PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • February 26, 2023
A manifestly unsafe Interstate 295 through Portland fails to allow drivers adequate sight-line distance, encourages excessive weaving and merging and defies modern standards of interstate design. In 2017, colleagues and I called for taking I-295 “to the ground” between Congress Street and Tukey’s Bridge, making the Congress-to-Washington corridor into a grand boulevard for local businesses, needed housing and useful public space. What a gift it would be to our fair city to repair the pain inflicted upon it in the 1960s by re-creating I-295 as a lively and pleasurable boulevard. Benefits would include reclamation of some 300-plus acres of publicly owned land; restoration of local neighborhood street grids; strengthening Portland’s Emerald Necklace connecting its parks, and facilitating access along Forest and Washington avenues and to the Roux Institute. ~ Richard Barringer, Portland