In his latest appearance on the Lars Larson Show, John Ley, newly elected to the Washington House of Representatives, dives into the controversial $9 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement (IBR) project. Ley argues that the project is based on outdated data and exaggerated traffic projections, leading to unnecessary costs with little to no added value for commuters. Ley emphasizes the need for transparency and practical improvements that truly serve the public’s interest, especially regarding vehicle lanes and congestion. Listen to this insightful interview to learn why Ley believes the IBR is a “boondoggle.”
Transcript:
Lars Larson
Welcome back to the Radio Northwest Network. It’s a pleasure to be with you, and I’m always glad to get to your phone calls and emails. Now, if I said there is a massive public works project, arguably the single largest single public works project that’s going on in the Pacific Northwest right now, I’m describing the Interstate Bridge, the one that they’ve tried at once, wasted a couple hundred million dollars, failed.
They now have another effort that appears to also to me to be failing. And this one’s even more expensive, perhaps as expensive as $9 billion. And it could go beyond all that. But is all of it based on bogus numbers and outdated data? Well, I thought I’d check in with our friend John Ley, but first congratulate John on his successful campaign to get into the Washington House of Representatives.
John, welcome back to the program.
John Ley
Hey, Lars, I’m delighted and extremely honored at the opportunity to represent the people of the 18th district. As you and I have talked about so many times, the issue that resonated most with our voters here in Southwest Washington is the tolling and light rail as part of the I-5 bridge project. At the end of the day, so many facets of this entire boondoggle are based on lies or half-truths or numbers that you just can’t trust, whether it’s the number of people that they say are going to use transit, or the fact that they’re using outdated numbers on projecting how many vehicles are going to be able to use the I-5 corridor in the future. But bottom line is, there’s zero value for the people in this 7 or 9 or $12 billion boondoggle.
Lars Larson
Yeah, because it could be numbers as big as that, especially depending on how they decide to finance it. Now, the most recent criticism was a study commissioned by the Just Crossing Alliance, the JCA. Can you tell my audience anything about the JCA? What are they all about?
John Ley
Well, in the macro sense, they’re a liberal organization that is very concerned with saving the environment. They would rather get people out of their cars, but they have an economist, Joe Cortright, that works with them. And at the end of the day, they have uncovered a lot of details related to the projections used by Greg Johnson and his IBR team.
At the end of the day, their old numbers back from 2005 to 2008, time frame on the initial Columbia River Crossing battle, and they have not been updated, first and foremost. Number two, the Just Crossing Alliance numbers say that the IBR is totally lying, talking about traffic increasing on the I-5 corridor by multiple times what they think the reality has been over the last decade.
And so, they’re projecting something on the order of 160, 180,000 cars on the I-5 corridor. And that’s just physically impossible. Unless you, of course, add new lanes, which the project is not doing. And so that’s been pointed out. Willamette Week had a wonderful article on this. And the Just Crossing Alliance is doing, yeoman’s work when it comes to exposing these details.
Lars Larson
And by the way, I’ve kind of fault my friends at Willamette Week, WWeek.com. They’ve written about this, too. And the fault, I think, and you feel free to correct me if I’m wrong. They describe this as the rationale for building a new, wider bridge. Now, technically, the new bridge will be physically more feet in width than the old bridge. Is that accurate?
John Ley
That is correct. About 50% more plus wide.
Lars Larson
But the amount that is allocated for cars and trucks actually shrinks. So you have a bigger physical bridge. You could point to it and say if you take a tape measure from east to west on that bridge, it is physically wider. But for the person driving a car, will there be any difference in the kind of lanes that cars and trucks have available to them on this newer, wider bridge?
John Ley
Nope. In the macro sense, the current bridge has three thru lanes and the new bridge is going to have three thru lanes. They will add an auxiliary lane, which is a lane to merge into the ongoing freeway traffic, or to merge off in order to prepare for an exit. But a single lane will help a little bit of the congestion slowdowns because they’ve got something like five on and off ramps within about a three-mile period there on the bridge.
But it’s ridiculous that way. The other good thing is that they’re going to actually allow for shoulders for safety reasons on the new bridge. But again, the shoulders only help if there’s an accident or somebody has a vehicle breakdown. It does nothing in the long run for normal traffic conditions there.
Lars Larson
And in other words, you’re building this extra lane as a breakdown lane. And if nobody is in it, nobody’s allowed to drive in it. It would be available if a car broke down or stalled out in the 3,000 or 3,600 feet of the bridge. Otherwise, it just is an empty lane that sits there all day long doing nothing, right?
John Ley
Yep. And of course, as always, there’s an asterisk on that. And the plan is to ultimately allow C-Tran buses to use bus on the shoulder to zip past all the cars that are stuck in the traffic congestion. That having been said, another insanity on this is they are already projecting that compared to doing nothing, those C-Tran buses using the express bus on their shoulder are going to take 11 minutes longer to travel from Vancouver to Portland than if they’ve done nothing.
It’s just one more aspect in the insanity of this.
Lars Larson
So the bridge, there’s a way, the way they’re envisioning using it. The buses will actually be slower than they are today with the old bridge. Is it that simple?
John Ley
Yeah, said unbelievably. You know, I mean, it just boggles the mind, let alone the fact that they want to spend seven, nine, 12 billion bucks on this.
Lars Larson
Well, John, I’m talking to John Ley, who’s a new member of the, member-elect of the Washington House of Representatives for District 18. And by the way, he was only ahead a few hundred votes on election night. But what did you finish rounding up by about 2,000?
John Ley
Well, and so it was 1,548. And they’ll release the semifinal numbers later this afternoon.
Lars Larson
After the Democrats are done massaging them, and probably after they run them past Tony Golick the prosecutor to show you how many illegal aliens are in there. But the other thing is kind of ironic. They want to make it easier for C-Tran buses to use the bridge. And yet right, right on the bridge will be a $2 billion, $1 billion per mile light rail line.
If the light rail line is there, why would anybody take a bus to get to Portland when they could ride on the train? Shouldn’t that be the theory?
John Ley
Well, on the surface, you’re exactly right. The train should be faster and all of those things. The reality is the yellow line, the light rail only travels 14 miles an hour. Why does it travel that slow? Oh my gosh. And that’s because all the businesses along North Portland’s Interstate Avenue demand a stop. There’s a stop every mile. So by the time the train gets up to speed, it has to start slowing down for the next stop.
Lars Larson
Because they weigh a lot.
John Ley
Well, yeah, there is that law of physics, you know. But at the end of the day, nobody wants to travel 14 miles an hour. Number one. Number two, there are legitimate safety issues on the light rail. And number three, you’re going to have to transfer at least once, if not two or three times, to get to your destination.
And nobody wants to do that. And therefore people much logically will prefer to use their private cars. And that’s the whole focus of what we should be talking about, is adding vehicle capacity for cars and trucks and our freight haulers. It’s an interstate freeway. This is not a recreational area for bicyclists and pedestrians. It’s not a transit corridor.
Maybe 40 years from now, there may be enough demand for something, but buses are hugely more flexible. We’ve talked so many times about all the problems in the summer. The light rail gets too hot.
Lars Larson
By the way, just before we have to hit the break. Do you see any chance that the Trump Department of Transportation is going to put one dime into this?
John Ley
I sure hope not.
Lars Larson
I sure hope not as well. That’s John Ley, new member of the Washington House of Reps.
