-cost Big Dig, Toulan counters that the city of Cairo, Egypt, built a four-lane, two-mile tunnel 90 feet underground beneath the ancient pyramids -- on time and on budget.
" 'Tunneling is one of the fastest-improving technologies in the world,' he says. In an urgent tone, Toulan argues, 'We must deal with the totality.' "
I remember decades ago seeing signs here in Portland that demanded "No City Freeways!" I didn't fully understand the signs then, but I sure do now. City freeways don't work! So whether it's a tunnel or the simple demolition of that ghastly section of urban I-5, I'm for it.
As Toulan said, "We must deal with the totality!" Unless we want Portland to become a smaller version of Houston or Los Angeles, in other words, we need to think big and plan boldly.
One minor clarification.... that's not my alternative. Rather, it's an idea that's been floated to me in private by several public leaders over the last ten years or so. I haven't got any idea where it stands in terms of the official process, if any.
Posted by: Kari Chisholm | November 20, 2006 at 03:32 PM