Quote:
Originally Posted by Jakz
This is how it's been budgeted all along. The sections north and south of the bridge were being budgeted at around $1 billion per mile, and with costs doubling that's probably gone up to $2 billion per mile. This is consistent with the RQ, which without the caps would be about $1 billion per mile. The other big chunk is the unnecessary replacement of the 8-lane Portland Harbor bridge built in the 80s.
Where it all goes beats me. I'm sure an absurdly large chunk of it is temporary routing, traffic management, staging, sequencing, etc. But still.
It really underlines the absolute foolishness of trying to widen urban interstates. ODOT has been delivering rural/suburban freeway projects at $100-$200 million per mile (OR 217, Newberg bypass, I-205 south of Abernethy budget). It's not an exaggeration to say that $4 billion can buy us 2 miles of widening in downtown Vancouver or 30 miles of widening on corridors like I-205, US 30, Cornelius Pass, OR 217. And those routes are far more useful for regional freight since they don't get nearly as clogged with commuters. Truckers will happily take a 10 mile detour that avoids traffic and has a reliable trip time.
But no one is thinking like this. The planning and funding systems are obviously very, very broken.
*Editing to add that part of the reason the Vancouver segment costs are coming in so high is that the plan is generally not to add one lane in each direction (which all the bridges could accommodate, since they were built in the 1980s with future expansion in mind), but rather two lanes in each direction, which requires replacing all of the bridges. It's madness.
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Crap, at $2b/mile that's getting close to tunneling costs. WTF is going on with this?
That is SUCH a wide ROW north of downtown Vancouver (the extents apparently now excluded). I only count maybe an additional 5 total crossings that would potentially need replacement (a few of which are for small 2 lane residential roads). Simple freeway crossings aren't that expensive. Retaining walls aren't that expensive. To be sure, real estate WILL add up, but I don't see that as a huge need here given the wide ROW.
I'd love to see more details on what was/is planned. There isn't much in terms of specifics on the website. This comes as someone who was heavily involved in designs of multi-billion widenings of I-95 in much more dense and expensive construction cost urban areas than this project has, hence my curiosity with this boondoggle.
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