The draft EIS was originally expected to be released last year, but as of now has not been completed
TJ Martinell
The Center Square Washington
In 2020, officials with the Interstate Bridge Replacement Program to build a new I-5 Bridge across the Columbia River between Vancouver and Portland anticipated construction would begin in 2025. However, they have now pushed that timeline into 2026 due to delays with planning necessary before bridge designing work can occur.
Before construction can begin and federal funding can be obtained, the program will need to get approval for their plans with the U.S. Coast Guard and complete an environmental impact statement. The draft EIS was originally expected to be released last year, but as of now has not been completed, though program officials say it will be available later this year.
“We are committed to getting that done by late next year,” Project Administrator Greg Johnson told the Joint Oregon-Washington Legislative Action Committee at its Monday meeting.
When asked as to the reason for the project delays, Johnson said it was due to disagreements with federal agencies regarding the traffic modeling used in their plans.
“The federal transit and federal highway administration believes that some models across the country have been over-predicting ridership and we have to resolve that issue,” he added. “This is very common when you have complex projects and especially our project is complicated by having two federal leads, both Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Authority.”
However, the delays drew criticism during public comment by Joe Cortright, who runs a think tank called City Observatory. He told the committee that the “it’s a mark of the incompetence of the staff that they haven’t met their deadline to complete the DSCIS (draft supplemental environmental impact statement) in two years and that they failed to deal with easily foreseeable modeling issues.”
He added that the traffic modeling issue “is a risk that they [program staff] have known about for years. Traffic modeling is not a minor detail. It is foundational to every aspect of this project, is foundational to establishing how large it is, to understanding what its environmental impacts are to all of the claims that they make about traffic and how this will relieve or affect traffic.”
This report was first published by The Center Square Washington.
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I will be long dead before that bridge boondoggle is ever completed.
Can you say “Columbia River Crossing 2” ??? hahahaha
10 years ago CRC, today IBR, 10 years from now ???. Government at work……..
What is needed is a route bypassing Portland and Vancouver……
When this proposed I-5 replacement bridge plus gold plated light rail was called the Columbia River Crossing, CRC over a decade ago, unrealistic public ridership increases were made for the year 2030, used to justify extending Oregon’s TriMet MAX light rail over the bridge into Clark County, WA. About a quarter of the project cost, BILLION$$, was, and still is allocated to light rail to serve about 1-4% of bridge crossers.
Meanwhile, the number of people crossing the I-5 bridge using public transit has decreased, not skyrocketed as the mysterious ridership models had forecast. The scram of forecasting gigantic ridership increases to justify the most costly form of public transit, light rail, has been deployed around the country, at the expense of taxpayers via local and state governments heavily lobbied by the light rail cabal.
In 2012, Voters in every city in Clark County, WA and the areas of Clark County allowed to vote REJECTED the light rail extension proposition.
In 2013, a county-wide vote was held, and voters insisted on a public vote on light rail prior to spending funds for light rail.
An analysis of the pros/cons of light rail vs. buses, vans, etc should not take 20-30 years. Perhaps it is becuase the consultants and modelers are highly paid to analyze on paper their dream, they continue to railroad this boondoggle instead of work on infrastructure solutions that will serve private, commercial, and all vehicles in the near and far term. Roads for all, or gold plated light rail for a few?