March 2023

What City Observatory did this week What are they hiding?  Oregon and Washington are being asked to spend $7.5 billion on a giant bridge:  Why won’t anyone show pictures of what it would look like?  The Oregon and Washington highway departments are using an old Robert Moses trick to make their oversized bridge appear smaller than it […]

ODOT grabs a billion dollars that could be used for bikes, pedestrians and transit, and allocates it to pay highway bills. Oregon highways are out of compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and the cost of fixing them can–and should–be paid for out of the State Highway Fund. But instead, ODOT plans to take

Oregon and Washington are being asked to spend $7.5 billion on a giant bridge:  Why won’t anyone show pictures of what it would look like? The Oregon and Washington highway departments are using an old Robert Moses trick to make their oversized bridge appear smaller than it really is. The bridge will blot out much

What City Observatory did this week Oregon’s transportation finance in crisis:  Testimony to the Joint Ways and Means Committee.  On March 16, City Observatory’s Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature’s budget-writing committee about the financial crisis confronting the state’s transportation agency.  The Oregon Department of Transportation’’s traditional sources of revenue are collapsing, and will certainly

What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge cost $7.5 billion?  For almost two decades the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been saying they want to replace the I-5 bridges over the Columbia River connecting Portland and Vancouver.  Late last year, they announced that the total cost of the project

What City Observatory did this week Testifying on the Oregon Transportation Finance.  City Observatory director Joe Cortright testified to the Oregon Legislature on HB 2098, a bill being proposed to fund bloated freeway widening projects in the Portland Metropolitan area.  As we’ve previously reported at City Observatory, proposed amendments to this bill would give the

Editor’s Note:  For the past two year’s the Federal Highway Administration has been investigating a civil rights complaint brought against the proposed I-45 freeway expansion project in Houston.  This week, FHWA and TxDOT signed an agreement to resolve this complaint.   Urban freeways have been engines of segregation and neighborhood destruction for decades, a fact that

What City Observatory did this week Why does a $500 million bridge replacement cost $7.5 billion?  For the past several years, the Oregon and Washington highway departments have been pushing for construction of something they call the “Interstate Bridge Replacement” project, which is a warmed-over version of the failed Columbia River Crossing.  The project’s budget