Worst Highway in America

By definition, news is when something unusual happens. “Dog bites man” is not news, but “man bites dog” is.

Why is it, then, that Portland television stations continue to report non-news events?

For example, most mornings I watch a few minutes of TV “news” as I pedal a stationary bicycle. When I do, the talking heads on the TV station report that Interstate 5 is a mess.

How is that news? I-5 is so often jammed that it would only be news if it weren’t jammed.

Note to all Portland businesses, merchants, museums and doughnut shops: Sorry, but I’m not going to Portland unless I absolutely, positively have to. Every time I go there, I-5 is a disaster area. I’m tired of sitting in my car on a freeway and not going anywhere, missing appointments, meetings and events. So, I guess Portland will just have to do without me. I can certainly do without Portland.

Here’s the straw that broke this camel’s back. The other night, our son had received a ticket to a Blazers game through a school promotion. Great, we thought, we’ll just get a few more tickets and make a family outing of it.

Big mistake. Big, expensive mistake.

Patti and the kids met me at work in Salem. We left at 5 p.m., figuring that would give us plenty of time to get to the Rose Garden, which, unfortunately, is in Portland.

Here’s the sad part of the story. It took us 2 hours and 15 minutes to travel the 47 miles from Salem to the Rose Garden. Traffic was backed up from the Highway 217 interchange all the way to the arena. We didn’t just miss the pre-game activities. We missed a big part of the first quarter.

This is a crying shame. We went out of our way to spend a small pile of greenbacks in Portland and we were skunked.

As the old saying goes, “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me a bunch of times and I’m a complete idiot.”

Well, I’m done.

Sure, you say, trying to get in and out of Portland during the afternoon rush hour — what do you expect?

Here’s my answer to that. I’ve driven to Portland in the morning, at noon, mid-afternoon and the evening. I doesn’t make any difference. The odds are that I will end up sitting in a big, fat, whopping traffic jam. And I-205 is just as bad.

I’m not doing it any more. Oh, sure, I’ll have to go there for work or other things, but otherwise, you can include me out. I have other things to do with my time and my money.

I don’t know who’s in charge of keeping traffic moving on the state’s roads. My guess is no one. I seems that we spend enough on gas taxes — 24 cents a gallon — and other taxes that someone in the state bureaucracy would be able to grab a clue and fix I-5 and the other roads that serve the dual purposes of damaging the state’s economy and frustrating the living heck out of its drivers.

And, please, spare me the excuse that I just don’t know about getting around cities. I used to live in Philadelphia and I’ve driven all over the country, from Los Angeles to Boston, and from Florida to Alaska. As far as I’m concerned, Portland is the worst. It’s just a backwater town with lousy roads.

So here’s my plea, which, no doubt, will go unheeded. Someone please fix I-5. It’s bad. Real bad.