But they had their "big dig," and the result was a rail tunnel 2.5 miles long. They could have had a different "big dig" and given us eight lanes from the top of the hill out to 185th, and six lanes out to Jackson School. They might even have been able to extend the eight lanes to downtown, widening the US-26 tunnels, although that's just a W.A.G. on my part. The ROW occupied by the tracks just east of the 217 interchange make widening that bit of US-26 quite a bit harder.
Light Rail Myths and Realities 4940Light Rail Myths and Realities The real goal of light-rail advocates is not to reduce congestion but to bring federal pork to Portland. Portland's light rail is poorly utilized and does nothing to...
A 5% reduction may indeed be "astounding", but it's still insignificant. If I managed to find fifty dollars worth of loose change in my sofa, that might be astounding, but it wouldn't change my standard of living. Driving on that road, you'd never notice if one out of twenty cars weren't there. Widening that stretch of US-26 out to 185th from 4 lanes to 8 would have immediately reduced the traffic density by 50%. I'm glad to see that they're finally getting around to doing some widening, even if on a smaller scale.
The problem with rail is that it's rail. It only travels along a single limited path, so you have to drive to the rail station anyway. And then when you get to the other end, you're standing there at a considerable distance from where you really want to go, without your car. And since it's in Oregon, it's probably raining. A few companies like Intel have set up shuttle services from the rail stop to their campuses, but everyone else has to walk. I used to work near the corner of Cornell and 25th in Hillsboro, and even that short walk would have been a drenching one if it was raining. Fortunately, I have a car.
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Ciao, Paul D. DeRocco