The Interstate “bridge replacement” gets marketed primarily as a project to serve cyclists and pedestrians. But its really about widening five miles of freeway, ostensibly to move 180,000 cars a day, something you’d never know by looking at project renderings.| City Observatory
On and off ramps for the Interstate Bridge Project on Hayden Island, south of the Columbia River.Calling it just a “replacement” is PR gimmick to conceal all these elements of the project. But it also conceals where the real money is going: the reality is that the “replacement” of the two existing I-5 bridges, is just a small part of the project’s total costs—only about one fifth of the cost of the project, according to its own estimates.| cityobservatory.org
Traffic levels are going down on the I-5 bridges connecting Portland and Vancouver, even as the Oregon and Washington Transportation Departments are proposing a massive expansion that could end up costing $10 billion.| City Observatory