Bing Blog the Which is Where?

Ding! Dong! The Witch is dead!

The CRC, a massive highway expansion project to place 5 lanes of travel from SW Washington into a 2-lane bottle neck, may have finally breathed its last breath.

Or on its deathbed?  Fatally wounded? Maybe a zombie? Okay fine, it could just be playing possum. It is rather confusing. Take, for example the fact the CRC office has admitted defeat and initially decided that it would spend the next 6 months packing up the office.

Curious. Ya know how sometimes ya hear people ask, "who does your hair?" we have a similar question about who is cutting their checks.

Either way the little guys celebrated a victory. We have been in the business of trying to encompass this titanic behemoth of 1950s design for so long (this blog itself has been pumping out the hits since Spring of 2009) we are not completely sure what we will do now.

We would like to believe that our reporting and testimony means something to the people who would call themselves our "representatives". But what really killed it was that Olympia doesn't like Vancouver (Washington) very much (in fairness it is mutual).

The fact is as long as there are people benefiting from bad design we will continue to get more sprawl and more of all the crap that comes with it. We should stay vigilant as these insane projects are popping up all the time. Meanwhile everywhere our infrastructure is failing.

At least there are good opportunities for lols. 

Office of Executive Abuse

[trigger warning, this post makes sexual assault analogies]

 News that Washington Goveneor's veto of the Senate's Columbia River Crossing plan rocked the few dozen people paying attention to every detail so you might have missed this somewhat important news.

Legislators had allocated $81 million to the CRC for 2013-15, far short of the $450 million identified as Washington’s share. Aware of concerns that including light-rail track below the project’s bridge deck could hamper navigation on the Columbia River, Benton, vice chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, wanted that money to pay for a redesign of the project to make sure it would meet Coast Guard requirements.

When that effort was blocked by the committee’s Democratic co-chair and others, Benton spearheaded a move to set nearly all of the new allocation aside until the Coast Guard’s permit decision, expected later this year. If the Coast Guard endorses the design the remaining money will be released for further work; if not it must be used to redesign the project – which almost certainly will eliminate the light-rail extension from Portland.

via http://donbenton.src.wastateleg.org/benton-praises-governor-for-veto-of-crc-funding/

This is pretty great news for people who think the CRC as designed is an abomination of design, set to wreck havoc on Cascadian budgets, transportation and environmental systems.*

Still this is no time to relax. You can bet the mysteriously inept, yet powerful forces behind the CRC will continue to push for more money to waste trying to figure out how to fit a round peg into a square hole. Over the past few months both the Oregon and Washington Governors have regularly pressured the legislature into taking premature action. Saying we must act now to take advantage of the paltry amount of federal money** that might be made available should everything else work out. Governors Inslee and Kitzhaber repeating "It is now or never" like some sort of creepy sexual predator, pushing their innocent partner into having sex before the magic spell is broken. If the trusting partner agrees they will be promptly used and disregarded, their phone calls and pleas for open communication ignored, while the predator, indifferent to anything but their own desires, will move on to the next conquest.

They decided now wasn't the time. How long do you think it will take for a Cascadian politician to use this line again? (We have created a poll on the side bar, vote now!)

This sort of behavior should not be rewarded. We must raise our voices and work to organize against these abusive, manipulative Governors. Together we can stop the transit rape.

*in other words, the vast majority of people
** try this game with a friend: ask for $4000, tell them if they act now you will give them $750. 

Bizarro Bridge stumbles on

 Bizarro World has come to Cascadia:

• The Governor did a complete 180 and has now pushed a pro CRC bill through the House.
• The majority of Oregon's environmental groups have been eerily silent about the biggest construction project to happen between Seattle and San Francisco.
• Everyone seems to be comfortable with going into massive debt, possibly because they don't think they will be alive to suffer the consequences.

In short, a region that is world redound for smart transportation will try to build itself out of a traffic jam.

How are we to measure the onslaught of colossal failure that is sure to come? Will we time the commute for a Vancouver resident? The cancer-carrying capacity of a child's lungs living near the I-5 bottleneck? The number of trees consumed by the shoddy environmental impact studies? The gigawatts of electricity used by bloggers decrying it as a waste? The number and variety of metrics for how much this is going to suck is mind-blowing!

But rather than looking ahead to the misery, let us focus the present. Our opponents would love for us to roll over and allow them to rape our future. I advocate we use our voice and tell them to stop. Now.

By Monday, March 4th you must call your Senator

Here is our simple 4 step plan:
1 - consider why it is that you hate this project. There is an impressive list of reasons below
2 - look up your legislator in the Oregon Senate
3 - Call your Senators office
4 - Make someone you care about repeat steps 1-3


This will take ~180 seconds of your life. That is probably less time than you spent reading this. 

 

You may hear a great number of reasons this bridge must be built. Lets examine them:

* Bridge Safety
Pro CRC folks will say the current bridge is old and should be replaced. They won't mention that the people whose job it is to keep an eye on this stuff, The Army Corps of Engineers, says the current I-5 Bridge has a higher safety rating than Portland’s Marquam Bridge, and 29 other bridges in the Oregon highway system. Also notable is that there are many more accidents occurring on the Marquam Bridge. If we want to improve safety, this would be a good place to start.

* Bridge Lifts
"A red light on an interstate?!?" Well it does sound like a bad idea, but ask how many times it happens during rush hour. For the 300+ lifts every year only a handful are during peak traffic. We wont lie, it sucks being stuck in traffic, but even according to the CRC's own website - "Bridge lifts cause vehicles to stop on I-5 for up to 20 minutes at a time to allow river traffic on the Columbia River to pass." Can you believe that? 20 Minutes! And yet we have among the shortest commutes of any west coast city. I guess the only reasonable thing to do is make sure we try and shave one minute off the commute to Vancouver, WA.

* Future Traffic
They say we have to plan for the future of traffic and we should expect traffic to get worse, but traffic is not getting worse. There have been fewer and fewer bridge crossings over the past five years. This trend means A) there would be less money from the tolls we would be collecting and B) we dont need to replace a working bridge.

* Freight Economy
Most everything gets put on a truck at some point in its life so it is pretty important. Strangely, the CRC proponents would have you believe that truck drivers are not smart enough to avoid traffic. Truckers should be offended! If the pro-CRC people were actually worried about freight they would be working on making the railroad bridge a few miles downriver. For 1/20th of the cost of the CRC we could fix the railroad crossing. Speaking of moving big boxes of stuff, our own Coast Guard says the current CRC design is too low, preventing some ships from sailing upriver. Sure enough maritime business upstream is fighting mad that our tax dollars are going towards this "solution" to the problem of moving stuff around. But dont worry we are make more jobs by moving the company to another location downstream.

* Wasting Funds
We are told that we should support it because we have spent millions on the plan. That if we dont spend billions than all those millions will be lost. Can you imagine a doctor talking about gang green in a similar fashion? "It has spread to your leg and is growing. We could amputate, but maybe we should wait." Only in this case the doctor caused the infection and will get money money if the patient dies.

* Jobs
For sure, we can spend a lot of money and employ a lot of people. But considering the epic scale of this freeway expansion project one would hope these jobs that we are creating will be around for a while. When the Pro-CRC camp talks about the 20,000 jobs they are creating they mean they are expecting 2,000 job increase over ten years. 2,000 x 10 years = 20,000. More accurate analysis showed that there will be an increase of about 1,150 temporary jobs.  We are all for making jobs but there are plenty of ways to make something better for cheaper. But this is Bizarro Cascadia. The workplace may soon be very, very different.

Hey CRC, Pay me! Pay me!

The comic stylings from those zanny folks at the Columbia River Crossing just dont stop. Here is the latest from their desk which might as well be accompanied by a cartoon strip:

For tall sailboats and yachts, the CRC proposes pulling them out of the water and towing them around the bridge. Another idea: acquiring the vessel and “taking it out of service so that the user no longer has a vessel that needs to transit under the new bridges.” - wweek

Also they want vessles to just take their mast down.

They have not yet suggested that boats float in from the other direction, possibly taking a cruise around Tierra del Fuego or the Cape of Good Hope, but I figure that suggestion will be forthcoming soon.

So now I am left wondering, how do I get a job at the Columbia River Crossing? I am sure I could do just as good a job as they have done ignoring advice, thumbing their nose at government officials and generally offending the local population. That plus I am also qualified at creating things that are absurdly dysfunctional.

Hire me! CRC! I have lots of experience and will need health care from all the cars you are planning on cramming down my throat.

President demands bridge... also wants pony

This article in the Willamette Week reveals a happy truth to the startling news that President Obama has given the Columbia River Crossing "Expedited Status"

'Obama is not the first president to offer such encouragement to the CRC', the Wweek noted, 'President Bush ordered the same expedited status in 2008. But neither Bush nor Obama offered anything more than encouragement. 

