First off, it should be noted that the Vancouver Business Journal has taken a stance in support of a new I-5 bridge. As John McDonagh wrote in his March column “No time for issue fatigue,” we believe there are key issues, which on balance, tip in favor of a new crossing. Those issues include:
▪ Predictable freight movement between Oregon and Southwest Washington (because traffic stacked up on the interstate for a mile or better multiple times a day every week costs both businesses and consumers)
▪ Structural reliability (concern about a lack of seismic structural integrity on the current bridge spans)
▪ A 50 to 100 year solution (a structure that’s intended to be a solution for the next five to ten decades that will never be less expensive than if we build it now)
That being said, there is clearly a wide variety of opinions and ideas out there when it comes to the Columbia River Crossing; many of them including valid and thought provoking points.
Here’s what Joe Cortright, President of the Portland economic consulting firm Impresa, had to say on the issue in this letter to the editor.
Dear Editor,
Slow traffic on I-5 is a perennial headache for Clark County commuters and businesses alike. Promises that the proposed Columbia River Crossing will alleviate this problem are attractive, but are ultimately a mirage that disappears in the face of financial reality.
If the first law of economics is that there is no such thing as a free lunch, the first law of transportation economics is that there is no such thing as a free way, or in this case a free bridge. The Columbia River Crossing (CRC) – which has an advertised price tag of $3.8 billion – will not come for free.
The project’s financial plans (which are still sketchy) call for $1.4 billion of this amount to come from tolls, $1.3 billion from the federal government and about $500 million from Oregon and Washington. The cost of operating the light rail component of the project would be borne by sales tax payers in Clark County.
Not only is none of the money in hand from any of these sources, it is highly unlikely that any of this funding will materialize any time soon. The project itself will require leaders in Washington, DC, Olympia and Salem to increase gas taxes, because current revenues can’t support this project.
Even the initial price tag is an incomplete and misleading measure of the true cost of the CRC. Not included in these estimates are the costs of interest or of collecting tolls, which together (according to CRC documents obtained via a public records request) will amount to $4.4 billion over the next 30 years.
Peak hour commuters will pay about $2.50 each way to use the new I-5 bridge. Annual toll payments, paid mostly by Clark County travelers, will drain about $100 to $200 million a year in spending power out of consumer and business budgets. Money spent on tolls won’t be spent in stores, restaurants or service businesses locally.
Tolling the I-5 bridge is also likely to have a profound impact on local real estate markets. Each Clark County resident commuting daily by car to a job in Oregon will pay about $1,200 per year in tolls. This added commuting cost is likely to change the calculus for buying homes in Clark County. This cost is likely to be capitalized into housing prices, because the $100 a month difference would enable homebuyers to purchase about $30,000 to $40,000 more home on the other side of the river.
In addition, the $3.8 billion price tag assumes this complicated project can be delivered on-time and under budget. But megaprojects like these almost invariably experience cost overruns. The city of Seattle and the Legislature are arguing about responsibility for cost overruns on the deep bore tunnel to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct – a project that hasn’t started yet. And in Oregon, each of the state’s three largest highway projects has seen a 100 percent price increase. Even a 25 percent cost overrun would be an additional billion dollar cost for the region.
Finally, we might complete a new bridge over the Columbia almost a decade from now, only to find that the bottleneck on I-5 has shifted a couple of miles south to the Rose Quarter, where the freeway narrows to just two lanes in each direction. The price tag for fixing that problem is some $1.3 billion – money that Oregon doesn’t have.
In January of this year, an independent panel of bridge experts told the Governor’s that the original “open-web” design for the CRC was structurally sound. Any kind of independent, thoughtful review of CRC costs and revenues will reveal that the project isn’t financially sound either. The sooner we own up to this reality, the sooner we can set about designing a solution to I-5 congestion that can actually be implemented.
Joe Cortright
Impresa Inc.
