The State and Regional governments renewed their commitment to the community destroying I-5 project by accepting the Transportation Department’s (ODOT) Environmental Assessment (EA). To recap, ODOT, with the support of State leaders, intends to increase travel lanes in the Rose Quarter to eliminate the current lane-change bottleneck. ODOT has tried to justify a project likely to cost a Billion dollars (!) for multiple reasons but has settled on “accident prevention.” In so doing it can claim the additional lanes will not increase traffic volumes or speeds. What it will do is make it easier for truck traffic from Lower Albina to merge onto I-5 and for all trucks to switch lanes to and from I-84 and I-405. In other words, they claim commuters won’t benefit from time savings but lane changers will have fewer accidents. Most of these claims have been either proven false or dependent on false assumptions.
Eliot Neighborhood 