ODOT is going to finish their southbound pavement maintenance project on I-5 tonight, with a reprieve from closures coming before Thursday.

There will be another closure in the opposite direction coming next year. They have been billing this as ‘phase 1A’ of a gigantic project that they have not secured funding for, but in reality this is just a ‘pave, repair and restripe’ project that is maintaining a few 60-year old bridges on the I-5 mainline for the future. The project is narrowing shoulders to squeeze an extra southbound lane between the I-84 exit and the Morrison bridge exit southbound.

We will see where things go from here but I expect traffic to bounce back to similar patterns pretty soon. Extending a southbound lane by one exit (about a half mile) – increasing car capacity south of the rose quarter – will likely expose other bottlenecks in the freeway system as lane expansion generally does. Induced demand is the major factor in traffic – just as the PR blitz ODOT did before this closure caused reduced demand.

From the ODOT press release, I-5 will open again overnight: