New CRC option could remove highway spaghetti from Hayden Island

Could attempts to scale back the Columbia River Crossing and Hayden Island's Safeway end up creating a new local or arterial bridge -– one connecting the island directly with North Portland's Expo Center and Kenton neighborhood? Since the Sentinel first reported the proposed 22 lanes of freeway spaghetti [pictured below] that the CRC would build on Hayden Island, a storm of controversy has arisen over the proposal.  [The Sentinel's consistent editorial position on the CRC has been to build a bridge of grander design and more modest scale.]

A CRC meeting on Monday night, two proposals surfaced that would greatly reduce the number of traffic lanes crossing the island. At least one proposed redesign would move a massive tangle of freeway interchanges off the island and create a local traffic bridge for Hayden Island. The local bridge would create a street grid for the largely suburban pod-style street system west of I-5 and allow Islanders and North Portlanders to get in and out of the community without having getting on the freeway.

Jantzen Beach Supercenter more or less hates the idea. So does Diversified Marine, a sizeable tug-and-barge service company that says a new bridge might wipe out precious deepwater harbor along Marine Drive.

On the table Monday: two new concepts to shrink the great gray wall of highway on- and off-lanes that would slice through the island and likely wipe out Safeway. (See pages 6-8 for maps of this PDF of the various plans, or here for the biggest plan, known as the "locally preferred alternative.")