The 60-day window for folks to share their ideas in regards to the deliberate Interstate 5 Bridge substitute ended Monday.
The roughly $6 billion mission to rebuild the century-old Columbia River crossing amid earthquake anxieties and ever-increasing site visitors distress has been a supply of regional controversy for many years.
However now — with assist in each Washington and Oregon and $2 billion in federal cash already secured — this most up-to-date effort is making regular albeit labored progress.
“We think it went very well,” he stated.
The mission remains to be tallying responses, however acquired about 3,000 — many expressing a wide range of each hopes and issues, Johnson stated.
Whereas the remark interval was tied particularly to the Sept. 20 launch of the Draft Supplemental Environmental Impression Assertion, each the report and the general public response to it coated a broad vary of matters. (You possibly can learn the 62-page govt abstract of the report on the mission’s web site.)
“There’s folks who are still interested in a third bridge corridor and think that a third bridge should be built before this project,” Johnson stated. “There are folks who are concerned about the addition of light rail coming into Vancouver. There are folks concerned about the size of the bridge; they’d like to see the bridge smaller and occupy a smaller footprint.”
Different responses had been acquainted.
“We’ve heard conversation around induced demand and whether we took that into account, which we did,” he stated. “We still have comments from folks who want to see a tunnel, and we’ve explained that a tunnel just doesn’t fit or meet the purpose and need here more than 100 times.”
The ultimate level Johnson stated respondents emphasised was that paths for folks strolling and biking had been extraordinarily essential.
“We’ve heard some very specific desires that we’re looking into that hopefully will help shape our design efforts as we move forward,” he stated. “Some are very creative and innovative. Some we can’t do but we’re going to take all of them into account and have our designers hear what advocates are thinking.”
The tip purpose, Johnson stated, is to make the bridge extra usable and protected, enabling folks to reap the benefits of options to driving.
He stated the group is now working to evaluate “each and every comment” to place all of them right into a remaining environmental evaluation, alongside the mission’s responses. It’s a gargantuan enterprise that he expects can be accomplished in mid-to-late 2025.
Johnson stated that between the 2 state transportation departments, a common engineering consulting agency and sub consultants, the mission has about 400 folks working for it full or half time.
Whereas the feedback will all be reviewed, it’s not totally clear how a lot they’ll really form the ultimate mission.
Johnson stated designers will evaluate the feedback and should incorporate them into the ultimate bridge design if the concepts are possible, protected and cost-effective.
Whereas he stated feedback calling for leaving the prevailing bridge and constructing a tunnel received’t get critical consideration at this level, others would.
For instance, Johnson stated the group had in-depth conversations with the general public at open homes suggesting totally different placement of the multiuse path for nonmotorized journey.
“We’re going to look at that and see if that idea has merit, if that can save money, if it can make it a better and more useful path for folks who want to travel in that mode,” he stated.
And a few concepts from the general public have already made it into the drafts, he added. The partial interchange on Hayden Island got here instantly out of requests from individuals who reside there.
“The best projects and end products are ones where folks are engaged and they’re giving us ideas, and we’re listening well, and taking those ideas into account to help shape what the final end product looks like,” he stated. “What we don’t want is people to say, ‘Well, hell, I didn’t know anything about this.’ ”
Johnson’s household was displaced by building of Michigan’s U.S. Freeway 25 within the mid-Nineteen Sixties when he was 4 years previous.
“My father told me that story as long as I can remember,” Johnson stated. “He made me more sensitive that we have to make sure that people’s voices are heard and reflected.”
In line with the I-5 Bridge mission’s web site, key remaining federal paperwork are anticipated subsequent yr.
After that, all that’s left is to construct the bridge.