Cycling News & Blog Articles

Big crowds flocked to carfree streets in Multnomah Village for Sunday Parkways on September 11th, 2023. (Jonathan Maus – BikePortland)

The City of Portland will put on three Sunday Parkways events this year. The Portland Bureau of Transportation announced the dates and location last Friday.

The events will be held in east Portland on May 19th, the Cully neighborhood on June 16th and in southwest on September 22nd. For the uninitiated, Sunday Parkways are open streets events that began in 2008. We were inspired by the Ciclovias in Bogota and were one of the first cities in North America to launch such an ambitious event. That first year we had just one event and it was a massive hit. PBOT expanded it to three Sundays in 2009 and by 2010 we were doing five events per year — including a route in northwest.

PBOT organized five Sunday Parkways events each year through 2019. Then we skipped two years due to the pandemic and returned with just two events in 2022. We’ve had three events per year since.

Finding funding for Sunday Parkways is a perennial issue. PBOT has had to hold donation drives and plead with City Council to keep it funded. Currently, the events are made possible thanks to grants from Kaiser Permanente and other sponsors. The Portland Clean Energy Fund has also provided a lifeline for the program as Sunday Parkways was part of a $112 million injection into PBOT announced back in December (but still not finalized).

View of the path looking west from N Port Center Way. (Steve – @Intersection911 on X)

People driving cars on what are supposed to be carfree paths for bicycling and walking has become a major problem in Portland in recent years. As tents and other temporary housing structures have sprung up on public right-of-ways adjacent to multi-use paths, it has become increasingly common for people who live in the camps to drive cars right up to their front doors. The presence of cars is unexpected for path users and can obstruct people from safely using these areas.

To deal with this tricky issue, government agencies erect barricades to keep the cars out, but those barricades often end up compromising access for law-abiding users of the paths as well. We saw this happen on the Columbia Slough path in 2022 when Portland Parks & Recreation erected large cement Jersey barriers to keep drivers off the path.

Today I confirmed yet another path where public access has been restricted due to concerns about campers and cars: The “Going to the River” path on Swan Island that opened in 2006 and provides a connection to the Willamette Riverfront via N Going Street and Port Center Way.

Albina Vision Trust Strategic Communications Director JT Flowers (left), along with ODOT Rose Quarter Project Manager Megan Channell and ODOT Urban Mobility Office Director Brendan Finn at an Oregon Transportation Commission meeting in Medford Thursday, March 14th. (Photo via YouTube screenshot)

“The Albina Vision Trust has consistently proven to be both the backbone and the wings behind this project.”

An unlikely partnership between a state agency and a Portland-based nonprofit that could have vast implications for the future of the Rose Quarter took a big step forward last Thursday.

At a meeting of the Oregon Transportation Commission in Medford, Albina Vision Trust and the Oregon Department of Transportation received official approval to develop a work plan for how the future cover over I-5 will be governed. Specifically, the resolution passed unanimously by the five OTC members says that AVT and ODOT now have 60 days to hammer out a plan that determines, “If AVT can have access and rights to the future lease(s) and/or easement(s) for developable air rights on the Project’s highway cover and ownership and development rights for surplus property associated with the Project.” And if current laws and regulations don’t allow AVT to be granted those rights, the plan will determine how to change the law to make it possible.

It’s an unprecedented step that’s likely to put AVT in the driver’s seat of the $450 million investment into lower Albina — the largest federal grant ever received by ODOT — and that sets into motion the largest redevelopment project of its kind in America today.

(Jonathan Maus – BikePortland)

*This post is from Erin Bailie. She writes our New to Portland column. Find previous installments here.

Last week, I went to my first Blazers game. I asked a few folks at Bike Happy Hour for advice on riding to the game and where to lock a bike at Moda Center. Several folks immediately pulled out their phones to show me their favorite routes and parking spots, and I quickly realized that everyone seemed to open a different app to show bicycle navigation around the city. 

There’s not just one way to find your way around Portland, as exemplified in the variety of apps folks referenced at Bike Happy Hour. In today’s post, I’ll share a few tools I’ve found helpful.

A few notes on my approach: 

The top 10.

Why are some places more popular for bicycle users than others? How important is infrastructure versus other factors such as proximity to destinations, connectedness to other infrastructure, and so on? What’s parts of town have the most bicycling hot-spots?

I’ve been poking around the 2023 City of Portland Bicycle Count Report and thought it’d be fun to share the top ten highest traffic locations. So on Sunday I grabbed my 13-year-old son and we visited all 10 locations. I got one of the spots incorrect so I had to roll over there this morning, but otherwise, all the photos (and forthcoming video) were shot on March 17th. These numbers come from a publicly accessible spreadsheet created by the City of Portland.

Check out the top ten below, peruse the area on the Google map, then ask yourself: why do so many people bike here?

This week’s comment came in six days ago, in response to our short post about Governor Kotek ditching regional tolling plans. Jonathan’s post didn’t read any tea leaves or probe the deeper reasoning behind the Governor’s decision—abandoning tolling just seemed like another change flying in on the whirlwind.

(Offhand, to me, it seemed one of a piece with her urban growth boundary loosening, part of her push to incentivize a market-based approach to getting more housing built—let ‘em live further away, and don’t charge ‘em for it!)

WRF, who self-describes as a rare “transportation professional … against tolling in our region,” offered up some some hope in the form of alternatives to tolling, and also a critique of it.

Here are WRF’s ideas:

Welcome to the week. Even though the sun isn’t supposed to last, the good vibes are unstoppable.

