This is I-70 in Denver during cap construction. All lanes fit on one side by making use of the shoulder space.

The reasoning given here for ruling out highway cover width reduction makes no sense. Shoulders are routinely used as temporary travel lanes during construction. A cap designed for three lanes and standard shoulders in each direction would have adequate width for four temporary lanes on one side.

We should follow suit. Instead of silver-bullet mega projects, we need a basket of solutions. For example, we do need to improve freight movement, particularly to the critical industrial areas in N and NW Portland. As it happens, there's a good route available. It's just missing

It would reduce the number of new bridges across the Portland Harbor from six to two, and would allow for similar trip times as the proposed design.

With the simple changes discussed here, the project budget could literally be cut in half.

a seismically resilient route will be provided. This was the plan in the original CRC. We should return to that plan. The other main problem here is that the interchanges are over-designed. A simple diamond interchange, looking something like this, would be far more cost effective.

The Columbia river bridge itself is not unreasonable, though there would be some savings in designing for 8 lanes instead of 10. But the decision to replace the Portland Harbor bridge is highly questionable.

The most absurd component of the project is the Mill Plain Blvd reconstruction, slated to cost $830 million. This is basically a mega-project in itself. If it were its own project it would be the fourth-largest in the metro area, after the IBR, Rose Quarter, and Abernathy bridge.

This part of the project ($270 million) replaces three 40-year old bridges for basically a single reason: Adding a ramp braid of the SR 500 onramp and the SB 4th Plain exit ramp. That's it. The ramp (and the NB onramp) could just be removed instead, only inconveniencing a few drivers by 1-2 minutes.

IBR costs, showing ~half of cost is widening scope:

and re-signing the south part of I-405 as I-84. The traffic-inducing and extremely-expensive-to-rebuild north part of I-405 would be removed. The result would look something like this:

- Caps were added in response to community concerns. But the caps were basically dropped on top of the older concept. Early concepts, like this one from 2019, show both ramps cutting through the caps, making the land on the caps mostly useless and not mitigating pollution and noise impacts at all.

I maintain that, starting from a clean slate, a logical, cost-effective plan for the Rose Quarter would look something like this: