Isaac Laquedem

The CRC post-mortem, day 29: Mayor Leavitt misunderstands "representative government"

Ten Washington legislators wrote to the Oregon Legislature, asking our Solons to kill off the Columbia River Crossing Project, the Oregonian reported yesterday.  Observing that Clark County has voted against light rail several times, Rep. Liz Pike of Camas asked the legislature not to give in to "special interests who are attempting to override the will of citizens and locally elected county officials."

The story's author, Jeff Manning, quoted this reaction of Vancouver Mayor Tim Leavitt, a prominent supporter of extending light rail across the Columbia:  "Individuals like Sen. Ann Rivers, Sen. Don Benton and a couple of local supposed "Republican" Representatives have dismissed the desire of our public. Instead of faithfully representing the will of the representatives of our local community, these individuals are entwined in political expediency, manipulation, and ideological rhetoric."

Did you notice the twist in Mayor Leavitt's statement?  The mayor is suggesting that the job of the elected officials is to represent the will "of the representatives of our local community," not actually of the public.  In other words, he's implying that Clark County's legislators should be representing Clark County's other elected officials, and not the voters who elected them.

Besides the intriguing descent into meta-representative government that this implies, some facts get in the way of Mayor Leavitt's argument.  For instance, on the C-TRAN board, two of the three Clark County commissioners voted against light rail, and two of the three elected representatives of cities other than Vancouver voted against light rail.  Rep. Pike is more in touch with the views of the elected officials of Clark County than Mayor Leavitt is giving her credit for.

The CRC post mortem, day two: eight lanes can't handle the traffic, but six lanes can

Not to throw too much manure into the CRC pigpen, but in doing the research for yesterday's autopsy of the Columbia River Crossing, I came across this juicy bit, reported by Joseph Rose in the Oregonian of August 10, 2010.  Mr. Rose reported on a recent vote about the proposed bridge, in question-and-answer format, including this question and answer:

What ever happened to the eight-lane option?
That pretty much disappeared from the rearview mirror this summer when a Portland-funded independent study by URS Consultants found that an eight-lane option would work only if 37 percent of commuters took public transit or bicycled over the new span. Currently, those commuters make up only 3 percent of the traffic over the six-lane Interstate Bridge. Officials saw a disastrous scenario that wouldn’t be able to handle the first year of traffic, much less the demand by 2030.

Think about that for a bit.  In 2010 Portland hired a reputable consultant who reported that an eight-lane bridge wouldn't be big enough to handle the first year of traffic after it opened.  In 2013 the bridgemeisters were asserting that six lanes would be enough.  Somewhere in there is a logical disconnect.

I am not implying that the CRC proponents lied about the six-lane bridge, but I do think that in this Age of Google they shouldn't have expected a study from four years ago to be unfindable.

Why is the Columbia River Crossing failure like our Iran policy of 1977?

As the supporters of the Columbia River Crossing boondoggle start to edge toward the exits (State Senator Lee Beyer, chairman of the Senate Transportation Committee, is the latest, reports Willamette Week), it's time to reflect on why this project failed -- or, more exactly, why the expensive planning, networking, and lobbying effort to build this project failed.  I have some thoughts.

1.  The planners set out on their trip without having a destination in mind.  Along the way they fell into detours to look for an iconic bridge design, arguments about whether the replacement bridge would have twelve lanes, or ten lanes, or eight lanes, or six, and an eleventh-hour realization that the bridge as designed would be too short for three major users of the river and the federal government.

2.  Portland's insistence that the bridge include light rail, and refusal to compromise even as the highway component shrank from 12 lanes to a bridge no larger than the current bridges, turned Vancouver's and Olympia's mild support into active opposition, and persuaded the Washington legislature to direct its funds somewhere else.

3.  The overblown propaganda in support of the bridge ("The current bridge is the only stoplight between Canada and Mexico," for example) eventually backfired, and brought the public around to doubt the more sober statements from the CRC backers.

4.   As the bridge backers, under fire, shrank the bridge from 12 lanes to 6, and continued to argue that the current bridge doesn't have enough capacity to serve demand, the public rightly noted that it doesn't make sense to spend $3.5 billion to replace two functional three-lane bridges with one functional six-lane bridge.

5.    And finally, the reason for the title of this post, is that the political insiders on the Oregon side who were pushing for the CRC listened only to the views of the elected officials in Vancouver, and took them as representative of the views of the Clark County public, in much the same way that the United States in 1977 assumed that because the Shah of Iran, Mohammed Pahlavi, was friendly to the United States, the Iranian people were also.

