The $1.2 billion Interstate 5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project was dealt a setback this week by the Federal Highway Administration, which rescinded a finding of “no significant impact” for the project.

That means the Oregon Department of Transportation must complete an environmental assessment, slowing the approval process.

“This means that the environmental process will still be taking place, but it is going to take longer,” Rose Quarter project director Megan Channell said. “It is going to take a few more months, with completion expected by the end of this year instead of summertime.”

Channell’s comments came during Thursday’s Oregon Transportation Commission meeting.

Commissioner Sharon Smith, of Bend, said she was concerned by the “continued delays and cost increases” for the massive project.

“It’s just daunting,” she said. “It’s just really daunting.”

FHA Division Administrator Phillip A. Ditzler rescinded the “no significant impact” finding in a letter to ODOT on Tuesday. Project opponents, who have questioned the environmental impact and cost of widening I-5, cast the finding’s revocation as a victory.

“No More Freeways has said for a long time that ODOT has not meaningfully studied the disastrous impacts this proposed freeway expansion would have to our community,” Aaron Brown, organizer of the activist group, stated in a news release.

No More Freeways had filed a lawsuit in April 2021 against ODOT regarding the finding of no significant impact.

“We remain concerned about this project disrupting our streets and discouraging development for years of construction before increasing traffic, congestion and pollution for future generations,” stated Allan Rudwick, co-chairman of the Eliot Neighborhood Association and a lawsuit plaintiff.

ODOT and industry groups portray the project as a chance to modernize I-5 while providing construction jobs and supporting a new generation of contractors.

Also Thursday, ODOT revealed a revised project design that features one large freeway cover. It would maintain the Flint Avenue crossing over I-5 and replace the Clackamas Bicycle and Pedestrian Bridge with the Broadway/Weidler Green Loop. The design iteration also reduces highway inside shoulder widths.

Budget estimates remained the same, at $1.18 billion to $1.25 billion. The highway covers in that option could support three-story buildings. For an additional $172 million to $200 million, the covers could be built strong enough to support structures up to six stories.

A funding shortfall persists, Channell said.

“We have a substantial gap and today no other sources of committed funding,” she said. “So that is our focus ahead as we continue to progress the financial planning process.”

The Legislature funded $30 million annually beginning this year. The state can leverage an additional $500 million to $700 million through bonds. There is still uncertainty about how much funding will be available from the federal Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the fate of the Biden administration’s Build Back Better bill, ODOT officials said.

ODOT officials essentially punted on providing a fuller financial picture to the OTC on Thursday.

“We want to bring something to you as a funding plan that’s ready for prime time,” said Brendan Finn, director of ODOT’s Urban Mobility Office. “We want to give you some certainty. Because there’s some other things we need to unpack – the uncertainty of Build Back Better out there as well – we’re asking for your patience so we can bring you a real concrete product as it relates to the financial plan.”

ODOT’s timeline calls for early construction work to begin in mid-2023, with the main construction resulting in the second half of 2025. At that time, tolling would also be implemented.

ODOT is looking at the project’s early stages to provide a leg up for disadvantaged and emerging contractors.

“It’s really with these early work packages that we’ll see some of the greatest opportunities for the disadvantaged business enterprise jobs,” Channell said.

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A Multnomah County task force has endorsed construction of a replacement for the Burnside Bridge.

The vote Monday was in favor of a “long span,” which supporters said would offer better seismic performance and fewer columns and other impediments than would a short span.

The task force also rejected construction of a temporary bridge that would cost approximately $90 million. A temporary bridge would shave only 3-4 minutes from an average vehicle trip and lengthen construction by 18 months to two years, county staff said.

The long span would result in a very different Burnside Bridge. The current bridge, which opened in 1926, has no superstructure. The long span would require a superstructure – perhaps not unlike the cable-stayed Tilikum Crossing.

An early rendering shows two tied arches sandwiching a middle drawbridge section that would allow boats to pass underneath. Two massive columns would anchor the bridge into the Willamette River.

The conceptual illustration is not final. The bridge type – likely tied arches or cable stays – will be selected next summer.

The new bridge would also be wider by about 20 feet to provide more space to serve bus drivers, bicyclists and pedestrians. The existing bridge narrows in the middle.

