Commuter blues

OK, my day (and many days previous) was made tedious and complicated by the construction on Portland's many streets and highways.  Basically, I've never seen so many projects going on in the central city at once as I have right now.  It seems like every turn I take is affected by some construction or another.

There are no less than two projects on NE Sandy Blvd, holding up traffic, and as it affected me this morning: the bus.  Not to stop there, all the busses that travel across the Burnside bridge are re-routed to another bridge, as the Burnside is out of commission for a while.  The bus I was on had to travel to the Morrison bridge, and then backtrack to Burnside where it would have been had it crossed its regularly scheduled bridge.  Needless to say, I was detained on the bus for much longer than I had planned.

West Burnside is closed in the one place that's truly inconvenient, going up the west hills.  Actually, the closing is intermittent, but in the mean time there's only one lane being shared by east and westbound traffic.  Considering there are only, like, four corridors over the west hills into downtown, I'm sure this stops things up a bit.

Not to mention that Front street (ok, ok.  Naito Parkway) has been bottled up for the last few months, and is only going southbound.

You'd think that the city would coordinate and plan this a bit better.  Perhaps not schedule too many projects that affect any particular area of the city all at once.  The list of projects currently going on in the city is truly astounding.  What kind of Federal grants did they have to pork out to get all this funding?