The 60-day window for people to share their thoughts about the planned Interstate 5 Bridge replacement ended Monday.
The roughly $6 billion project to rebuild the century-old Columbia River crossing amid earthquake anxieties and ever-increasing traffic misery has been a source of regional controversy for decades.
But now — with support in both Washington and Oregon and $2 billion in federal money already secured — this most recent effort is making steady albeit labored progress.
Greg Johnson, administrator of the Interstate Bridge Replacement Program, said in addition to accepting online comments, phone calls, emails and mail, the team also hosted two in-person open houses, two virtual sessions and numerous presentations to raise awareness about the comment period.
“We think it went very well,” he said.
The project is still tallying responses, but received about 3,000 — many expressing a variety of both hopes and concerns, Johnson said.
While the comment period was tied specifically to the Sept. 20 release of the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, both the report and the public response to it covered a broad range of topics. (You can read the 62-page executive summary of the report on the project’s website.)
“There’s folks who are still interested in a third bridge corridor and think that a third bridge should be built before this project,” Johnson said. “There are folks who are concerned about the addition of light rail coming into Vancouver. There are folks concerned about the size of the bridge; they’d like to see the bridge smaller and occupy a smaller footprint.”
Other responses were familiar.
“We’ve heard conversation around induced demand and whether we took that into account, which we did,” he said. “We still have comments from folks who want to see a tunnel, and we’ve explained that a tunnel just doesn’t fit or meet the purpose and need here more than 100 times.”
The final point Johnson said respondents emphasized was that paths for people walking and biking were extremely important.
“We’ve heard some very specific desires that we’re looking into that hopefully will help shape our design efforts as we move forward,” he said. “Some are very creative and innovative. Some we can’t do but we’re going to take all of them into account and have our designers hear what advocates are thinking.”
The end goal, Johnson said, is to make the bridge more usable and safe, enabling people to take advantage of alternatives to driving.
He said the team is now working to review “each and every comment” to put them all into a final environmental analysis, alongside the project’s responses. It’s a gargantuan undertaking that he expects will be completed in mid-to-late 2025.
Johnson said that between the two state transportation departments, a general engineering consulting firm and sub consultants, the project has about 400 people working for it full or part time.
While the comments will all be reviewed, it’s not entirely clear how much they’ll actually shape the final project.
Johnson said designers will review the comments and may incorporate them into the final bridge design if the ideas are feasible, safe and cost-effective.
While he said comments calling for leaving the existing bridge and building a tunnel won’t get serious consideration at this point, others would.
For example, Johnson said the team had in-depth conversations with the public at open houses suggesting different placement of the multiuse path for nonmotorized travel.
“We’re going to look at that and see if that idea has merit, if that can save money, if it can make it a better and more useful path for folks who want to travel in that mode,” he said.
And some ideas from the public have already made it into the drafts, he added. The partial interchange on Hayden Island came directly out of requests from people who live there.
“The best projects and end products are ones where folks are engaged and they’re giving us ideas, and we’re listening well, and taking those ideas into account to help shape what the final end product looks like,” he said. “What we don’t want is people to say, ‘Well, hell, I didn’t know anything about this.’ ”
Johnson’s family was displaced by construction of Michigan’s U.S. Highway 25 in the mid-1960s when he was 4 years old.
“My father told me that story as long as I can remember,” Johnson said. “He made me more sensitive that we have to make sure that people’s voices are heard and reflected.”
According to the I-5 Bridge project’s website, key final federal documents are anticipated next year.
After that, all that’s left is to build the bridge.
