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Vancouver commuters are two weeks into a five-week experiment nobody in this city volunteered for: driving to Portland, or anywhere south of the Columbia River, with the busiest stretch of Interstate 5 in the region shut down in one direction, around the clock, until mid-October.
The Oregon Department of Transportation closed all southbound lanes of I-5 through Portland’s Rose Quarter, between I-405 and I-84, starting the night of Sept. 11 and running through an expected finish around Oct. 16. It is a construction closure tied to the wider I-5 Rose Quarter project, and it leaves only a single southbound lane open to the Broadway/Weidler exit for local access. Everyone else headed south is detoured onto I-405, with regional traffic pushed toward I-205 instead.
For a city whose daily rhythm runs on the assumption that the bridge into Oregon works, that is not a Portland problem. It is a Vancouver problem, and city hall has been telling residents so for weeks. The City of Vancouver’s own closure-resources page, posted before work began, named the on-ramps it expected to feel it first: SR-500, 39th Street, Fourth Plain, Mill Plain and Washington/6th Street feeding I-5, and SR-14, Mill Plain, 18th Street and SR-500 feeding I-205. The city’s advice was blunt — shift trips out of peak hours, use C-TRAN or carpool, work from home if the job allows it — because ODOT’s own projection was that trips through the closure zone could run two to three times longer than normal.
The first days did not bear that out. WSDOT told The Columbian on Sept. 14 that traffic was “light and flowing freely” as far north as Vancouver on the first weekday morning of the closure, and OPB reported the next day that Vancouver traffic was “largely unaffected” on day one despite the warnings of gridlock reaching the Columbia River. That reprieve did not hold. By week two, KATU reported on Sept. 22 that travel times were climbing and, in some corridors during the evening rush, had roughly doubled. ODOT said the project remained on pace for its Oct. 16 completion date, but the early calm has given way to the congestion the agency warned about from the start.
The numbers WSDOT is now giving Vancouver-area drivers are specific enough to plan around, and specific enough to sting. A Tuesday-morning trip from Mill Plain to Oregon City was projected at about 45 minutes this week — roughly a 25-minute delay over a normal commute. A shorter trip, Mill Plain to I-84, was pegged at about 10 minutes. KATU’s reporting named the trouble spots Vancouver drivers are most likely to hit: I-205 itself, and the on-ramps at SR-14, Mill Plain, 18th Street and SR-500 — largely the same list the city flagged before the closure even began.
None of this is happening in a vacuum for a county that has spent the better part of two decades arguing about the bridge itself. The Interstate Bridge Replacement program — the long-delayed successor project to the Columbia River Crossing effort that collapsed in 2013 — is currently in the procurement phase of its own multibillion-dollar timeline, with a request-for-qualifications deadline at the end of this month and construction not expected to begin before 2028. A new bridge, if it stays on that schedule, would not open to traffic until the mid-2030s. The Rose Quarter closure is a preview, in miniature, of what happens when the region’s single most important north-south link loses capacity even temporarily: it is a reminder to Vancouver residents of exactly why the decades-long fight over replacing the aging twin spans has never really been optional.
ODOT and the City of Vancouver are not hiding how long this will last. Quieter is who bears the cost while it does. Commuters absorbing an extra 25 minutes each way, twice a day, are not a line item in a construction budget. Neither are the businesses along the closure’s ripple effect. KATU’s Sept. 22 reporting on Portland-side businesses near the Rose Quarter found the closure was “putting pressure” on them directly; no outlet has yet published a comparable accounting of the toll on Vancouver’s own retail corridors along Mill Plain or Fourth Plain, even though the city’s own materials point straight at those roads as chokepoints.
For now, the practical guidance from both sides of the river is the same it has been since before Labor Day: avoid the 6:30-to-9 a.m. and 4-to-8:30 p.m. windows if at all possible, check real-time conditions before leaving, and expect the ramps the city named weeks ago — Mill Plain, Fourth Plain, 39th Street, 18th Street, SR-14 and SR-500 — to be where Vancouver feels the closure most. The city’s resources page remains live at cityofvancouver.us, and WSDOT’s regional traffic map is the tool both agencies are steering drivers toward before they commit to a route south.
The closure is scheduled to lift by Oct. 16. Whether that holds, and what three more weeks of a doubled evening commute do to a city that did not choose this closure, is the part of the story still being written.
Sources: KATU, OPB, The Columbian, KPTV, City of Vancouver