I think that the public would have supported, and even possibly been willing to pay for, an 8-lane fixed bridge with 135-foot high water river clearance that passed over Hayden Island without direct access and did not include light rail tracks.  Alternatively, I think the public would have chipped in to rebuild the railroad bridge to raise it about 30 feet, which would cut out 90% of the lifts of the freeway bridges, and put light rail tracks on the railroad bridge.  I also think that the more sensible of our local politicos will be happy to wait 8 or 10 years before they touch this issue again.

Schrodinger's Bridge: until September 30, it's both alive and dead

The Austrian physicist and philosopher Erwin Schrodinger, in a famous thought experiment, asked us to imagine a closed box containing a cat and a timed device.  The device may go off sometime between now and six hours from now, when we will open the box.  When it goes off it will kill the cat.  Whether it has gone off can't be determined without opening the box.  Schrodinger asked whether, in that six-hour period, the question "Is the cat alive or dead?" has any meaning.  In his view, which he likened to quantum states of particles, until the box is opened Schrodinger's cat is both alive and dead: in physical language the cat's two possible states exist in superposition until the box is opened.

In June, afte the Washington legislature rejected a measure to fund $450 million of the Columbia River Crossing, Governors Kitzhaber of Oregon and Inslee of Washington declared the CRC dead.  Dead it may have been declared, but pieces kept on twitching, to the point that three weeks later Willamette Week called the CRC a Zombridge, as the CRC team continued to work on getting the DEQ to approve pier work in the river, and the Coast Guard continued its review of the CRC team's application for a permit to obstruct the river.  Since then it's been announced that the two states' departments of transportation have agreed to pay off two businesses that the bridge would hurt, and the Oregon Department of Transportation has agreed to pay off a third business in the same situation.  Governor Kitzhaber has made noises about calling the Oregon legislature into special session on September 30, ostensibly to deal with PERS, but the behind-the-scenes talk is that he will also ask the legislature to fund the CRC whether or not Washington chips in.  And yesterday evening, the C-TRAN board (Clark County's trasportation district) voted to get back into the CRC planning process.

So:  is the Columbia River Crossing alive or dead?  Or is it, like Schrodinger's cat, alive and dead at the same time?  We'll open the box on September 30 and find out.

Isaac takes a fresh look at what might come after the CRC failure

With the bloated Columbia River Crossing project mostly dead, we can turn our attention to a better, finer, cheaper solution.  One possibility occurred to me that would open a route for light rail to reach Vancouver some day, not interfere with interstate road and train traffic, and be reasonably easy to accomplish.  (I think it would cost about $300 million.)  That is to replace the railroad bridge with another lift or swing-span bridge that is 39 feet higher than the existing bridge.  Here's why.

Most of the lifts of the Interstate Bridges are either for maintenance or for barge traffic.  Many of the barge lifts are because it can be difficult to navigate a set of barges underneath the hump of the Interstate Bridges, where the clearance is 72 feet, and then across the river to the swing span of the railroad bridge.  The fixed portions of the railroad bridge have a clearance of 33 feet.

If the railroad bridge were 39 feet higher then its clearance would be the same as the fixed portion of the Interstate Bridges.  Any vessel that could make it under the Interstate Bridges' fixed spans could make it under the new railroad bridge in a straight line instead of requesting that the Interstate Bridges lift so that the vessel could avoid the turn between the two bridges.  The new railroad bridge would still require a lift span or a swing span  to accommodate the occasional taller vessel from the Vancouver industrial district, but barges shorter than about 60 feet would no longer need to request the Interstate Bridges to lift.  This is a twist on the Common Sense Alternative to the CRC, which contemplates adding a lift span to the railroad bridge in line with the hump on the Interstate Bridges; I'm suggesting that we raise the entire railroad bridge and not just add a lift span.

The new railroad bridge would be built to accommodate four tracks: two for the Burlington Northern and two for eventual light rail.  Until light rail is constructed the unused area could accommodate a bikeway.  ODOT and WSDOT could still play with the freeway ramps to their hearts' delight, without demolishing the heart of Hayden Island for a massive highway project.

The CRC replacement bridge collapses before it's even built

The Washington legislature adjourned without passing a transportation funding bill, meaning that our northern neighbors declined the invitation to chip in $450 million toward the Columbia River Crossing Freeway/Bridge/Light Rail project.  Today Governor Kitzhaber acknowledged that without that funding, the CRC project is dead, and stated that the planning effort will be shut down.

