A More Down-to-Earth Plan to Span the Columbia River

Did the Columbia River Crossing highway/bridge megaproject for suburban Portland ever have a chance of becoming reality?

A lot of folks who watched the project very carefully from the beginning doubt it. Part of the problem was that the $3 billion project became so bloated, so outlandish, that it simply collapsed under its own weight. Finally, about a month ago, the project was put out to pasture by Republican lawmakers in Washington.

Now that the mega-bridge concept is dead, Michael Andersen at Bike Portland reports that there's a new plan circulating :

Jim Howell, a longtime citizen activist and former TriMet bus planner who helped lead opposition to both the Mount Hood Freeway and the Columbia River Crossing, has an out-of-the-box idea:

• Scrap most of the highway enlargements that were part of the Columbia River Crossing.
• Build a new eight-lane highway bridge immediately upstream of the current Interstate Bridge.
• Repurpose the Interstate Bridge as a two-lane local street, a light rail crossing and a pair of dedicated cycle tracks.

Interesting? You bet. Howell, the volunteer strategic planning director for the Association of Oregon Rail and Transit Advocates, says the whole thing would cost $1 billion, compared to the Columbia River Crossing plan's $3.1 to $3.5 billion.

Andersen says right now this concept is just a proposal from the grassroots, but you never know. What Howell put forward may be more realistic than the doomed plans that highly paid consultants spent more than $100 million developing:

Elsewhere on the Network today: CincyStreetcar Blog reports that $81 million in real estate investments along Phase 1 of the project route were announced yesterday. Strong Towns says that letting go of one cars means a household can pump an additional $7,000 per year into the local economy. And Human Transit's Jarrett Walker, writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, says a new generation is demanding different transportation solutions but it's up to their parents to honor their wishes.