Oregon Transportation Officials: Here’s Some Driving Tunes For When Traffic Stops in Carpocaplyse 2018

Highway department catching up on deferred maintenance between now and the end of summer.

Traffic in Portland's Rose Quarter (Daniel Stindt)
By Nigel Jaquiss

The Oregon Department of Transportation is going to be doing a lot of paving on high volume highways in the metro area between now and the end of summer.

The details of what ODOT is calling BigFixPdx are here.

The agency has pulled together a useful interactive map that will be sobering for any commuter—I-5 south will be closed between the Fremont and Marquam Bridges from July 13 to 20, for instance, and the I-5 southbound ramp to I-84 east will be closed July 8 through July 23 and I-84 westbound ramp to I-5 north will be closed July 25 to Aug. 6.

There are plenty of other projects as well. It's all enough to make you dust off your bicycle or ask your boss if you can telecommute for the rest of the summer.

But for everybody who still has to drive, ODOT has helpfully put together a Spotify playlist of 23 songs the agency is calling Gridlock Grooves.

"If the traffic gets bad for you, tune in, bob your head and sing along. It won't make the traffic go away but it might help you shake those traffic jam blues," the agency said in a statement. "If indeed it's gridlock, you may well be on Road to Nowhere (Talking Heads) and you may be thinking, whatever OregonDOT Don't Stop Me Now (Queen) but soon you'll find yourself Stuck in the Middle (MIKA) and there's No Going Back (Yuno)."

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