Will Portland ever build more freeway lanes? (Wilsonville: bus, transportation)

[Leisesturm]

If this went here and that went there and this were six lanes wide and that was eight lanes wide and that other thing was extended to go around there and you could get from here to there without going through you know where... ... but... we all know that didn't happen and we also know it will not happen. Ever. Friends. It's not going to happen! There is never going to be an additional lane on 26 in each direction. There is not going to be anything done to anything in Portland because... its done. The only way for things to be as you would like them to be was for them to have been done that way when the construction was being done decades ago. Now its too late. Do you understand the concept of too late? I look at the sheer chaos caused by a minor re-paving operation and I think to myself that these people that I have seen post all kinds of reasonable opinions on a variety of things over a six year span must really not be that sanguine if they can imagine that something like a city street or highway can be altered to any significant degree once it has been finished and in use. It must be a character flaw that I simply cannot abide pointlessness. This time, however, I am on the side of reason. Give up this dream of Portland one day, any day, being exactly like you want it to be. It ain't gonna never happen. Why not? Because no two of you agree on what that looks like and so many of your druthers are mutually exclusive that it is imply impossible for any of it to work to the satisfaction of even a small minority. We have the roads and bridges and tunnels that we have because people once ago were able to dream, plan and compromise. Today, not so much. Portland and Washington cannot even get a bridge project past the concept stage. 1999 marked the apogee of America's arc. That means Portland too.

H

[sorupaa]

How come the bay area and seattle have commuter rail and a subway and we will not have that in the next 20 years?

Portland isn't that big now but in 20 years it will be. We will be going backwards while other cities are going forward.

[bler144]

Originally Posted by Leisesturm

There is never going to be an additional lane on 26 in each direction. There is not going to be anything done to anything in Portland because... its done. The only way for things to be as you would like them to be was for them to have been done that way when the construction was being done decades ago. Now its too late.

H

I don't think it's impossible - road projects deal with temporary bypasses all the time. I think what makes it particularly challenging in Portland is 3 things:

1) very high cost on a state/metro budget that isn't really that big
2) lack of political will in the seats of power and amongst the populace
3) existing layout and geography here is problematic - there aren't a lot of places you can easily bypass existing routes.

Can it be done? Sure. But you'd probably have to chain your improvements, upgrading first the areas that would be bypasses when you moved to work on the primary routes. And you'd need lots of money, and the will from the populace willing to pay and suffer through the cons of the work being done (cost, time, inconvenience, etc.).

So if your argument is "it's highly unlikely" then sure, that I'd agree with.

[pdxMIKEpdx]

We have the roads and bridges and tunnels that we have because people once ago were able to dream, plan and compromise. Today, not so much. Portland and Washington cannot even get a bridge project past the concept stage.

That's because there is so much easy money spread around doing impact studies, planning, administering, polling, visioning, etc............everybody involved in the early stages gets a piece of the pie and makes some serious cash, but then later on, nothing physical actually gets done.

That's how we roll in Portland nowadays, baby.
Money for nothin' and chicks for free.

[bler144]

Originally Posted by pdxMIKEpdx

That's how we roll in Portland nowadays, baby.
Money for nothin' and chicks for free.

I don't know about free but you can buy chicks 'cheep' at Coastal Farm and Ranch.

[sorupaa]

Free chicks? You should have told me earlier

[Leisesturm]

Originally Posted by drum bro

Free chicks? You should have told me earlier

Wouldn't have mattered. This is Portland. The chicks are for other chicks...

[ca_north]

Originally Posted by doity

I have noticed that traffic has been getting progressively worse lately. Maybe it is just because it is the summer travelling season but I kinda doubt it. Today I was way late for work as there was a fender bender on the approach to the Marquam bridge. I first heard about it at 15 after the hour, and when I got up to it over a half hour later there were no tow trucks or emergency vehicles at all

Anyway, the i-5 to i-84 interchange is so out of date as to be ridiculous and add to the fact that at some points I-5 through Portland is only 2 lanes. And don't get me started on 217. The fact is that once the Mt. Hood Freeway got shelved (look it up) only the 205 has been built and that was only because the residents of SE didn't put up a fight due to winning the Mt. Hood freeway battle. I recently drove through Boise, ID of all places and their freeway has at least 4 lanes on their section of I-84 and it looks brand new.

Skip forward 35 years and what we have is a freeway/highway infrastructure that is out of date and cannot possibly accommodate Portland's growing population. And with the nitwits in charge who put all of their eggs in the MAX basket, it doesn't look like there is any great push to change this situation. What I want to know is how many of you out there are upset with this and wish that Portland's and Oregon's pols would be more car friendly and help to fix the problem? Are they so blind that they don't see the traffic jams?

And I am sick of hearing these geniuses that say that "Once you build more lanes the traffic will become worse". Oh really.......does that same theory hold with sewer pipes also? So if a town starts out with a small sewer pipe they should never expand it to keep up with population growth in the town? OK......

How about NOT trying to "keep up with population growth" and recognizing that it's long been unnatural? People have no trouble admitting when other species get jammed up in a finite area. The human economy needs to stop growing beyond the limits of nature. The typical urban sprawl solution just spreads the problem outward, eventually reaching critical mass. We have seen this over and over again but the growth zombies don't care. Failure to admit that people are too numerous is the last vestige of environmental denial that even "green" folk won't tackle honestly. Our entire food supply is very dependent on fossil fuels, as is most of the other bloat we consider normal. Human expansion literally followed the tracks of oil, gas and coal. You can't just keep expanding with finite resources (reality check for renewables, also).

Anyone who's lived in western cities for a few decades should see that widening roads does little in the long run. You just end up with an endless series of construction projects which themselves add to congestion. It becomes physically impossible in many cases, especially with elaborate bridge networks that cross each other. Imagine trying to widen that tangle of Portland overpasses just west of SW Moody Ave. at the South Waterfront. You'd have to widen just about everything in that maze to stop major bottlenecks. It fails in the details.

The world's population is growing by close to 80 million people each year, spilling into wherever it can find refuge. There is a direct connection between ever-growing populations and declining quality of life once a certain economic efficiency is reached. Lack of quality/permanent jobs is a common symptom of overload. Portland's urban growth boundary was a noble but flawed idea that treated the problem at the terminus, not the source. The boundary keeps getting expanded, just like the Federal budget.

If people really want to get serious about quality of life, there should be a global birth control push, along with superficial activism on environmental symptoms like pollution, climate change and habitat loss. Many conservatives think a god wants endless numbers of people and many liberals deny overpopulation for PC reasons. I don't see much hope of critical thinking in that combo. You get called a radical for suggesting that nature has limits we can't "fix" with some new phone app or accounting trick.

[eric351982]

We need more freeway lanes. Two lanes through the center of town on I5? Ridiculous.

[urbanlife78]

Originally Posted by eric351982

We need more freeway lanes. Two lanes through the center of town on I5? Ridiculous.

I am guessing you are referring to the interchange by the Rose Quarter? That area is in need of being redesigned to handle today's volume.