I-295 Freeway to Boulevard Conversion

[RectoVerso]

Hello! I'll start by stating that I have been catching up and lurking around for the last year or so as my partner and I have become enamored with Portland. We live in San Francisco, visit once or twice a year, and hope to call Portland home one day. We just returned from an extra long weekend (got to take the new direct United flight!) where we biked around a bit and really got an appreciation for how accessible everything is by bike. The biggest barrier was really getting across I-295 and it got us wondering if there has been any discussion around such a conversion of the freeway into a boulevard through the peninsula. I found just one reference online in a Reddit post. So much land is gobbled up by on/off-ramps and the value that could be created by reconstituting the grid and connecting Bayside to Back Cove would seem to support a cost/benefit argument. It's hard to believe this hasn't been seriously considered but curious if there is a history around this topic. Cheers!

 

[NR2Portland]

Nicely said RV! So cool that you got to take advantage of the direct flight- hope that sticks around for the long run. Seems to be a hit so far.
I’m not even close to a traffic expert so I could be way off, but I think (from daily commutes via 295) that there is way too much traffic to turn it into a BLVD with traffic lights and bike/pedestrian crossings. I think a way more expensive but effective change would be burying the highway from Deering Ave to just before Tukeys bridge. Then you worry about flooding and things of that nature so I don’t know if that would even be possible.
I’ve always thought about a better 295 so thanks for bringing this up!

 

[Island Frye]

Nicely said RV! So cool that you got to take advantage of the direct flight- hope that sticks around for the long run. Seems to be a hit so far.
I’m not even close to a traffic expert so I could be way off, but I think (from daily commutes via 295) that there is way too much traffic to turn it into a BLVD with traffic lights and bike/pedestrian crossings. I think a way more expensive but effective change would be burying the highway from Deering Ave to just before Tukeys bridge. Then you worry about flooding and things of that nature so I don’t know if that would even be possible.
I’ve always thought about a better 295 so thanks for bringing this up!

I think the idea would be for traffic to no longer flow through the city, instead to route around on 95 then take the Falmouth connector.

A big part of the reason that people take 295 to get to Brunswick and beyond is because it's currently a couple minutes faster than 95/Connector. Removing even just the middle section, through downtown would significantly increase the time through the city, rerouting traffic around downtown.

The largest, most obvious drawbacks I can come up with are access from the northern suburbs to South Portland, via the bridge, and access to outer Washington Ave from the southern suburbs.

I've also thought it could be an interesting idea to have a pretty significant through-running toll--basically if you go through the 295 southern entrance toll and through a toll reader just before Exit 10 on 295 within 30 minutes of one another, add an additional toll of $5 or $10 to further remove the incentive to take 295 to access points north.

 

[TC_zoid]

Hello! I'll start by stating that I have been catching up and lurking around for the last year or so as my partner and I have become enamored with Portland. We live in San Francisco, visit once or twice a year, and hope to call Portland home one day. We just returned from an extra long weekend (got to take the new direct United flight!) where we biked around a bit and really got an appreciation for how accessible everything is by bike. The biggest barrier was really getting across I-295 and it got us wondering if there has been any discussion around such a conversion of the freeway into a boulevard through the peninsula. I found just one reference online in a Reddit post. So much land is gobbled up by on/off-ramps and the value that could be created by reconstituting the grid and connecting Bayside to Back Cove would seem to support a cost/benefit argument. It's hard to believe this hasn't been seriously considered but curious if there is a history around this topic. Cheers!

Vancouver, B.C. does this. It's a nice city. Lots of residential mid and high rise too.

 

[RectoVerso]

I think the idea would be for traffic to no longer flow through the city, instead to route around on 95 then take the Falmouth connector.

A big part of the reason that people take 295 to get to Brunswick and beyond is because it's currently a couple minutes faster than 95/Connector. Removing even just the middle section, through downtown would significantly increase the time through the city, rerouting traffic around downtown.

