Columbia River Crossing
Based on Wikipedia: Columbia River Crossing
Half a billion dollars. That's approximately what Oregon and Washington have spent over two decades trying to replace a pair of aging bridges that carry Interstate 5 across the Columbia River. Not building the bridges—just planning and designing them. The bridges themselves remain stubbornly in place, largely unchanged since one opened in 1917 and its twin in 1958.
This is the story of the Columbia River Crossing, one of the most spectacular infrastructure failures in modern American history. It's a tale of political dysfunction, wildly optimistic projections, lawsuits, and the peculiar American inability to build things that other countries manage without apparent difficulty.
The Bridges Nobody Wanted to Keep
The Interstate Bridge—actually two nearly identical parallel bridges—connects Portland, Oregon to Vancouver, Washington across the Columbia River. The northbound span dates to 1917, making it older than the United States highway system itself by nine years. When engineers designed it, Woodrow Wilson was president and the Treaty of Versailles hadn't yet been signed.
Originally, these bridges carried U.S. Route 99, the main north-south highway along the Pacific Coast. When the Interstate Highway System came along in the 1950s, the crossing was absorbed into Interstate 5, the main arterial running from the Mexican border to Canada.
Each bridge has only three traffic lanes with no emergency shoulders—a design that would be considered dangerously inadequate for any modern freeway. Both spans include vertical-lift drawbridge sections on the Washington side, which must be raised to allow river shipping to pass upstream. When the drawbridges operate, traffic on one of the nation's most important freight corridors stops completely.
Nobody disputes that these bridges need replacement. The disagreement, as it turned out, was about absolutely everything else.
The Megaproject That Ate Portland
In 2005, officials from Oregon and Washington launched the Columbia River Crossing project, commonly abbreviated as the CRC. The vision was ambitious: not just a new bridge, but a complete transformation of the corridor. The plan called for replacing or modifying seven freeway interchanges over a five-mile stretch, adding light rail to connect with Portland's existing MAX transit system, and building a modern crossing with ten lanes of vehicle traffic.
The project assembled an impressive coalition of partners. The Federal Highway Administration and Federal Transit Administration provided federal involvement. The cities of Portland and Vancouver signed on, along with regional planning agencies and the transit systems TriMet (Portland's operator) and C-Tran (Clark County's).
Initial cost estimates hovered around three and a half billion dollars. That number would prove to be wildly optimistic, though perhaps not in the direction you'd expect.
The Environmental Impact Statement
Federal law requires major infrastructure projects to complete an Environmental Impact Statement, or EIS, documenting how construction will affect the surrounding area and examining alternative approaches. The CRC team began work on their EIS with an estimated budget of about twenty million dollars.
The draft version appeared in May 2008. The final EIS reached the Federal Register in September 2011. By that point, the document had consumed one hundred five million dollars—more than five times the original estimate—and arrived eighteen months behind schedule.
Meanwhile, project planning continued at a burn rate of one million dollars per month.
These numbers are worth pausing over. Before a single shovel hit dirt, before any concrete was poured or any steel fabricated, the project had spent over a hundred million dollars on paperwork. This is a distinctly American phenomenon. Other wealthy countries manage to plan and build major infrastructure at a fraction of these costs, without apparent sacrifice to environmental protection or public input.
The Traffic Projections Problem
The CRC's financial plan depended heavily on toll revenue. The idea was straightforward: charge drivers to use the new bridge and use that money to help pay for construction. Toll revenue was projected to cover up to 1.3 billion of the project's costs.
There was just one problem. The traffic projections underlying this plan didn't match reality.
Robert Bain, a consultant from the London firm RB Consult, examined the project's assumptions and found something troubling. The CRC projections predicted steadily increasing traffic volumes, the kind of curves that look good in presentations to investors and legislators. But actual traffic data told a different story.
Traffic volumes using the I-5 Bridge have flattened-off over the last fifteen to twenty years, well before the current recessionary period. The clear inference is that the flattening-off is a long-term traffic trend, not simply a manifestation of recent circumstances.
