Bridge to Nowhere

Actually, this should probably be entitled the Nowhere Bridge. I'm talking about the Three Cities River Crossing - the bridge that was envisioned to cross the Boise River where Five Mile Rd would extend to, if Five Mile were to extend across the river.

This bridge idea came out of the Bench to Valley Study in the mid 1990's. At the time, the cost was supposed to be $15-20 million, as I recall.

Here we are 15 years later and the bridge is still on the books, but the cost is now anticipated to be $85-92 million in today's dollars. It will be well over $100 million when the time comes to actually build it in 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 years hence.

To gain perspective, the entire ACHD budget for 2009-2010 is around $80 million.

We're going to be discussing this bridge this Wednesday, May 6, 2009 at 10:30am (yes, I know, an inconvenient time but we're mitigating that with having the meeting in an inconvenient room and not taping it). If you want to weigh in on whether or not this project should be pursued, you should call ACHD and leave a message for the commission at 387-6110 or e-mail us at tellus@achd.ada.id.us. Or you could come to the meeting.

The issue is really very simple. Should we as a community continue to believe that we can afford a bridge that exceeds the entire transportation budget of the county in any given year? Or should we just forget about it and concentrate on projects that will actually happen and move traffic?