Some task force members expressed aesthetic reservations, but said the advantages of a long span outweighed any drawbacks.

“It has to be done elegantly, if you can do that,” said Bill Burgel, who represents the Portland Freight Advisory Committee. “I don’t want the final result to be chaotic with the built environment.”

The task force recommendation is nonbinding. A policy group of elected leaders and agency officials will meet Oct. 2 to adopt or reject the task force’s recommendation.

Supporters said the long span would avoid unstable soils – “wiggly earth close to the river,” as described by task force member Susan Lindsay of the Buckman Community Association.

Seismic resiliency is the driving force behind the project. The existing bridge is at risk of collapse during a sizable earthquake, according to county officials and consultants. In recent years, seismologists have warned the Cascadia subduction zone could rupture, causing a devastating tremor.

The task force roundly rejected construction of a temporary bridge to serve during the main project. A temporary span was used during construction of the Sellwood Bridge replacement, but the Burnside Bridge is much more centrally located. Without a temporary bridge, traffic would be diverted to other downtown bridges during the Burnside Bridge replacement project.

Construction is expected to take 4.5 to 5.5 years.

Traffic impacts downtown could cause consternation, said Fred Cooper, a representative of the Laurelhurst Neighborhood Association.

“I see a public nightmare here if we tear down the bridge and tell them to go another route,” he said.

Another task force member said building a temporary bridge would also risk controversy.

“There’s going to be a whole lot of public backlash if we spend $90 million on a temporary bridge,” said Cameron Hunt, captain of the Portland Spirit fleet.

Some task force members expressed concern about the impacts to homeless pedestrians who must cross the river on foot.

“That will be a burden,” said Timothy Desper, director of Burnside shelter services for the Portland Rescue Mission.

A Burnside Bridge replacement project will need to undergo an environmental impact statement and win various federal approvals, including from the Coast Guard. County leaders expect to pursue Federal Highway Administration funds to help pay for the $825 million project. In November, county commissioners voted to nearly triple vehicle license fees to raise local funding for the project.

The Portland office of HDR, an Omaha, Nebraska-based engineering company, is engaged in the bridge planning effort.

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Talk about a passion project: University of Washington graduate research assistant Kristina Tsvetanova has logged more than 100 hours a week at the UW’s Structural Research Lab working on one project – one for which she will receive no academic credit (her thesis was about a totally different project).

“She’s put a phenomenal amount of work into this, and I have never told her, ‘You have to be here at this time, doing this,” said her adviser, civil engineering professor John Stanton.

It’s likely because she’ll get something more valuable out of the experience.

“She’s completely engaged, and it’s because she’s excited about being a part of a real-world project that is going to be built,” Stanton said.

Several of the bright minds working to take – a world first – aren’t earning a dime for their trouble. Three UW graduate students and nine undergrads are part of a global team assembled to tackle this . The team also includes an English design engineer and more than 30 U.S. subcontractors – including Portland-based David Evans & Associates and the Portland offices of KPFF Consulting Engineers and WSP. Another of the graduate assistants, Travis Thonstad, even helped author a scholarly article on design development of the project. (Thonstad now works professionally on the East Coast.)

“It was a global problem, so it required a global solution,” said John Sleavin, deputy director of Sound Transit‘s $3.7 billion , which includes at Lake Washington. The 5,700-foot-long span now carries westbound and express lane traffic, and is the widest and fifth-longest floating bridge in the world.

Among the consulting engineers were experts in marine vessels, who were able to consider matters like trim, ballast and how high the bridge sits on the lake. Sleavin said there was in adding a railway to a structure that floats.

“A floating bridge, in the simplest terms, is a marine vessel that cannot go into port,” he said. “It’s basically a ship we’re putting this on.”

There are six degrees of motion that affect a span like the Homer M. Hadley Memorial Bridge, and that engineers in this case had to account for. The hardest piece to get right is the approaches.

To allow the light-rail cars to ride smoothly onto and off of the bridge, U.K. engineer Andy Foan developed a new, highly-responsive track system dubbed the Curved Element Supported Rail (CESuRa).

UW students led by Stanton have worked closely for five years with Sound Transit officials and consultant Parsons Brinckerhoff, primarily involved with lab-testing various prototype materials, like the CESuRa system. Thonstad led testing of the system, starting in 2012, using a custom steel rig that mimics the movements of a train. After that, Thonstad assisted with full-scale testing at the Transportation Technology Center in Pueblo, Colo.

