Longtime followers know that I am a longtime opponent of plans to widen Interstate 5 through Portland’s Rose Quarter. For these last few years, I’ve been privileged to work alongside many of the smartest activists in Portland in an effort to shed some light on the potential impacts of the project and the questions surrounding it.
The project is currently navigating the environmental process, and a Supplemental Environmental Assessment was released in support of the project for public comment late last year. I submitted a detailed review of the traffic analyses within the SEA as a comment on behalf of Studio Davis. You can read my entire letter (link to pdf) on the No More Freeways website, and I’ve excerpted some key pieces below.
I continue to be surprised at how little scrutiny the technical documentation for this project has received. In both the original and supplemental environmental analyses, the traffic reports are rife with errors and unstated assumptions. As but one of many examples, the study reveals almost nothing about traffic volume assumptions, now or in the future. The figure I made shown above illustrates how much is missing relative to Oregon DOT’s own official procedures for conducting precisely this sort of study.
The technical documentation for this project is obviously rushed and consequently half baked at best, and should be called out as such. As a transportation professional I feel it is my responsibility to, at the very least, ask the hard questions about this billion dollar investment. I continue to agree with Metro President Lynn Peterson’s assessment of the environmental process as a risk-laden “shortcut” and with No More Freeways’ call for a full Environmental Impact Statement on the project.
On a happier note, I was thrilled to be able to make it to the Waypost for the No More Freeways happy hour and see a lot of the freeway fighters in person! It’s been a loooonnng pandemic and I’ve missed the heck out of thesese sorts of events so it’s wonderful to see them coming back.