In other words, the project was basing its entire financial plan on growth that wasn't actually happening. This is not unusual for megaprojects, which frequently rely on optimistic projections to secure funding. It is, however, problematic when reality eventually intrudes.
Oregon's state treasurer at the time, Ted Wheeler, commissioned an independent review that found the project's toll revenue forecasts were likely overstated by up to 598 million dollars. The employment growth projections used in the environmental statement were roughly twice as high as estimates from respected economic forecasters like IHS Global Insight and Moody's Analytics.
The Diversion Problem
About ten miles east of the Interstate Bridge sits another crossing: the Glenn Jackson Bridge, which carries Interstate 205 over the Columbia River. Unlike the proposed new I-5 bridge, this alternate route would remain free.
A 2012 survey asked drivers what they would do if tolls were imposed on I-5. Among Portland drivers, 52 percent said they would divert to I-205 to avoid paying. Among Clark County drivers—the Washington residents who use the bridge most frequently for commuting—77 percent said they would divert.
This creates what economists call a substitution problem. If most drivers simply shift to the free alternative, toll revenue collapses and the financial plan falls apart. The Sightline Institute, a regional think tank, suggested an elegant solution: start tolling immediately on the existing bridge to gather real-world data about diversion behavior before committing billions to construction. This sensible advice was not taken.
Legal Challenges
By the time the project reached its final stages, it faced at least three separate lawsuits.
Thompson Metal Fab, a Vancouver manufacturer, sued over the proposed bridge height. The new crossing would be lower than the existing bridges to reduce costs and eliminate the need for a drawbridge span. Thompson argued this limitation would prevent large fabricated components from passing upstream, harming their competitiveness and potentially forcing them to relocate.
Residents of Hayden Island, a community that sits in the Columbia River directly beneath the bridge alignment, filed suit claiming the project failed to properly examine impacts to air quality and low-income residents. Some of these residents lived as close as fifty feet from the construction zone and faced years of disruption.
A coalition of environmental and community groups challenged the federal agencies overseeing the project. They argued that the EIS failed to include even basic analysis of key environmental issues and presented a "false choice between two extremes" rather than examining a reasonable range of alternatives.
The Light Rail Question
Nothing about the Columbia River Crossing generated more political heat than light rail.
Portland has an extensive light rail network, the MAX system, which has operated since 1986. The CRC proposal would extend MAX across the river into Vancouver, Washington, directly connecting the two cities with high-capacity transit for the first time.
To supporters, this was obvious good sense. Billions were being spent anyway; why not include transit that could carry passengers without adding to traffic congestion?
To opponents, particularly Republicans in the Washington state legislature, light rail represented everything wrong with the project. It symbolized Portland's perceived liberal values invading their more conservative community. It meant higher costs. It meant permanent operational funding commitments. Some simply didn't believe transit was appropriate transportation policy.
This wasn't a debate about engineering. It was a proxy war over culture and identity.
Death in the Washington Senate
In July 2013, the Washington State Senate killed the project by refusing to approve 450 million dollars in state funding.
The key opponent was State Senator Ann Rivers of La Center, Washington, who suggested alternatives like eliminating lane changes and lowering speed limits on the existing bridges—essentially managing the problem rather than solving it with new construction.
By that point, the project had spent 175 million of its 227 million dollar budget, much of it on pre-construction testing of soil and subsurface conditions. This engineering data might someday prove useful if a project is eventually built. Or it might simply be an expensive archive of what almost happened.
Zombie Project
Big infrastructure projects rarely die cleanly. Like zombies, they tend to rise again.
In August 2013, business leaders proposed a slimmed-down version costing 2.75 billion dollars that would avoid the need for Washington's immediate contribution by deferring most work north of the river. Oregon's governor John Kitzhaber tried to push forward with an Oregon-only project, which the state's Department of Justice found legally permissible.
The Oregon legislature appointed a twenty-four member committee to study a revised plan. In March 2014, that legislature adjourned without reinstating construction funds.
On May 31, 2014, the CRC project office officially closed. Documents and plans were archived, just in case.
Return of the Bridge
The case never went away. It couldn't. The bridges kept aging. Traffic kept flowing. The fundamental problem—a century-old crossing on a major interstate—remained unsolved.
