The Rose Quarter conundrum: how to reduce I-5 congestion and get Clark County commuters to pay for it?
The solution seemed so obvious with the CRC – light rail and tolls.
1) Build humungous parking garages for Portland employers on the cheaper Vancouver real estate (paid for by the Clark County commuters who work in Portland; sort of a user fee) and build a light rail employee shuttle service from the Vancouver parking lots to the Downtown Portland office towers. Let’s see, with 2,900 parking spaces (provided we don’t let anyone else use them, like Clark College students, shoppers, or those new apartment dwellers) we can take 2% of the daily traffic off of I-5.