The rail cars were tested at 55 mph. Playing the role of human passengers: barrels full of water.

“They actually do a pretty good job representing how a human body reacts in those circumstances,” Sleavin said. “And we obviously can’t use real passengers.”

It’s fitting that students were so involved in an innovation to a bridge that was itself dreamed up by an engineering student. Though floating bridges are rare in the world, Oregon’s neighbor to the north is considered the global home of the floating bridge. They are an option when a body of water is too deep to effectively employ columns, as is the case with Lake Washington, which has an average depth of 108 feet and a deepest point of 214 feet. Floating bridges can work if the water is a relatively stable level and lacking strong currents and ice floes, as a young engineering student, Homer Hadley, reasoned about Lake Washington nearly 100 years ago.

Hadley’s plan was finally put to use in 1940 with the construction of the Lacey V. Murrow Memorial Bridge. The Murrow bridge’s companion span was named for Hadley upon its completion in 1989. Rail was envisioned to cross Lake Washington as far back as 1976, when a pact was signed to add high-capacity transit to the bridge. But it wasn’t until Seattle was squeezed by development in the mid-2000s that testing began. The Washington State Department of Transportation put together a panel including engineers of all stripes that identified 23 issues designers would have to account for in their final plans.

They anticipated problems with corrosion, wind, lightning, maintenance, attachments for the tracks to the bridge pontoons and structural impacts to the bridge, to name a few.

After the constantly changing lake levels, the next great challenge for the UW team was attaching rails to the bridge pontoons without use of bolts (a condition of the Federal Highway Administration was to not add holes to the bridge.) This meant traditional methods of building rail could not be considered.

After puzzling through various trials, Sound Transit’s engineers decided to use layers of various adhesives between the bridge decks and rails. But the adhesive solution has be able to withstand extreme vibration and shrinkage from the curing process.

When Sound Transit’s initial attachment solution appeared insufficiently flexible, former UW student Matthew Sisley wrote reports to Sound Transit. Using his notes, they changed course. Three years later, Tsvetanova is leading a team testing the final prototype, which has been informed by the earlier UW test results.

Though the students weren’t all paid or given school credit for their work, it was as real as can be, Stanton said. The students will have the same pride traveling over the bridge in a light-rail car as any other team member. Beyond that, firms that rely on Tsvetanova daily have taken note not just of her technical ability, but her ability to lead others by way of a clear and persuasive passion for the project, Stanton said.

“In fact, they’ve been leaning on me a lot, saying, ‘When is she going to graduate? I want to employ her.’”

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Portlanders know congestion. The city is consistently ranked among the major American metropolitan areas with the worst traffic. But many observers don’t realize the city’s congestion is deeply tied to the rest of the state.

Not only does Portland traffic “cascade” down to smaller outlying communities, congestion here slows the flow of business around Oregon. Meanwhile, traffic planners say many communities have outgrown their road systems.

The effects of rural congestion are seen in rises in fuel consumption, trip times, accident rates, and delayed freight deliveries. Leaders will soon look at how federal air quality money is allotted in rural communities to ease congestion, and a long-discussed transportation funding package could also bring relief.

Sweet relief

It’s not your imagination – traffic really is getting worse in the Portland area, planners say. Part of this is the resurgent economy and resultant explosive population growth. Registered vehicles and drivers increase year over year. As well, the closure of Terminal 6 at the Port of Portland has spilled freight haulers onto Oregon’s highways. Local government leaders confirm this, as do aerial images of trucks stopped in the Columbia River Gorge during recent harsh winter weather.

“It’s quite striking,” Oregon Sen. Betsy Johnson, D-Scappoose, said.

Johnson was a member of the bipartisan committee empaneled by Gov. Kate Brown last year to travel around the state and speak with citizens about transportation ahead of the 2017 legislative session. Brown is hoping to see this Legislature pass the first major transportation funding package since 2009.

Across Oregon, committee members heard a common refrain.

“There was a lot of interest all across the state in addressing some of our major congestion choke points, from residents and companies that ship products from our farms and forests and factories to markets across the nation and the world,” said Travis Brouwer, assistant director for public affairs at the Oregon Department of Transportation.

