The Unceremonious Death of a Freeway Expansion Project

In a piece in Streetsblog USA originally published on City Observatory, Joe Cortright describes the hard-won battle of Portland, Oregon’s anti-freeway advocates as the Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) unceremoniously “deleted” a proposed widening project on Interstate 205 due to “revenue uncertainty.”

As Cortright notes, “This is how bad projects die: Agencies finally, and reluctantly, concede that they don’t have the money to pay for them, and that they are so bad that no one can be convinced to appropriate (or borrow) the money needed to move them forward.” The battle to stop freeway expansions is often a slog, and the final win, if and when it comes, often amounts to a “bureaucratic footnote.”

Cortright hopes this was just a “first small victory” for freeway fighters in Oregon. “Oregon DOT continues to maintain the ‘extend and pretend’ fiction that its now-$1.9 billion Rose Quarter project is still alive, but it too, will have to yield to the fiscal reality that the highway department is essentially broke and doesn’t have the resources to maintain the roads it currently has, much less build enormously expensive new ones.”