Month: May 2023
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The Week Observed, May 26, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Pricing is a better, cheaper fix for congestion at the I-5 Rose Quarter. The Oregon Department of Transportation is proposing to squander $1.45 billion to widen about a mile and a half of I-5 in Portland—that’s right about $1 billion per mile. But a new analysis prepared by ODOT…
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The Week Observed, May 19, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Rose Quarter tolls: Available, but not foreseeable? There’s a glaring–and illegal–contradiction in the planning for the Oregon Department of Transportation’s $1.45 billion Rose Quarter project. While ODOT’s financial plan claims that needed funds for the project will come from tolling I-5, the project’s environmental analysis claims that there’s no…
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Pedestrian safety: There’s no technical fix
Engineers would have us believe that we’re just one shiny new technology away from making streets safer for people walking Sooner than many of us thought possible, self-driving cars are in testing on city streets around the country. While a central promise of autonomous vehicle backers has been that this technological advance would eliminate road…
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The Week Observed, May 12, 2023
What City Observatory did this week There’s plenty of time to fix the Interstate Bridge Project. Contrary to claims made by OregonDOT and WSDOT officials, the federal government allows considerable flexibility in funding and re-designing, especially shrinking costly and damaging highway widening projects In Cincinnati, the $3.6 billion Brent Spence Bridge Project Was downsized 40…
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What Cincinnati’s Brent Spence Bridge can tell Portland
There’s plenty of time to fix the Interstate Bridge Project Contrary to claims made by OregonDOT and WSDOT officials, the federal government allows considerable flexibility in funding and re-designing, especially shrinking costly and damaging highway widening projects In Cincinnati, the $3.6 billion Brent Spence Bridge Project Was downsized 40 percent without causing delays due to…
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The Week Observed, May 5, 2023
What City Observatory did this week Why can’t Oregon DOT tell the truth? Oregon legislators asked the state transportation department a simple question: How wide is the proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement they want to build? Seems like a simple question for an engineer. But in testimony submitted to the Legislature, Oregon DOT officials…
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Why can’t ODOT tell the truth?
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) can’t tell the truth about the width of proposed $7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Project ODOT is more than doubling the width of the bridge from its existing 77 feet to 164 feet. The agency can’t even admit these simple facts, and instead produces intentionally misleading and out of…