US Highway 97 is the economic spine of our region, running from Weed and Mount Shasta in Northern California up through the Klamath Basin, Bend, and Madras to The Dalles on the Columbia. When a project could land at more than one place along it, a corridor study compares the candidate sites through the same evidence, on the same terms.
Most site comparisons are a spreadsheet that flatters whichever location someone already preferred. A corridor study is built the other way around. We re-solve the same project at each candidate site, pull the same public sensors for each region, run each through the same method gates, and then measure how stable the ranking actually is. Where the order holds, we say so. Where a small change in the inputs would flip it, we print the flip condition instead of a false winner.
The honest part is the withholding. A corridor study can be release-safe, meaning the pack is sound and each figure is labeled by its method and source, while the ranking itself is not yet stable enough to name a single site. When that happens the study says which sites are in contention, what separates them, and what evidence would settle it. A selection is named only when the ranking holds. This is early work, and it is described that way on every artifact.
The corridor connects very different economies: the Mount Shasta and Siskiyou timber and tourism country, the irrigated Klamath Basin, the fast-growing Bend and Redmond market, the seed and ranch ground around Madras, and the orchards, hydropower, and data centers of The Dalles. A distribution center, a food-processing plant, a data center, or a resort could plausibly go in more than one of them, and the right answer is rarely the site with the biggest headline number. It is the site where the project pencils, the region can absorb it, and the recommendation would survive the first hostile question.
US-97 runs through these counties directly, from the California line to the Columbia.
These counties feed the corridor and share its markets.
The same deliverable stack as any engagement, built for a decision among sites: a report, a one-page brief, a reviewer pack, structured JSON, and a release ruling, plus the candidate comparison, the rank-stability finding, and the flip conditions. You can see the shape of a comparison pack, and what it withholds, in the evidence pack, and follow the flagship build on the US-97 corridor package page.
Weighing sites along the corridor? Tell us the project and the candidate locations, and we will lay out what a corridor study takes, what it can settle now, and what it cannot.
Commission a corridor study