Transportation officials urge drivers to make alternate plans during I-5 lane closures in Portland

If you live in the Portland-metro area, you might’ve heard about the plan to improve and expand I-5 through the Rose Quarter. On Friday night, that stretch of freeway through the Rose Quarter will be closed as the project begins in earnest for about five weeks.

Rose Gerber is the public outreach and media manager for the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project with the Oregon Department of Transportation. We get details from her about the scope of the project, how it will likely affect traffic patterns in the coming weeks, and what ODOT and Portland transportation managers are doing to try to mitigate delays and encourage drivers to choose other routes and travel methods during these major closures.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Geoff Norcross: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Geoff Norcross in for Dave Miller. Are you ready for this? Interstate 5 southbound will close in one of its busiest stretches through the Rose Quarter in Portland beginning tomorrow night. The highway is expected to stay closed 24/7 for the next five weeks. Here to talk more about the project and the impact it’ll have on our lives is Rose Gerber. She is ODOT’s Public Outreach Manager for the project, and she joins us now. Rose, welcome to Think Out Loud.

Rose Gerber: Hi, Geoff, thanks for having me.

Norcross: You ready for this? You feeling OK?

Gerber: As ready as we can be.

Norcross: Yeah, for sure. So what actually is going to happen to I-5 southbound there at the Rose Quarter over the next five weeks?

Gerber: So we are going to be replacing the concrete surface of the road there that is last replaced in 1985. It’s well past its 25-year lifespan. It’s going closer to 40 now, and there are significant potholes, cracks, and damage to the surface that we need to repair to keep that road safe, and prepare it for the remainder of the project. We’re fortunate to have this work part of the Rose Quarter project so that it can get taken care of as it’s been long overdue.

Norcross: How did you decide it had to happen now in late summer 2026? Why is this a good time of year for it?

Gerber: That’s a good question. So, we are looking for windows that are continuous between holidays and special events in the city. And the chosen time is the only five-week window that is compatible with the holiday and special event restrictions. And then we also really need to do the work during the dry season so that the concrete can cure, and with our construction schedule, needing to get work done on the kind of the road prior just to set this work up needed to be completed.

So we are really kind of threading a needle with work that needed to be done prior to this work, dancing around some of those special events and holidays I mentioned, and this is where we landed, recognizing there’s never a good time to do a large closure like this, as we do need to fix the road in 2027 on the northbound side. We will fortunately be doing a little earlier in the summer, with that one shooting for July. So hopefully not interrupting some of the return to school activity that will be happening this time around.

Norcross: Yeah, and we’ll talk more about that other phase that we’re going to get into next year. But for this part of it, could you give me a sense of the safety problem here? What might have happened if this work was put off any longer?

Gerber: Well, as this, we call bridge deck or concrete layer ages, the cracks and ruts, they’ll get water in it or there’ll be a freeze cycle. And this is, as a bridge, it has a rebar and concrete underneath the concrete that starts to deteriorate as erosion happens. And the top of the concrete, about four inches of concrete there, delaminates and it can create hazards like pieces of concrete coming off potentially and causing incidences for vehicles.

It’s similar, I think it was 2024, a situation like that happened in this stretch or near it that caused emergency shutdown of I-5, similar to what we’re gonna need to do here but unplanned. And caused quite some backups during rush hour. And thankfully, we’re able to patch it up and fix it fairly quickly, but if you’re on the ground, you could see a hole up through the deck.

So we’re always examining and making sure that these roads are safe and doing our inspections, but we are only going to experience more frequent repairs like that one and the roadwork that we need to do. And since it’s overdue and we have the budget with this project to do it, we’re striking while the iron’s hot.

Norcross: Why does the highway, at least the southbound part, have to be closed 24/7? Why couldn’t you do it piecemeal and leave at least a lane open through this time?

Gerber: Sure. So we looked at different options to avoid this long closure. In the last three years, we’ve really been diligently kind of exploring how to do this the quickest, most efficient way. We looked at weekend closures and single lane closures, all those options would have taken significantly longer, so we’re talking multiple weekends or multiple summers and cost more taxpayer dollars. This option saves us up to $9 million compared to the other ones that we looked at.

