A cover story in Willamette Week questions the need for the Columbia River Crossing: a proposed $4.2-billion new Interstate-5 bridge over the Columbia River.

Although this project isn’t in Lane County, it does raise questions about the changing economics of transportation investments throughout Oregon.

An excerpt:

5: The need for a new bridge is predicated on a massive increase in traffic—but current behavior raises questions whether such assumptions are valid.

There’s a flip side to a new bridge creating more traffic demand. That is, people may already be changing their driving habits, according to Portland economist Joe Cortright.

Cortright, who is part of the SmarterBridge group, is no highway engineer. But he is a nationally recognized expert on economic behavior (a report he did in 2002 for the Brookings Institution correctly predicted OHSU’s bio-tech hopes were a pipe dream, for example).

He says CRC backers’ underlying assumptions are opaque, and probably wrong when they project traffic congestion more than doubling, from six hours per day currently to 15 hours in 2030, if nothing is done.

For one thing, the price of gas is now an attitude-adjusting $4 per gallon and could go a lot higher. And, Cortright says, the CRC models seem to assume people will continue blindly moving to and commuting from Clark County to Oregon regardless of increasing congestion.

CRC staff have punched back at Cortright, charging that he cherry-picks data to support his arguments. But data released by ODOT recently tend to back up Cortright’s case. They show Oregonians are driving less and using the I-5 bridge less. Highway miles driven decreased from 20.9 billion in 2002 to 20.6 in 2006, even though the state’s population grew about 4 percent during the same period.

“This project is predicated on the assumption that traffic will increase at about the rate it did from 1990 to 2005, when we had declining real gas prices that averaged maybe $1.25 a gallon,” Cortright says. “People adjust their behavior when the world changes significantly.”

Joe Cortright will be speaking at the Lane County Moving Forward Together™ conference on June 11, 2008.