Crossing Guard
The Columbia River Crossing may be the largest transportation project in the Pacific Northwest’s history. But for the residents of Hayden Island, nothing is too big to tame.
By Randy Gragg
Residents understood that the Crossing’s freeway would be large, but it was also supposed to ride on columns high above the island. “I went to the various open houses they had,” recalls Tom Dana, one of the Livability Project’s early organizers. “I knew it was 22 lanes, but it just didn’t register with me how big that was. I just took their word that it would be OK.”
The Crossing’s planners can explain the “why” of every ribbon of concrete, whether it’s to keep the weekend crushes of mall shoppers from backing up onto i-5 or to give 18-wheelers exiting nearby NE Marine Drive (the busiest freight conduit in the region) enough road to reach 55 miles per hour before merging onto the freeway. But even those designing the new freeway variously describe the Hayden Island section of the bridge as “an aircraft carrier” and a “plate of fettuccini.” For a sense of scale, stand by the Starbucks in Pioneer Courthouse Square, look south to the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, and imagine those 950 feet of SW Broadway transformed into freeway lanes and ramps.
When the Crossing’s first cost estimates arrived in March 2009—a breathtaking $3.1 to $4.2 billion—elected leaders experienced sticker shock. Key funding gatekeepers, led by Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio, began calling for major cuts. The Crossing’s planners quickly responded by trimming $650 million worth of lanes and interchanges from the project. But the $125 million chopped out of Hayden Island’s section came out of the freeway’s height. And so, in early November, the islanders suddenly discovered that their flyover freeway had plunged to the ground and plowed right through their only grocery store.
According to Victor Viets, a HiNoon member and a retired civil engineer, that’s when residents of the island first began to comprehend the project’s ramifications. “It’s hard for regular citizens to get a whole lot out of a set of drawings,” he says. “But when they took the Safeway, and people realized most of our restaurants were going, too, it finally hit home.”
Crossing planners like Steven Witter point to their efforts to work with the islanders to improve the design. For instance, the planners shrunk a proposed ring road around the SuperCenter from five lanes (the width of SE Powell Boulevard) to a more neighborly three lanes. The new, lowered freeway had forced the island’s “Main Street,” N Tomahawk Island Drive, into a tunnel 25 feet deep. The Crossing’s planners raised the tube by 8 feet and, at the islanders’ request, proposed ideas like festooning the dark, potentially scary 500-foot-long underpass with a public-art lighting display.
Earnest as such efforts were, islanders concluded that they were “just trimming the toenails of the elephant.” But as the residents pondered the full impacts of the freeway’s new design, they also discovered that the Hayden Island Plan, despite being a long-range vision, had given them something more immediately useful: a sense of unity.
“We had something to point to—that these are our goals for the island,” says Roger Staver, the HiNoon board chair. “It was like forming an army. We had our weapons ready. All we needed was to be attacked.”
Published: June 2010
Public officials, in spite of their objections to the design of this project, still believe that the freeway must be fixed by adding lanes and replacing bridges that are structurally sound and are good for another century.
Tinkering with the freeway won’t solve the problem. It functioned fine before traffic turned it into a parking lot. Remove the traffic demand by providing attractive alternatives and the problem goes away.
Shift the demand to other crossing options such as local Hayden Island access, new freight mobility options, light rail, commuter rail and more bike and pedestrian crossings.
All these improvements are possible and far less expensive than this monstrous 5-mile long freeway project.
Taking a broader look at the CRC, it seems the project’s true goals can be summed up as follows:
1. Slightly increase profit margins for shipping companies (faster delivery) and by extension make large corporations operating locally slightly more competitive
2. Increase capacity for Clark County solo-commuters to flood Portland each morning, and leave each afternoon, by extension making further McDevelopment in SW Washington practical and more profitable.
If we accept these facts, its obvious that the CRC is completely unnecessary from a public-good standpoint. We know that the existing bridges are quite safe, or certainly no more dangerous than the Marquam or Fremont bridges. And we know that tolling could solve the congestion problem in a heartbeat.
So why is the CRC still even up for discussion? Are large Oregon corporations such as Schnitzer and Clark County developers going to put up $4 billion to build their new bridge, or aren’t they? If not, why in the hell would Oregon taxpayers want to do it for them?
Toll the tax-dodgers, don’t subsidize their addiction to 4500 s.f. houses on 1/3 acre lots. There is a villain here, and sooner or later we’re going to have to face up to the fact that everyone pays for the white suburban lifestyle.
We pay taxes to build freeways. People in the third-world die of starvation caused by driving-induced climate change. Shut down the suburbs.