The largest, most obvious drawbacks I can come up with are access from the northern suburbs to South Portland, via the bridge, and access to outer Washington Ave from the southern suburbs.

I've also thought it could be an interesting idea to have a pretty significant through-running toll--basically if you go through the 295 southern entrance toll and through a toll reader just before Exit 10 on 295 within 30 minutes of one another, add an additional toll of $5 or $10 to further remove the incentive to take 295 to access points north.

Traffic could still flow through the city but it would be a bit of a slog, as you stated, if the intention is to just pass through (how many people are going to Brunswick?). I'm less familiar with the jobs distribution around the metro but it would seem like a significant percentage of commuters are either starting or ending their commutes on the peninsula so the traffic just passing through may not be so significant, maybe? As an outsider who lives in a place where our bridges are heavily tolled it's hard to believe that the opposite is true in Portland where commuters are tolled in the 'burbs and yet it's free and more convenient to cut right through the city.

NR2Portland, I also like the idea of a buried freeway with a lid but that does seem incredibly expensive and would cause years of disruption. The effect would essentially create the same condition as a freeway removal for years only to re-induce demand. This kinda sorta happened in Seattle when they removed their viaduct highway along the Puget Sound coastline while they developed a new tunnel bypass. There was about a month before the tunnel opened and traffic was nowhere near the apocalypse that was predicted and many argued that the tunnel was never necessary after spending over $3 billion.

The Reddit post suggested that the traffic numbers might support such a conversion but it would be interesting to see how updated traffic numbers compare.

 

[RectoVerso]

Vancouver, B.C. does this. It's a nice city. Lots of residential mid and high rise too.

Vancouver is an interesting case in that they never really bought into the Robert Moses philosophy of tearing up neighborhoods for freeways. The city doesn't have freeways anywhere near the core, allowing the grid to distribute traffic - and this was even before they built their trains.

Seattle, San Francisco, and Providence are three excellent examples where freeways were removed to better connect neighborhoods and waterfronts. I've always been enamored with Seattle's early vision for connecting their downtown with the Lake Union waterfront. Imagine extending Back Cove Park into Bayside and surrounding it in new mixed use development!

 

[cneal]

There's actually a serious financial reckoning coming in Augusta w/r/t the future of Interstate 295 in greater Portland – it's been the subject of extensive discussion at PACTS, the regional transportation financing agency, over the past couple of years. Basically, we have a highway that was built in the 1970s, under design standards that have long since been debunked as unsafe. Now, virtually all of the bridges and overpasses between South Portland and Brunswick are nearing the ends of their lives and will need to be replaced within the next ten years.

Andrew Bickmore, MaineDOT's Chief Operating Officer, admitted at the Oct. 7, 2025 PACTS Regional Transportation Advisory Committee meeting that Interstate 295 in the greater Portland area alone has an unfunded capital needs backlog of roughly $250 million (which is probably an underestimate given recent construction cost inflation), and that MaineDOT does not have a financial plan for funding those needs unless taxpayers cough up with significant increases to the state's gas taxes or tolls.

You've probably noticed that a lot of those bridge replacements in places like Falmouth and Freeport are already underway, and they're already draining away capital funds from the entire rest of the state – MaineDOT doesn't even have money to finish a bunch of basic paving projects they'd hoped to complete this summer.

Incredibly, though, the agency's leadership is trying to act as though that money is just going to appear out of nowhere for them: they're proceeding with multiple eight-figure bridge replacements this summer, even though they admit they don't have money to maintain the rest of the highway.

It looks like their strategy is to play chicken with the state legislature – to deny that the problem exists, then blackmail lawmakers for hundreds of millions of dollars in tax increases with the threat that MaineDOT will need to close down the highway if they don't pay up.

Of course, those aren't the only choices. If it were converted into a basic two- to three-lane limited-access boulevard through the Portland area, it could accommodate a lot more traffic, with dramatically fewer crashes and congestion issues, at a much lower cost to taxpayers.

If MaineDOT were run by more competent people, we'd be talking about those other options right now to avoid a billion-dollar shakedown later.

