It seems we have lost sight of our objective in this situation. We want to provide fast, uninterrupted, higher traffic flow through the area on a major West Coast north-south freeway.
It seems if we’d build two or three new lanes on either side of the existing bridge we could accomplish this. Begin the lanes near 39th Street in Vancouver and end them in Delta Park near the raceway. They would be high enough to be unaffected by river traffic, could handle all daily traffic from areas north of 39th Street, be additional capacity to the current roadway at rush-hour periods, and be a high-speed, uninterrupted flow past the existing Interstate 5 Bridge.
This would eliminate all the interchanges needed for the other proposals, achieve our primary objective, and if light rail is really needed we can build a separate bridge later as Portland is doing now.
We need to relieve this situation, not only for the Vancouver-Portland area, but for the entire West Coast transportation infrastructure.
