The Week Observed: September 26, 2025

What City Observatory Did This Week

Federal funding of the Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) Project is in jeopardy, largely due to self-inflicted delays and questionable planning. The IBR now seems headed for the perfect political-bureaucratic-financial storm, mirroring the spectacular 2013 failure of its predecessor, the Columbia River Crossing. Running two and a half years behind schedule, the IBR now faces a lethal combination of Trump Administration hostility, Coast Guard obstruction, and fiscal reality.

The project’s $2.1 billion in federal grants could evaporate by September 2026 if construction doesn’t begin—and the Trump Administration seems hostile to big highway projects in blue states and also appears to be deliberately slow-walking needed approvals for the IBR. Meanwhile, the Coast Guard continues to demand a costly 178-foot clearance versus IBR’s preferred 116-foot span, setting up more delays and another expensive design battle.

With costs likely ballooning to $9-10 billion and federal support in danger of vanishing, Oregon and Washington may soon confront an unpalatable choice: absorb the entire cost themselves or watch another decade-plus bridge effort collapse under its own bureaucratic weight.

Must Read

Five proposals to make infrastructure spending more efficient. The Brookings Institution has a timely (and also perhaps timeless) post offering several ideas for making infrastructure spending--which is increasing much faster than inflation--more efficient. Some make tons of sense, like Ed Glaeser and his co-author’s ideas for lowering bus costs. The average cost of an electric bus in the US is about triple the world wide average; US operators pay $1.1 million, while most overseas operators pay about $350,000. While cheaper buses would be pretty much an unalloyed good, some of the other ideas are interesting, but debatable, to say the least. David Schleicher suggests creating a priority list of major project that would get exempted from many laws, be guided by appointed experts and granted preferential access to funds (somewhere, Robert Moses is smiling). That may be a recipe for expediting construction but begs the question of whether the project makes sense or is cost effective or “right-sized.” Greater efficiency makes sense, but the problem of exploding costs has as much to do with bad, bloated projects, and poor incentive structures as it does with sometimes onerous regulations.

In the news

The Washington State Standard quoted City Observatory’s Joe Cortright in its story about delays and rising costs for the Interstate Bridge Replacement Project.

Joe Cortright . . .