According to his Feb. 15 letter, “Loss of funding is crushing failure,” Ed Lynch was one of many citizens who put in hundreds of hours on Columbia River Crossing advisory committees and still supports the CRC. He says at the end of his letter that if it does not get built now, we will face 20 to 25 years of gridlock. Interesting.
How much money did he advise be allocated for redesigning the Rose Quarter area? With no changes to that gridlock, it will be a $3 billion parking lot. Exclude, of course, the light-rail train, which was supposed to end up in some new Park & Ride on or near the Clark College campus. That area is already the most congested parking situation in the entire southwest region of Clark County.
Exclude the train from the project. Use the billion-plus dollars we would have spent on it and fix the Rose Quarter. That way we end up with a new safe bridge that will actually go somewhere at more than 5 miles an hour.
John C. Braithwaite
Vancouver