It's time for the proponents of light rail to accept reality: because of the preexisting needs of river commerce, the only ways that Portland's light rail system can be extended across the Columbia River are (1) through a tunnel, (2) over a drawbridge, or (3) over a high fixed bridge in east Multnomah County.  The Yellow Line isn't going to run to downtown Vancouver while the Columbia River is still serving oceangoing commerce at Vancouver.

The fun part will be watching the blame game begin on Monday, as disappointed contractors and consultants point fingers at the people who cost them $4 billion of mostly federal money.  Their fingers should point at Portland City Hall.

Portland insisted that the replacement bridge include light rail.  The technical limitations of light rail mean that a fixed-span bridge can't be built high enough at Hayden Island to accommodate existing river traffic.  That conflict, and the hundreds of millions carelessly spent on planning an inadequate bridge, doomed the project.  Without the light rail albatross, the Interstate Bridges could easily have been replaced for $500 million for new bridges and another $500 million for access improvements.

On to the next project!  Isaac predicts that the collapse of the CRC effort will result in Portland and TriMet redoubling their push to construct light rail to Sherwood along Barbur Boulevard and Pacific Highway.  We have a lot of people who need to be kept busy.

Let's face it: Washington doesn't care much about the CRC

I missed a lot of news in the last two weeks, including the Washington legislature defeating a transportation bill that would have provided the Evergreen State's $450 million share of the cost of the Columbia River Crossing project.  Richard Read's article in the Oregonian (here) includes one sentence that Oregonians should take to heart.  It's this one, eight paragraphs into the story:  "Despite its $3.4 billion total price tag, the CRC is a relatively minor item in the current debate for most Washington House members, who concentrated Wednesday on the package that would raise state gas prices by 10.5 cents per gallon."  This is significant for two reasons.

First, important as the Portland-Vancouver bridges may be for Portlanders, they aren't much on the minds of Washington's legislature.  I doubt they collectively pay more attention to the Interstate Bridges than we here in Portland do to the I-84 bridges over the Snake River that provide the vital link between Malheur County and Idaho.

Second is that the debate that Mr. Read describes is one of the few instances in which the debate about the project is tied not just to the project's cost, but to who is going to pay for it, and how.  People are a lot more enthusiastic about projects that they don't have to pay for themselves.

The FDIC pays a return call to the Emerald City

The word on the street is that the FDIC staff enjoyed their visit to Seattle earlier this month so much that they're coming back this week to move another failing Washington bank into new hands.

How not to sell stock in your bank

A Friend Of Long Standing is now a vulture, in a cheerful and professional sort of way; she and her coworkers buy troubled assets (the nice phrase for "bad loans" and "repossessed real estate") from banks that are themselves in trouble and need to sell them to raise cash.  My F.O.L.S. reports that one small bank (not a Portland-area bank) doesn't want to negotiate the sale of its troubled assets, but is holding out for full price, and insists that buyers of its troubled assets must also buy its stock.  (The bank needs to raise capital quickly or it will be shut down this spring.)

My F.O.L.S. and I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this bank's philosophy.  If the troubled assets were still worth their face value, they wouldn't be troubled assets.  And the bank's stock would be more desirable if it hadn't made those loans in the first place.  As it is, it makes me imagine a car dealer who won't sell me a Yugo unless I buy a Lada also.

A Sounder example of mass transit

Difficult as it is for me to admit, I think I've caught a mild case of soccer fever, not from anything going on in Portland, but from watching the Seattle Sounders' opening game from a skybox at Qwest Field.  It's a fine facility that serves football and soccer, My hosts claimed that soccer outdraws baseball in Seattle, at least in attendance per game.  It's a stadium with a lot of visible sponsors and it's remarkably easy to get to on foot or by car, train, bus, or light rail.

I was also struck by Seattle's bus/rail tunnel.  I had first seen it when it was bus-only, before the rails were installed.  Now, with buses and trains sharing the tunnel, it's an efficient way for mass transit to pass through downtown.  The thought occurred to me that instead of replacing the Interstate Bridges with a new 10- or 12- or 16-lane bridge (I'm not sure where the count is today), we could build a bus-rail tunnel underneath the Columbia and not do anything about the bridge and car traffic.  With a massive park-and-ride on the Vancouver side, light rail between Portland and Vancouver might become faster than driving, something that should have been the goal of our rail system in the first place.