The highway cap is not the reason this project is so expensive. The real expense comes from doubling the width of the existing highway — something that ODOT has gone to great pains to conceal. The existing roadway is 82 feet wide, and ODOT’s plans — which were not revealed publicly, but which we obtained via a public records request — show that the agency plans to nearly double the width of the highway to 160 feet along much of its length. In some places, it will roughly triple it to 240 feet.

Instead of disclosing the massive highway expansion, though, ODOT instead claims that it is merely adding “one auxiliary lane” in each direction to the existing four-lane freeway, and calling for wide inside and outside shoulders that can be easily be re-striped into travel lanes once the project is built (which can be done without additional environmental review under FHWA regulations, by the way).

The agency also claims that this widening-by-another-name will result in no increase in road capacity, and that therefore there won’t be any additional traffic on I-5. But ODOT’s own traffic count data predicts that traffic will grow from about 120,000 today to 142,000 per day in 2045 – a 18-percent increase