New Columbia Boulevard-Killingsworth Interchange Planned

 

Rush-hour bottlenecks to be fixed by 2006

 

 Lee Perlman

The Mid-county MEMO

 

A new $19 million Northeast Columbia Boulevard-Killingsworth Street interchange is in the offing.

Rob Barnard of the Portland Office of Transportation says the money has been made available through funding provided by the Oregon Transportation Investment Act. The funding was based on strategic importance of the connector - it services the Columbia Corridor, planned as one of the key sources of jobs in the years to come - and its current state.

The connection between the two arterials today is “a substandard, narrow, two-lane underpass” at Northeast 92nd Avenue, a city fact sheet says. This, plus its closeness to the I-205 Freeway interchange, causes traffic backups of as much as a mile during rush hour, Barnard says. Vehicles trying to weave into the appropriate lane of the fast-moving traffic have made this the fifth worst location for serious accidents in the state, he says.

City plans, which Barnard emphasizes are very preliminary, call for a new, wider connector and underpass stretching from Northeast 84th to 87th avenues, with new traffic signals at both interchanges. An alternative proposal would move the westbound lanes to a second signalized interchange at Northeast 89th Avenue. The advantage of this is that it would separate the relatively rare Eastbound Killingsworth to Westbound Columbia movement from the primary interchange, and eliminate the need for a three-phase traffic light there. The disadvantage is that the movement as currently designed might be difficult for large rigs.

The project would mean the displacement of five businesses in the proposed right of way: Thermal King Northwest, Landmark Equipment, Pyramid Auto Wrecker, Air Flow Control, and Let’s Brew. Barnard says the affected owners have been contacted, “and the response has been positive. Everyone acknowledges the need for something like this.”

He intends to meet with affected organizations such as the Cully, Sumner and Parkrose neighborhood associations, the Columbia Corridor Association and the Parkrose Business Association in April, and to hold a public open house in May. Preliminary engineering will begin in July, and construction is tentatively set for 2006.

Parkrose Business Association transportation committee chair Bob Brown said he was not aware of specific plans, but that a change of some sort is long overdue. “It’s a real bottleneck,” he says.