Here’s what our community has been talking about for the past seven days…

Putting out fires: Bike advocates and shop owners are worried that a new law in San Francisco aimed at e-bike battery safety has gone too far and will snuff out more than fires. (The San Francisco Standard)

A smarter warning: A new product called Copilot uses a mix of software and AI to go several steps beyond radar detection and sounds like the most advanced rear camera/light warning system on the market. (Ars Technica)

(Jonathan Maus / BikePortland)

What if you and your fellow Portlanders had a direct impact on what city funds were spent on? I’m not talking about lobbying politicians and then hoping they do what you want; I’m talking about true direct democracy where you come up with a project idea, work with your peers to flesh it out, get support for it from a vote of the people, then get it funded and implemented.

That’s the promise of participatory budgeting (PB), and a local effort to have it become an official part of the city of Portland’s budget process launched on Thursday.

The Community Budgeting for All campaign is gathering signatures to get PB on the ballot in November. The effort is being led by nonprofits Next Up, East County Rising, and Participatory Budgeting Oregon and their campaign wants to put at least 2% of the city’s General Fund budget — an estimated $15.6 million — into the hands of the people. Yesterday I interviewed one of PB Oregon’s staffers, Maria Sipin, to learn more about the initiative and how PB is different than the way we currently do things. (Watch our conversation below.)

As a former transportation planner with the Oregon Department of Transportation, Sipin saw first-hand that what gets funded often doesn’t reflect what people on the ground actually want and need. “What I personally like about it is in a PB process, you don’t end up with highway projects… people put forward projects in this process that have never been funded in the past, but should have. It addresses community safety, basic needs and all kinds of things that might have been overlooked.”

Where will the paths take you this weekend? (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

Sun! You want it. We got it.

You also want fun things to do. We got those too…

Climate Curious Happy Hour – 5:30 to 7:30 pm at Upright Brewing (N)
Talk about the big redevelopment of the Lloyd Center with folks in-the-know, with a focus on making sure it makes people and the planet healthier. Panel and Q&A hosted by EcoLloyd. More info here.

Beaverton Farmers Market Ride – 9:30 am at Tigard Public Library (West Side)
A family-friendly ride where I can guarantee a kiddo or two and a 7-mile route led by one of the best people you’ll ever meet. And it’s between a library and a farmers market. It simply doesn’t get better than this! More info here.

Last week Jonathan texted me that he “would really love to see more women using our comments section.”

Little did he know that men and women communicating is something I, for decades, have spent a lot of time thinking about. It probably started with that 1981 Gloria Steinem piece, Men and Women Talking, and continued with the excellent 1990 book by linguist Deborah Tannen, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.

It’s a fascinating topic to me. The wrinkle of internet message boards is that most people comment anonymously, so you don’t know their sex. The structure of a Zoom call changes things too, profoundly, especially in terms of interruption.

My short answer to Jonathan was that more women than he thinks do already comment to BikePortland. Women, like men, can and do pick anonymous, gender-neutral user names. The deeper question for me is, why do we assume that everyone is a man?

And I mean the “we.” Just a couple days ago, an occasional commenter posted on one of our stories. “Oh good, so-and-so posted, I like his comments,” thought I. Meanwhile, I had also just received an email from this person in my home email account—nothing to do with BikePortland. I know this person, she is a woman! But it took me a day before I realized the woman in my email box was the same person in the BikePortland comments, despite the fact that her gender-neutral username was practically the same.

From a road safety protest on SE Division in December 2016. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

I’m still going through the recent bicycle count report published by the Portland Bureau of Transportation this week and there’s something I need to make very clear: The reason more people aren’t biking is not because of some flaw in the idea of bicycling itself or even because of any shortcomings in the network of roads, paths, and lanes that people do it on.

The problem is cars. Too many cars, to be exact. And too many of them driven without regard for others. This isn’t just my opinion, it also happens to be the official stance of the City of Portland.

This problem has always been right in front of our faces but we don’t recognize it as such because it requires us to acknowledge that something we (nearly) all do on a regular basis might actually have negative impacts on our community and our city. Put another way, the problem is us, and that’s the problem. Not only is driving a car something the vast majority of us do and sympathize with, it’s also normalized by trillions of dollars in marketing over the last century as something that is cool, fun, and harmless. When you’re in a car, Big Auto propaganda says, everyone else is the problem. None of that is true of course, but this is America! With enough money and marketing savvy, you can convince people of anything.

But I digress. What I want you take from this post is a clearer understanding of what has happened on Portland streets in the past decade.

Conceptual drawing of cap looking southwest from NE Tillamook toward the river. (Source: ODOT)

Just two days after the Biden Administration announced a $450 million grant to construct highway caps above I-5 through the Rose Quarter, the advisory committee that is largely responsible for making it happen held a meeting. Members of the Oregon Department of Transportation’s Historic Albina Advisory Board (HAAB) gathered on Zoom Tuesday. The group aired feedback on the grant news and watched presentations about the caps and other details from project staff.

HAAB meeting on Zoom with ODOT Director Strickler on bottom right..

I found the meeting very enlightening and figured you might too. Below I’ll share some of the slides and other things I took away from it…

The plan is for one continuous cap (also called a “highway cover”) that would stretch over I-5 from the corner of NE Tillamook and Flint south to NE Weidler (see images). The cap, which is estimated to cost about $700 to $900 million total (about half the project total) would fully restore the street grid of North Flint, Vancouver, and North Williams (north/south) and N Weidler, Broadway, Hancock and Tillamook (east/west). The cap would add about 7 new acres of land to the Rose Quarter.