Editor’s Note: At a recent Portland City Council Committee hearing, two city commissioners challenged No More Freeways assertions that the Oregon Department of Transportation’s $1.9 billion Rose Quarter is actually building a roadway wide enough to accommodate 10 lanes of traffic, not just merely an additional auxiliary lane in each direction. Bike Portland pointed out that these Councilors are placing their “blind faith” in the assertions of ODOT staff. The record of this project shows that ODOT staff hasn’t earned anyone’s trust when it comes to accurately and honestly disclosing the width of this project. This matters because the project will be massively more costly, generate more traffic and more pollution than ODOT claims, and will worsen the quality of life in adjacent neighborhoods.
For more than six years now, ODOT has been concealing and willfully misrepresenting its plans to build an eight- or ten-lane freeway through Portland’s Rose Quarter. ODOT staff has known for years that it planned to build a 160-foot wide roadway through the Rose Quarter, and intentionally hid that information from the public and either lied or misled the public in its answers to direct questions about that basic fact.
Previously secret ODOT documents, obtained via public records requests in 2021, showed that from at least 2016 onward, ODOT planned a 160-foot wide roadway at the key Broadway Weidler overpass.
Despite repeated requests for details on freeway width, ODOT staff repeatedly failed to provide detailed information.
No More Freeways is not the only organization calling out ODOT’s deceptive claims about the width of the proposed I-5 Rose Quarter project. In 2019, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported that Metro, Portland’s regional planning entity, challenged ODOT’s claim that it wasn’t expanding the freeway.
The staff of Metro also wrote a longer letter to ODOT questioning several conclusions in the environmental report. Among other things, the Metro staff said it’s “not objectively true and is potentially misleading,” when ODOT claims it is not a freeway expansion project.
ODOT repeatedly refused to answer direct questions about Rose Quarter width
City Observatory has been repeatedly asking detailed questions about the width of the freeway  since early 2019, and ODOT staff either failed to respond, or offered false or misleading information in reply. To summarize:
- On March 13, 2019—during the public comment period on the project’s initial Environmental Assessment—City Observatory published a commentary, “The Hidden Rose Quarter MegaFreeway” pointing out that the 126-foot roadway illustrated in the project’s environmental assessment would accommodate an eight-lane freeway. (This observation was also included in formal comments on the project’s Draft Environmental Assessment).
- On April 18, 2019, I testified to the Oregon Transportation Commission, noting factual inaccuracies and omissions by ODOT staff, including omitting traffic data from the EA, denying the existence of detailed project plans, and claiming that they’re not widening the freeway, something Metro described as “not objectively true,” and “misleading.”
- Â On December 1, 2020, I testified before the Oregon Transportation Commission, reiterating these concerns and noting that ODOT staff had never acknowledged, denied or refuted these claims. The Commission directed its staff to meet with me to address this question and others I raised.
- On December 16, 2020, I met (via Zoom) with several ODOT staff, including the project managers of the Rose Quarter project. I specifically asked about the width of the Rose Quarter Project, and was told I’d be given a written answer to that and my other questions by Brendan Finn. Here is an excerpt of a transcript of that meeting:
Joe Cortright
My understanding is that you have a 126-foot right of way for the expansion, at
least as it goes under the Broadway and Weidler overpasses. . . . Is that right? Is
it 126 feet? . . . this was a matter of reporting what’s in the EA, in the right of
way section, it says 126 feet wide. Am I reading that correctly? . . . Megan, is
the right way 126 feet wide, or am I wrong about that?
Brendan Finn
Joe, we will provide will provide all that in writing for you.
Joe Cortright
I’d like to get the width. And I’d also like to get detailed drawings that show the
right of way, and excavation and proposed structures . . . whatever you have
now that shows what the actual physical footprint of both the structures and
the road right of way will be in the Rose Quarter.
- On January 16, 2021, ODOT staff mailed a written reply to my questions, which contained no information about the actual physical width of the proposed Rose Quarter roadway, instead repeating vague statements about the purposes of the project.
The anticipated right of way provides for the existing travel lanes and the new auxiliary lanes and full shoulders in the northbound and southbound directions between I-84 and I-405. The anticipated right of way would also provide the opportunity for bus on shoulder use and the space needed for fire, life, and safety requirements and provisions under the highway covers.
- On January 21, 2021, I again testified to the Oregon Transportation Commission. I reviewed this entire chronology, documented ODOT staff’s intransigence and obfuscation and said:
You say you’ve finished your environmental review, you’re not going to do an EIS, and that the project has “no significant impact” on the environment. And yet you’ve never told us how wide it really is, and you’re demanding a formal public records request to get that information. Despite repeated questions, and the direction of this commission, your staff is still treating the most basic question—how wide is the freeway they’re building—as some kind of state secret.
No More Freeways obtains secret ODOT documents on Rose Quarter width
And that is where the public record stood—until in February of 2021, No More Freeways unearthed three different documents showing that all along the Oregon Department of Transportation has been planning a much wider freeway at the Rose Quarter than it has ever publicly disclosed.
ODOT, as well as its consultants, knew all along and decided that the I-5 Rose Quarter Project would be approximately 160 feet wide as it crosses under Broadway and Weidler Streets in Portland. That is established in a series of documents: a 2016 memorandum on the design parameters for freeway caps prepared by consultant HDR [HDR], a landscape planning cross-section prepared by ODOT consultant Marianne Zarkin [Landscape Plan] and by electronic CAD files showing the parameters of the proposed construction [CAD], all shown below:
All of these facts were fully known to ODOT staff on every occasion I appeared before the commission and asked these questions, and ODOT staff failed to reveal the existence of any of these documents, or to disclose the actual width of the project as documented in each of them. Instead, they provided either non-answers or intentionally incomplete and evasive answers.
Misleading, not-to-scale illustrations in the 2019 Environmental Assessment
The existence of these detailed plans, each replete with dimensions, shows that the illustration included in the February 15, 2019 Environmental Assessment was intentionally misleading, showing just 126 feet of a proposed roadway width, and omitting an additional 34 feet of roadway (for a total width of 160 feet). Rather than including actual plans, with actual measurements, ODOT chose to create a separate carefully edited not-to-scale illustrations. This reveals their intent to hide the actual width of the project. (See the EA width illustration, below)
It makes a mockery of public engagement and “transparency” when, under repeated questioning, and with an admonition from the Oregon Transportation Commission to reveal this information, ODOT staff instead chose to conceal and mislead about this very fundamental aspect of this project. Why, it is reasonable to ask, is ODOT staff treating the actual physical dimensions of the roadway they are proposing to build as a secret? Why, only after years of questioning are we finally finding out how wide a freeway ODOT wants to build?
The answer is clear: While they are claiming that this project is merely a minor adjustment of on- and off-ramps, it is actually a massive expansion of the freeway. Their plan is plainly to engineer a 160-foot roadway, and then when the project is opened, to simply re-stripe this much wider space for eight or ten lanes of travel. This is central to the public interest in understanding the effects of this project on the environment, the neighborhood and regional transportation. The department has pinned all of its claims about the modesty or insignificance of this project’s social and environmental impacts on the transparently false claim that it is no more than six lanes wide. An eight- or ten-lane freeway would create vastly more traffic and pollution, and ODOT has not modeled or revealed the impacts of this. This much larger freeway will significantly deteriorate the local environment, with more emissions, more local street traffic and significant impacts on the health, safety and livability of the project area.
