NE 21st Avenue looking north across I-84. (Photo: PBOT)
On Wednesday, crews from the Portland Bureau of Transportation placed four large, concrete drums on the southeast corner of the Northeast 21st Avenue overpass of I-84. It’s the exact location where a woman was hit and seriously injured by a car driver while biking in the previously unprotected lane.
In posts on social media, PBOT said the move was aimed at providing “hardening protection for bicyclists.” The bureau added that new signage warning car drivers of a curve in the road and a restriction on truck use on NE 21st Circle is also in the works.
PBOT installed the two-way bike lane with plastic flex-posts (aka delineators”) in 2016. When we reported on the project, commenters predicted that head-on collisions were likely. And that’s exactly what happened on August 31st when the driver of a Honda Civic failed to negotiate the curve, slammed into a woman biking in the opposite direction, and then sped off.
If these concrete drums were in place from the start, that woman would not have been hit. In the video, the driver of the Civic plowed right over the plastic posts as if they were not even there.
Tactical urbanist installation by Block Ops. (Photo: Block Ops)
The unprotected corner in 2016. (Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)
Crews installing the drums on Wednesday, November 8th. (Photo: PBOT)
Looking south at the corner in 2016. (Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)
Another view of the location where the drums have been installed in 2016. (Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)That collision was shocking and terrifying. Video taken by a driver’s dashcam and shared with BikePortland showed that the flex-posts were useless as the driver careened into the bike lane and the impact catapulted the rider into the air — flipping her body head-over-heels two times before she landed on her face on the adjacent sidewalk. The woman suffered gashes requiring stitches on her cheek and eyebrow. BikePortland ultimately removed the video and the story (which included a graphic photo of the victim’s bloodied face) by request of the victim*; but not after it had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. (*The victim only wanted it posted to catch the driver and asked me to remove it all after police apprehended them.)
The collision spurred even greater urgency from the community for protected bike lanes. A week later, a group of guerrilla activists placed concrete curbs in the curve. Those curbs were quickly removed by PBOT and the agency said in a social media post that they were “unauthorized safety hazards.” The collision video also inspired a letter from BikeLoud PDX to PBOT staff and Portland City Council members (dated September 12th) that made the following request: “Use physical protection rather than plastic delineators in new bike lane projects, especially at curbs, corners, or where the speed limit is greater than 20 miles per hour.”
This context is why many Portlanders have taken umbrage at PBOT’s claim in their post yesterday that, “There have not been reported traffic deaths or serious injury crashes at this location.” That statement appears to create a narrative that this wasn’t a reactionary move. As if PBOT would have done it even if there wasn’t a violent, predictable collision caught on video.
Beyond any operational, policy, or budget issues PBOT faces in deciding whether or not to harden bike lanes to defend against increasingly reckless drivers, an additional challenge at this specific location was that it is on an interstate bridge surface. That means the Oregon Department of Transportation needs to be in the loop (since they have jurisdiction over city streets that cross interstate freeways) and that PBOT engineers need to be careful about doing anything that might erode the structural integrity of the bridge — especially by placing heavy objects and/or drilling into the pavement.
I’ve asked PBOT how much the concrete drums weigh, what each of them costs, and whether or not they’d like to clarify their statement about there being no serious injuries at this location. I’ll update this post when I hear back.