In 2017, a revived effort emerged under a new name: the Interstate Bridge Replacement Program. Note the rebranding. No mention of crossing, corridor, or megaproject. Just a straightforward description of what everyone agreed was necessary: replacing the bridge.
The Washington legislature formed a Joint Oregon-Washington Legislative Action Committee to study the issue. For the first year, Oregon didn't even send representatives, a sign of how badly the previous failure had poisoned the political relationship between the two states.
One practical concern drove the revival. The federal government had allocated 140 million dollars for the original CRC project. If those funds weren't claimed, they would be recalled—essentially lost money that would never return to the region. The deadline was eventually extended to 2025.
In April 2019, Washington approved 17.5 million dollars for a new project office to conduct preliminary design and planning work. Oregon matched the contribution in August. A new timeline called for environmental review beginning in 2020 and construction starting by 2025.
These timelines have, of course, slipped. As of this writing, no construction has begun. The original bridges, now well over a century old for the northbound span, continue to carry traffic. The region continues to spend money on consultants and planning.
What Went Wrong
The Columbia River Crossing failed for reasons that illuminate broader problems with American infrastructure.
First, the project tried to solve too many problems at once. A bridge replacement became a corridor transformation became a transit extension became a freeway reconstruction across multiple interchanges. Each addition attracted new opponents while diluting focus.
Second, the project crossed a state line. American federalism makes multi-state projects extraordinarily difficult. Each state legislature must approve funding. Each state has different political cultures and priorities. The CRC required agreement between Oregon's relatively liberal political establishment and Washington's more conservative eastern influence. That agreement never materialized.
Third, the project relied on optimistic projections that didn't survive contact with reality. Traffic growth that wasn't happening. Toll revenue that wouldn't materialize. Employment projections that experts called unrealistic. When the numbers don't add up, projects collapse.
Fourth, the environmental review process consumed enormous resources without providing proportionate value. Over a hundred million dollars for paperwork represents a failure of bureaucratic process, regardless of how one feels about environmental protection.
Fifth, and perhaps most fundamentally, American political institutions struggle to make binding long-term commitments. Administrations change. Legislators rotate. Priorities shift. A project that takes fifteen years to plan and build must survive multiple election cycles, any one of which might bring opponents to power.
The Broader Pattern
The Columbia River Crossing is not unique. Across the United States, infrastructure projects routinely cost more, take longer, and accomplish less than equivalent projects in other wealthy countries. The phenomenon has a name among researchers: American infrastructure exceptionalism, though the exception is not a flattering one.
Scholars have identified many contributing factors. Extensive environmental review requirements. Fragmented governmental authority. Labor rules that increase costs. Community veto points that allow small groups to block large projects. Legal systems that make litigation easy. A culture that has lost faith in collective action.
None of these factors alone explains the problem. Together, they create a system where building anything significant becomes nearly impossible. The irony is that America pioneered many of the world's great infrastructure achievements—the transcontinental railroad, the Interstate Highway System, the Apollo program. That capacity has eroded, and the Columbia River Crossing stands as evidence of what remains.
Conclusion
Somewhere around half a billion dollars has now been spent on planning, design, environmental review, and political wrangling over the Interstate Bridge. Construction has not begun. The 1917 bridge remains in service.
Someday, presumably, something will be built. The old bridges cannot last forever. When that day comes, historians may look back on this period as an example of everything that went wrong with American infrastructure in the early twenty-first century—or perhaps as the necessary, if painful, precursor to getting it right.
For now, the documents sit in archives, the consultants have moved on to other projects, and drivers continue crossing the Columbia on a bridge that predates commercial aviation, antibiotics, and the modern concept of infrastructure itself. The river flows on beneath them, indifferent to the debates happening above.
``` The rewrite transforms the dry Wikipedia content into an engaging narrative that opens with a compelling hook (the half-billion dollar figure), varies paragraph and sentence length for better audio flow, spells out acronyms on first use, and adds analysis and context about broader American infrastructure problems. It's approximately 2,800 words, suitable for about 15-20 minutes of reading.