Permitting has not been the issue, as local, state and federal agencies have rubber-stamped the plan developed by the Washington and Oregon Departments of Transportation.

What is preventing construction is that no one wants to pay for it. And why should anyone want to pay to replace a working bridge that is rated better than the bridge, which a few miles south of the CRC as you leave Portland on I-5 (the Marquam Bridge)

But Congress—which is supposed to provide a third of the $3.5 billion cost—is not looking to send money to blue states these days; neither Washington or Oregon's Legislatures have approved the $450 million each state is supposed to provide; and the projected toll revenues that are to provide the final third have been found to be wildly inaccurate.

 Even looking at USA Today's coverage the press release stating support from the White House seemed tepid, even passive. (note the other projects listed request 25 million for a bridge in Maine and 89 million for railroads in Washington, as opposed to the 3500 million for the CRC. That's TWO extra zeros if you weren't paying attention.)

Finally our favorite economist, Joe Cortright offered some scathing words for the project costing taxpayers a million dollars each month:

"The sooner the CRC faces its day of reckoning, the sooner we can stop wasting money on a project that we don't need, can't afford, and doesn't solve the region's transportation problems," says Portland economist Joe Cortright, a longtime critic of the project.

 Thanks for setting the record straight!

Drilling Holes In Their Arguments

They claim they are not building anything yet, that this is just a test. However considering the "hell or high-water" stance the pro CRC folks have been using I wouldn't be surprised if the building equipment that has appeared on the Oregon banks of the Columbia river near the I-5 bridge just stuck around for a while, slowly getting us all used to its presence so that we wouldn't be at all alarmed when we hear:

"The bridge? Oh, we have already started building and can't stop. But don't worry we will have a lot of people you can trust making sure it is done right."

Curious thing, trust. It is something that is usually earned rather than simply given. Moreover when trust is broken it usually takes twice as much work to regain the lost trust.

This organization of bumbling bureaucrats has already spent $140 million of your tax dollars on the project. So far they have tried to deceive us by telling us that traffic is getting worse, when their own projections prove otherwise.  They say it will make traffic smoother, when their own projections say that at best drivers will save one minute.

Never mind that they have avoided answering questions pertaining to how they will protect, fish and wildlife the original source of currency in the region, how it will affect air quality due to moving the bottle neck closer to the city (because all 8-12 lanes become 4 at the Rose Quarter, just where their construction stops), or even something as simple and tangible as how they plan to pay for it.

But we are to trust them because even though they have lied to us in the past and continue to lie to us now, they are really telling the truth about the future when they promise they will stop lying to us.

We may be in an abusive relationship...

DTMFA

spanging 4 billions

Yes we are stil in the heat of Joe Cortright days.

"With an estimated price tag of $4 billion, this proposed five-mile, 12-lane freeway would be the most expensive public works project in the region's history. The cost works out to more than $8,000 for each four-person household in the region or roughly the equivalent of 80 OHSU trams." - Joe Cortright

In this Oregonian article Cortright proposes a simple question. "who is gonna pay for all this?"

The sound of everyone not raising their hands is pretty apparent.

The Economy of the Future Part 3

Joe has some pretty good numbers. In this final episode of his testimony he explains the fallacy of the Safety concerns the CRC people are selling us.


Moreover He shows hos important it is that we improve the railroad bridge for moving freight.



Here is Joe Cortright's 6 Prudent Steps for solving the problems the CRC is trying to solve.

1. Toll the existing bridge
2. Improve transit
3. Fix the railroad bridge
4. Seismic upgrade for I-5 bridge
5. Modify Hayden Island ramps
6. Light rail to Clark County

The Economy of the Future Part 2

What about funding?



Yes he said the CRC is "80 times more expensive than the Ariel Tram"

Not to sound like a jerk, but how dense is PDX? How about the Couve? What about the planners who expect that planners who think that we can build our way out of congestion?

Stand by for the conclusion of Joe Cortright's testimony to City Hall, "The Economy of the Future Part 3" " available here tomorrow.

The Economy of the Future Part 1

Joe Cortright provides some spirited info about the future of building more driving capacity.

Get your econ on.



Thanks for sharing, Joe!

Wait for "The Economy of the Future Part 2", coming tomorrow!