It also results in a higher quality road that lasts longer. With that continuous work, the concrete will cure uninterrupted with vibrations from traveling cars next to it. It also keeps our crews safer. If you’ve driven this stretch, you’ll see how narrow it is. It’s about 38 feet, you can feel the vibration of the traffic as you’re standing on that bridge deck. We need to keep our crew safe, and to be able to do this work efficiently we are also very mindful of how little space we have to work in there.

Norcross: Rose, this is where the rubber really hits the road for a lot of people. What kind of impacts on traffic are you anticipating?

Gerber: Yeah, so we are expecting some of the worst traffic this region has seen in some time. We expect traffic delays and unpredictable travel times on many routes in the city, up to two to three times longer, potentially, more than normal with congestion possibly extending into Washington by the Interstate Bridge. Now, we want to be clear, when we model this, this is if nobody changes their travel patterns that are currently in place. And so part of our messaging that we’ve been putting out there for a while now is we want folks to plan ahead and think about how they could, if they have the flexibility, consider other forms of transportation or other travel options during this time like TriMet, carpooling, transit, etc., because the more folks who have the flexibility to do that or even stay home or work remote, they create more space on the system for the folks who don’t have that flexibility to, they need to travel through this area. So we’ve seen with other large closures that when people make those choices and are able to relieve some of the pressure on the congestion by traveling at different times or changing an appointment, etc., that congestion can ease and not be as worse as expected.

Norcross: I know that PBOT and TriMet and other partners are doing their part to alleviate the pain for everybody. Can you talk about how people can access resources and get information so that they can make plans and maybe get around this problem a little bit?

Gerber: Absolutely. We’ve really wanted to work with our partners who are doing an excellent job of helping us get the word out, to create resources for travelers during this time. So the first place you can look is i5rosequarter.org. On that homepage, you’ll find all kinds of resources, from a business toolkit to a travel options page where you can explore resources from all our project partners from CTRAN to TriMet to Streetcar. There are a lot of resources for how to map your trip on transit.

Shift Your Trip is, you mentioned the city getting the word out. PBOT created a page called Shift Your Trip where you can really learn about their resources for travelers during this time and how to access different resources for biking, walking, etc. and how to learn about how PBOT’s doing, hopefully enhancing safety on local streets during this time. So I would check Shift Your Trip, I’d check i5rosequarter.org.

And finally, TriMet has a plan your trip app right on their homepage that is really great for helping folks figure out how to access the train if they haven’t been using TriMet much these days. This is a great opportunity to try it because the train is one of those few ways of getting around during closure where you’re not going to be hitting that congestion because of the nature of the train.

Norcross: Could this project take more than five weeks?

Gerber: With closures like this, there’s always the possibility that an unexpected disruption could happen. We’ve been planning to make sure that we’re minimizing what those disruptions could cause. So weather barring in a major weather event, or an earthquake or one of those things that could delay us, there is a lot of mitigation efforts we’re doing to keep ourselves on schedule. We’re working 24/7, as you mentioned earlier. We’re staging tow trucks and incident response vehicles around the area to make sure that we’re able to respond to incidents quickly and clear them from the road. And we are also keeping extra maintenance crews on hand to fix equipment should it fail, and we hope to get this done under five weeks if we can.

Norcross: Well, there’s me being the eternal optimist. Could it possibly take less than five weeks?

Gerber: You’re with us in the eternal optimism. We have a good crew. We have great engineers and we’re really hoping that we do come in under that mark, but we need to give ourselves that cushion and that’s why we give ourselves the five weeks that has contingency built into it, right? The unexpected. So we’re hoping it’s smooth sailing and that we can get folks traveling back to their normal routes and travel times.

Norcross: Rose Gerber, thank you so much for this and best of luck.

Gerber: Thank you so much, Geoff. Appreciate you having us on.

Norcross: Rose Gerber is with ODOT. She’s the Public Outreach and Media Manager for the I-5 Rose Quarter Improvement Project. You can find all of OPB’s reporting on that project at OPB.org.

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