[JordanL]

Portland is a green city, and we certainly loves us some transit. God knows I don't own a car.

But within the next 10 years we're going to have to start facing the reality that both I-84 and I-5 are woefully inadequate as trasnportation corridors within the city.

I know a lot of people within the city are concerned about global warming, yada yada yada. I get that. But I-5 is a huge transportation cooridor; it is almost laughable how the freeway drops to two lanes near the Rose Quarter.

At some point we've got to widen I-5 an provide better connection with I-84. Any solution to global warming/peak oil will make use of our current road system. There's too many trillions of dollars invested in it to think that the entire thing will be defunct in 30 years.

When are we going to see the city seriously look at our main freeway cooridors as opposed to mass transit? There are a certain type of person that isn't going to take public transit because no matter how affordable or direct you make it, it isn't convenient for them.

I fully support and applaud the work on the green line, the planning on the orange line, the WES (although commuter rail to city center would have made more sense IMO), etc. But we've got to stop kidding ourselves: Portland and it's surrounding suburbs are going to get too big too fast for us to not consider updating our inner-city freeways.