PORTLAND — The good news is that the Newberg-Dundee Bypass is well into construction.
The bad news is that it won’t help a bit to alleviate the dreaded Oregon 99W crawl through the cities over Memorial Day weekend, as Portland drivers head to Yamhill County wine country, Spirit Mountain and Chinook Winds casinos and the Oregon Coast.
Relief won’t happen until late 2017, when the four-mile bypass, currently under budget and ahead of schedule, will siphon traffic out of the cities onto a new section of Oregon 18.
The $262 million project is the largest new highway, with a big impact on Portland-metro area drivers, that the Oregon Department of Transportation has built since Interstate 205. That goes back to 1982, when the Glenn L. Jackson Memorial Bridge opened across the Columbia River.
Examples of other more recent highway projects in the state include alternatives to U.S. 97 through Bend and Redmond.
The southern bypass of Newberg and Dundee, with its one traffic light and two travel lanes, has been talked about for years. There was even a proposal to build a private toll road, but the project in construction is a state highway with no fee to drive. The Legislature got the ball rolling in 2009 by passing the Oregon Jobs and Transportation Act. Ground was broken in 2013.
This is phase I of an 11-mile bypass, with other sections planned on both ends of the current construction. Future phases are not funded, so there is no timeline for them.
The bypass under construction is a limited access two-lane highway. Bridges are being built to accommodate four lanes of traffic, if and when funds are allocated to add two more lanes.
ODOT estimates that 50 to 70 percent of truck traffic in the area will move off 99W onto the bypass, with 35 to 40 percent of overall traffic shifting out of the two downtowns. That will allow the cities to re-envision their downtowns.
