Comments on: Governors oppose Columbia River Crossing design

By: New I-5 bridge designs heading to governors « Daily Journal of Commerce

New I-5 bridge designs heading to governors « Daily Journal of Commerce — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 00:01:10 +0000

[…] of Washington released a joint statement on Feb. 3 calling for the leaders of those departments to discontinue further work on the open-web box girder bridge design, which had been the proposed […]

By: Jayson

Jayson — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 05:20:08 +0000

Thanks for your opinion nativePDX. If only they built all those massive highway projects you dream about.. we’d be broke. and we’d still have congestion everywhere else on the highway system and a whole set of the same problems – only multiplied. building our way out of congestion is a 1950s engineer’s wet dream and vastly out-of-date.

By: nativePDX

nativePDX — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 20:38:48 +0000

We are where we are on this project, because the transit planners have been ignoring the problem for decades.

The 1988 study predicted our problem and was ignored!

The third bridge should have been built 20 years ago and was killed, for the west side light rail. The experts predicted this and ignored it, for the west side Light rail. It would have cost us about a 2 billion dollars including the west side by-pass.

We scrapped the billion dollar west side bypass and third bridge for the billion dollar west side Max, that did nothing to solve the problem.

——————-

STUDY OF THIRD COLUMBIA BRIDGE CLEARS ANOTHER HURDLE
Oregonian, The (Portland, OR)
November 4, 1988
Author: BILL STEWART – of the Oregonian Staff
—cut——-

At the present rate of growth, transportation officials expect the two existing Columbia River highway bridges to be clogged before the year 2010. Traffic volumes are growing faster than previously anticipated, IRC figures show.

By: Marvin McConoughey

Marvin McConoughey — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 17:06:19 +0000

Don’t count on the claim that “‘The bridge is just a small portion’ of the entire Columbia River Crossing project, which could cost approximately $3.6 billion.” The bridge will be subject to unpredicted cost growth expenses that will surprise planners. For a current example of such cost growth, consider the Highway 20 road straightening project between Corvallis and the coast.

The governors should convene an independent cost-risk panel to scrub down bid proposal language and engineering assumptions to ensure that the initial cost estimate is soundly based and will have a high probability of coming true.