Well said, Margaret!

We welcome more input and perspective from citizens!

Thank you for the information. Please submit this as a letter to the editor so more people will read it.The Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement public comment period is open thru Nov. 18, 2024.See Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) pagehttps://www.interstatebridge.org/updates-folder/supplemental-environmental-impact-statement/

Tolling, to fill in funds to build a replacement Interstate Bridge, and when it is paid for, they end it but that is not what the political leadership in Oregon want. They want those bad Washingtonians, who pay Oregon Income Tax, to pay maybe $15.00 one to go across this new IBR. The problem is that the costs are going up and up and up and the financial commitments from: Federal and State Governments appear to be maybe $3-Billion short and using the mythology Washington used up north it is easy to extrapolate, what will have to happen. Tolling Back Bonds will require adequate revenue. It is easy to see Toll Rates of $15.00 one way. The working poor will be hit hard and if they are part of the commuters, TriMet’s Light Rail Transit (LRT) has little or no possibility of being an alternative, as it cannot get 99% of the commuters to where they need to go. TriMet’s LRT has got dangerous that TriMet now has 450 new transit police. The immediate area around the Clackamas Town Center as an example, has the highest crime rate by a massive scale over the rest of Clackamas County. The drug pushers historically go into and out of this area on Light Rail. One in four, don’t buy tickets to ride of TriMet’s LRT and those who do buy tickets, don’t create enough sustainable ridership to pay for operating costs. The cost to provide a seat on TriMet’s LRT is now over $100- dollars, when all of the fully encumbered costs are added in. New and very affordable Micro electric vehicles, with 100 range will let people go place to place with intelligent routing. In the next 5-years the old technology transit will be totally obsolete. The transportation planners know this, and they know that they do not have a fix as to how to add capacity to the I-5 Corridor between Portland and Vancouver. They need a secondary corridor and figure out how to get light and heavy track traffic out of I-5 and on to a secondary corridor. They should look at what they did with I-84 and how they used Sullivan’s Gulch, where Union Pacific had their railroad tracks. I-84 went in and worked and got expanded and now there is an east to west way to move freight in and out of the core of the City of Portland. From my old house, I used to go up and down Fruit Valley Road sometimes paralleling the BNSF railroad tracks. This parallel to what Portland did putting in I-84 and this right-of-way (ROW) again an ideal location for a westside bypass, that can use that (ROW) and when coupled with the replacement of the 1907 Swing BNSF Railroad Bridge. There is adequate ROW to connect all of the way to Oregon State Highway 30, in NW Portland. Connecting links off of this bypass corridor would connect to 90% of industrial Portland, where the jobs are.