Interstate Bridge

The aging Interstate Bridge between Oregon and Washington.
Courtesy photo: Oregon Department of Transportation

The Interstate Bridge is a pair of nearly identical steel vertical-lift bridges that carry Interstate 5 traffic over the Columbia River between Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon in the United States.

The bridge opened to traffic in 1917 as a single bridge carrying two-way traffic. A second, twin bridge opened in 1958 with each bridge carrying one-way traffic. As of 2006, the bridge pair handles around 130,000 vehicles daily. The 3,500 foot long bridge carries traffic over three northbound lanes and three southbound lanes. - excerpt from Wikipedia

24 hours times 60 minutes per hour times 6 lanes equals 8,640 lane-minutes per day. 130,000 vehicles divided by 8,640 comes to 4 cars per minute, or one every 15 seconds. That would imply smooth sailing, but that is only if the traffic was evenly distributed over the course of the day, but of course it isn't. During rush hour morning and evening it is freaking jammed up and backed for miles. Pity the poor sods who spend hours of their life creeping and crawling over this aging erector set.

The Glenn L. Jackson Memorial Bridge, opened in 1982, is another big bridge about six miles upstream (east) of the Interstate Bridge.

Business Tribune is talking about a plan to replace the Interstate Bridge. The Feds have allocated a boat load of money to this project, but Washington and Oregon have to get their act together and get a plan in motion if they want to make use of this money. You might think this would be a straight-forward engineering project, but this is Portland, land of the morons, so we have this little bit of crap right in the middle of the discussion:

We learned last month that the program anticipates it will require approximately $6 billion to achieve equitable and climate-conscious multimodal infrastructure through the program corridor.

This kind of bullshit practically guarantees that the time to completion will double and the cost will balloon by a factor of ten, but hey, that's okay because the Feds are picking up the bulk of it, right?

Portland and Vancouver are at opposite ends of the bridge. Portland is in Oregon and Vancouver is in Washington and these two states have radically different tax structures. Oregon has income tax but no sales tax. Washington has sales tax but no income tax. So we have a bunch of people who live in Vancouver but work and shop in Portland. A change in tax laws might eventually result in a change in traffic patterns, but I doubt that will ever happen. Both states are too entrenched in their ways.