Sick of taking the long way on Greenwood, Franklin or Revere? Hang tight for ‘Olney’ one more week (sorry). An east-west segment of Olney Avenue, a key arterial in Bend, will be reopening to traffic on Wed, Feb. 11.
Several blocks of the street initially closed in early 2025, including its intersection with NW Wall Street, as part of the Olney Avenue Improvements Project. Intended to make Olney “a safer road to drive, walk, bike and roll” through redesigned sidewalks and bike lanes, the project also included significant work on underground water and sewer infrastructure.
“A lot of that sewer line and water line work took place in that [Olney and Wall] intersection,” said Ryan Oster, Director of Engineering for the City of Bend. But after concluding work there, the real troubles began between the Bend Parkway and First Street.
“The biggest part of the project was working underneath the BNSF railroad,” Oster told the Source. “We had to get a boring machine and bore new channels underneath the railroad track to install new water lines and sewer lines, while keeping the existing ones moving.”
Unexpected geology led to months of delay. “We ran into some really odd rock issues,” Oster explained. “Normally, you go an inch underground in Bend and it’s just solid rock. For some reason under the footprint of the railroad, it turned into really light, soft soil.”
Unlike a firm rock layer, loose soil collapses upon itself during drilling. That created a problem. “We can’t have any ground underneath the tracks collapsing. If those tracks were to move an eighth of an inch…” Oster trailed off, leaving the potentially dramatic consequences of such a mistake to the imagination.
A solution came in the form of what Oster called a “roof” – a semi-circular reinforcement system underneath the tracks, preventing loose soil from spilling and collapsing. “Anything under the roof can move around without impacting anything,” he said.
This careful process of working under the railroad pushed back the project’s completion date, which had been set for October 2025. Additional asphalt work (and another full street closure) in spring 2026 was thought to be necessary, but sunny winter days sped things along. “Fortunately, we found some good weather windows over the month of January,” Oster said.
After the arterial reopens, the City of Bend will observe as traffic patterns “take a couple weeks to normalize,” before “collecting some more data on Greenwood [Avenue] to get a good sense of where people are going,” Oster told the Source, expecting that greater east-west mobility created by the Olney reopening will be “really beneficial to our system as a whole.”
The 2020 Transportation GO Bond, which passed with 58% voter support, created a $190 million budget for citywide infrastructure projects, paid back by taxpayers through staggered increases in property taxes. In 2024, “the annual estimated cost for the average homeowner” was $119, the City stated. The total budget for the Olney improvement project was set at $5,450,000.
Mentioning “more work to do” on the Franklin Avenue underpass in the future, Oster said that city engineers would present those ideas to the City Council in March.
This article appears in the Source February 5, 2026.
MAKE LOCAL JOURNALISM HAPPEN
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
