The project to replace the Interstate 5 Bridge continues to inch forward. It secured $2.1 billion in federal funding earlier this year and wrapped up a public comment period last week.
“We’re hoping that, if everything goes smoothly, we will be putting shovels in the ground to start this program late next year, early 2026,” said Greg Johnson, who heads the project.
Despite progress, the effort to replace the century-old bridge — which carries 140,000 vehicle trips and about $132 million of goods each day — continues to swirl in controversy.
Last week, Johnson spent an hour with The Columbian. He spoke about the end of the public comment period and shared his perspective on criticisms of the project.
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Some in Clark County worry that expansion of Portland’s MAX light rail to Vancouver will drive an increase in crime. What’s your response to that?
Our office sits here in Vancouver, and our office has been broken into twice, and I don’t see light rail bringing those criminals across the river.
Every community has certain levels of crime, and crime on light rail is a function of the community that it exists in. If folks police light rail, incidents of things happening on light rail will be minimized.
I’ve built infrastructure around the country. In West Michigan, folks assured me that “You’re building this bike path, folks are going to be stealing TVs and riding them on their bikes to make their getaway.” It’s an old trope that has very little basis in reality.
I was just reading an article today that Arlington, Va., is one of the safest areas in the country. And guess what? Arlington, Va., has light rail coming out of Washington, D.C. I understand people’s concerns, and you do have to make sure that you are policing certain activities on light rail or buses, but the idea that crime is going to be exported is, it has this basis in race and racial politics.
Another controversial aspect has been tolling. Where does that stand?
The main purpose of tolling on this program is to help pay for the bridge itself and help pay for future maintenance and operation for this bridge.
Tolling is a feature of large projects like this across the country, because these two states don’t have an extra $1.5 billion laying around to send to this program to construct it, the federal government doesn’t have an extra $1.5 billion. They want to see, “Are we making sure that we are doing smart things to help pay for and help maintain this bridge in the future?”
And, one of the ironic things is that this bridge, at several times during its life, has been tolled in the past. This is not a new thing for this location. It’s not the most popular thing in the world, but neither is it the end of the world. Policies can be made to take care of folks who cannot afford that daily trip and who have to travel for work. But we know that there are some spin-off benefits from tolling, that some of the discretionary trips that are taken during peak hours, some of those trips can now be pushed out to a less expensive time of day for folks to travel across the bridge, which helps traffic flow in the corridor.
Generally, Republicans have opposed the project, and Democrats have fought for it. And its future was cemented by Bipartisan Infrastructure Act funding, which President Joe Biden’s administration has, in part, attached to his legacy. Do you worry about the future of the project and its funding in light of that and in light of the coming transfer of administrations?
We know that this project has a lifespan that has spanned Republican and Democratic administrations. It’s so strong that it does not have an R or a D or red or blue behind it. It has good infrastructure practice behind it. So we think that the Trump administration is going to be amenable to the discussions of, “How can you make this corridor more effective and more efficient going into the future?” We think that this is a good project under any administration.
Some argue that creating more freeway lanes will drive traffic instead of alleviating it. What’s your response?
Induced demand occurs if we were to build a third bridge corridor with interchanges that currently have no businesses, no connections, then you’re going to induce demand, because you’re going to get changes in land use that will drive folks to say, “Yeah, I want to be in this corridor.”
This corridor is over 100 years old, and even if you were inducing demand, this is the corridor that you want to induce demand on. You do not want to induce it 20 miles down the road in green fields. You want to induce it where the infrastructure supports it. That argument gets thrown out very casually without a lot of in-depth thought behind it.
We are trying to, No. 1, make this a multimodal corridor by accommodating the current 140,000 vehicles that cross every day. But also, we’re trying to increase the use of high-capacity transit by getting folks out of those single-occupancy vehicle trips and getting them onto light rail or express buses that can help free up some of the capacity of the freeway.
The auxiliary lanes that we are proposing are lanes that only go between interchanges. They’re not through-lanes. If I’m getting on the freeway at SR 14 and I’m only going to Hayden Island, I can stay in that auxiliary lane and not get into the flow of traffic and not have to slow down through traffic. We are not creating any more through lanes, but what we are seeking to do is make the three through lanes in each direction work as they were designed to do.
Looking back on this project decades in the future — maybe once it’s completed, maybe 10 years after it’s completed — what would success look like to you and what would failure look like to you?
Success is to have a resilient bridge where you are getting folks who are driving, folks who are biking and walking, and folks who are taking transit trips rather than just driving a vehicle across this bridge. That’s what success looks like.
Failure? I’m not in the business of considering failure as an option. Failure would be if we did not get a bridge built and this process failed once again — that would be failure.