But the current commissioner, Dale Doughty, has been completely out to lunch on this. He's a 20th-century highway nostalgist and absolutely does not want to admit that, under his leadership, the state can't afford to patch together Interstate 295. But the general consensus is that he's way out of his depth in the leadership role he's been promoted into. At the end of the day, Doughty can't conjure money out of nowhere.

The state's bondholders, who finance MaineDOT's projects to the extent that Maine's taxpayers can pay them back for it, are already sounding alarm bells that MaineDOT is headed for insolvency, so state lawmakers are going to have to do something about it sooner or later (and we'd all be better off if it were sooner).

 

[nomc]

Basically, we have a highway that was built in the 1970s, under design standards that have long since been debunked as unsafe.

If it were converted into a basic two- to three-lane limited-access boulevard through the Portland area, it could accommodate a lot more traffic, with dramatically fewer crashes and congestion issues, at a much lower cost to taxpayers.

Is there any place I can read more about these? No doubting you, just want to learn.

 

[Still Tom Nevers]

Of course, those aren't the only choices. If it were converted into a basic two- to three-lane limited-access boulevard through the Portland area, it could accommodate a lot more traffic, with dramatically fewer crashes and congestion issues, at a much lower cost to taxpayers.

Do we want to accommodate more traffic? To me, the benefit of removing 295 seems to be diverting through traffic and thus eliminating exhaust, particulate, and noise pollution in addition to stitching the city back together.

 

[cneal]

AASHTO is the generally accepted design guide. I should note that AASHTO's guidance is also considered out of date by a lot of professional transportation engineers, since AASHTO's guidelines are rooted in a 20th-century approach that produced a highway system that's far less safe than roads in other countries. Nevertheless: AASHTO's "A Policy on Design Standards Interstate System" (January 2005) states that “as a rule, minimum spacing should be [1 mile] in urban areas and [3 miles] in rural areas, based on crossroad to crossroad spacing."

The distance between the Fore River Parkway interchange and the Congress/Park interchange is just 1000 feet; Congress/Park to Forest Ave is 0.9 miles; Forest to Franklin is 2800 feet (0.5 miles).

The more crucial measurement is "ramp spacing" – the distance from one on/off ramp to the next. If there's adequate ramp spacing, drivers have plenty of time and space to merge into traffic at an adequate speed or decelerate safely onto an off-ramp. As anyone who's driven it knows, Interstate 295 does not have adequate ramp spacing.

The Federal Highway Administration has a Guidelines for Ramp and Interchange Spacing manual: https://cmfclearinghouse.fhwa.dot.gov/studydocs/nchrp_rpt_687.pdf. The recommended distance between the end of one on-ramp and the beginning of the next off-ramp is 1,600 to 2,000 feet:

Note that this standard assumes that there's only one "weaving" lane that drivers coming onto the interstate need to merge from. On Tukey's Bridge, if you're coming northbound from Washington Avenue onto the I-295 mainline, you need to merge across two lanes. And there's only 960 feet between the end of the on-ramp on the south side of the bridge to the beginning of the off-ramp on the north side.

But there's also the Forest Ave. cloverleaf, where there's about 360 feet of weaving lane where drivers coming onto the highway have to merge with other drivers who are slowing down to come onto the off-ramp. The distance between the Congress SB on-ramp and the Fore River Parkway off-ramp is a little better – 600 feet – but it also violates the federal standards.

Read through these guides one and you'll easily find at least a dozen other examples of how I-295 in Portland violates the federal guidelines – the curves on the Congress, Franklin and Forest loop ramps are way too tight, the on/off ramps at the Washington Avenue exit are too short, etc., etc.

These spacing standards are there because merging to/from exit ramps is one of the biggest hazards to public safety on a highway, where you have slower-speed traffic mixing with higher-speed traffic on the mainline. Tukey's Bridge is one of the worst high-crash locations in Maine – and MaineDOT designed it to be that way.