ODOT has noticed “significant” congestion issues pop up in rural communities, according to Brouwer. One example is in Yamhill County, where the road system wasn’t built to accommodate the heavy vehicle traffic now gripping the small communities of Dundee, Newberg and McMinnville. ODOT and its contractors are now in the process of – the largest road project in the state. Completion is scheduled for this year.

“By routing truck traffic away from the downtown, they can actually have a more livable community and reclaim their downtown,” Brouwer said.

The agency is also interested in adding lanes in the mountains of Southern Oregon for slow, climbing trucks – they can create congestion and danger when mixed with lighter vehicles traveling around 70 mph.

Peak times

Along Interstate 5 to the south, bottlenecks in the Salem and Eugene areas slow freight travel and regularly cascade onto other highways and local streets, impacting those communities.

Keizer Mayor Cathy Clark said this has led to more traffic at peak times, and longer peak times.

“With our growing population and increased density, it has definitely gotten worse over time,” said Clark, chairwoman of the Salem-Keizer Metropolitan Population Organization, one of about 10 such transportation groups in Oregon. “Recently, with our ice and snow, we saw our vulnerability. We’re seeing that it doesn’t take much to cascade our system into some pretty severe congestion issues.”

MPOs are units of local government that identify and prioritize transportation projects for consideration for state and federal funding. The Federal Highway Administration recently altered its criteria for the dispersal of Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality (CMAQ) dollars – an important source of funding for congestion-related projects.

And given President Donald Trump’s pledges to pass a massive infrastructure package early in his term, MPOs are excited about the possibility of checking long-needed projects off their lists.

“It’s a whole new ball game,” Clark said.

To win CMAQ dollars, MPOs have learned to tack multimodal features to road projects to stand out.

In Medford, the upcoming, partially-CMAQ-funded Foothill Road improvement project – converting a major two-lane arterial road to four – will feature sidewalks and separated bicycle lanes.

Though Medford hasn’t seen the same population growth as the rest of the surrounding Rogue Valley, many of the region’s jobs and services are located in the city, which has become more crowded during the day, according to Cory Crebbin, public works director since 1999.

“This department’s philosophy has been: We can’t build our way out of congestion, because everyone wants to use the streets at the same couple hours of the day,” Crebbin said. “You can’t build a big street for all those people and have it sit vacant for those 22 hours a day.”

But people do get frustrated, so to combat congestion Medford is looking at adding multimodal infrastructure, to provide commuters with a choice.

“Our theory is that if you provide the bike lanes and the sidewalks so that they have alternatives for their trip, they’d be less frustrated because they’re making a choice,” Crebbin said.

Community crises

MPOs have to carefully spread dollars around to combat congestion – intersection and signal projects to bicycle/pedestrian projects to transit purchases like buses and sidewalk shelters.

Often, reducing congestion can be done without touching the roads. Signal timing can be synchronized better. Many rural communities are bolstering transit and bicycle-pedestrian options to encourage more people to not drive. And even raising and lowering speed limits or buying new buses can have a big impact.

“Even an extra turning lane can make it flow better,” said Mike Jaffe, chairman of the Mid-Willamette MPO.

CMAQ dollars have helped pave dirt streets in Medford and Klamath Falls.

Klamath Falls is uniquely susceptible to poor air quality because it’s located at the bottom of a valley and many of its residents still favor wood-burning stoves.

Klamath Falls City Manager Nathan Cherpeski is hopeful that a new funding formula will help the city maintain compliance with federal air quality laws – a genuine challenge in the past.

Around 100 people are moving to Portland each day, and traffic planning has not kept pace, said Clackamas County Commissioner Paul Savas, who’s outspoken on the issue of congestion bottlenecks in his county. He says we’ve outgrown our transportation system, just as we’ve outgrown our housing.

“We simply don’t have the capacity; we can’t keep up,” he said. “It’s a recipe for poverty, and here we have homelessness at a record high as well. This isn’t something to be proud of.”

The impact on travel times and business is affecting the state’s ability to add and retain jobs, he said.

“They say, for every crisis, there’s an opportunity,” he said. “And I think that we are at a crisis level with the congestion and it’s unprecedented.”

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