Cycling News & Blog Articles

Graphic from the StreetsPDX website.

StreetsPDX is up and running! And to be honest, I’ve got mixed feelings.

All that information I spent years and hundreds of hours poking around internet for—street classifications, the public works review process, early assistance, required development improvements—is now conveniently and attractively packaged in one location. Hey, I had to earn that knowledge the hard way! Now, any Joe Blow can easily access it.

Joking aside, StreetsPDX (formerly called Streets 2035) is great. A web page for people who wonder how decisions about using the right-of-way are made. Why no street trees here? Can’t a sidewalk go there? How about a median?

It’s a decision framework that establishes priorities for what goes in the right-of-way. It’s audience, the people who would care about any of this, are mainly city employees, developers and neighborhood advocates. But the site is so well-designed that I think it could be handy for a lot of people, even just as a nice map.

Yes, the transformation of North Willamette Boulevard is something I’m very excited about. And yes, I’ll admit it’s partly because it’s a key bike street in my neighborhood and my family, friends, and I will be among the many people who use it.

I know I’ve done two posts about it in the past few months — one about newly released designs, the other about some project elements that will break ground this year — but it’s time for another. Why? Because at last night’s monthly meeting of the Bicycle Advisory Committee (BAC), Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) Capital Project Manager David Backes shared a sneak peek of newer “60%” designs and overlayed them on a Google Map to give us a detailed look at what’s coming.

Backes (who happens to live in St. Johns and rides/walks/drives on Willamette a lot) said the designs and map he shared last night were completed a few weeks ago and haven’t been made public yet. I was watching the meeting and happened to record my screen while he explained the designs (and rationale behind them) to BAC members. Beyond the exciting changes Backes revealed, it’s a fascinating look at some of the thought processes PBOT goes through to arrive at design decisions.

What we see in the video above is Backes going through major elements of the project starting from the corner of N Willamette and Rosa Parks.

At Rosa Parks, he reveals PBOT will actually widen the road in order to make room for full concrete protection of the bikeway. Then he moves north to the expansive intersections of N Liberty/Oatman and N Vincent/Saratoga — both of which will be severely necked down as part of this project. Next stop is the intersection of Willamette and Bryant, where big changes are in store for the bus stops and the awkward diagonal connection with a major east-west greenway. Then we hear about changes at N Chautauqua, where PBOT will add curb extensions to shorten crossing distances and cut into the bluff for the bike lane. Further north, at N Olin and Harvard we learn about plans to close Olin to drivers. Backes also shares plans for the bike lane at the University of Portland entrance and N Ida just beyond the railroad cut.

Looking northwest on NE 33rd where PBOT has installed a new, two-way bikeway between Mason (on the left) and Skidmore (upper right) along Wilshire Park. (Photos: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

Over the weekend I finally got a chance to take a closer look at the new protected bike crossing and bike lanes on the Mason-Skidmore Greenway. It’s a welcome addition that makes getting across Northeast 33rd much easier and helps make an important connection in the bike network.

To refresh your memory, the Portland Bureau of Transportation took advantage of a repaving project on NE 33rd over the summer (the same one that led to the big bike lane removal controversy about one mile north) to make improvements for bicycling. With an east-west neighborhood greenway route planned on NE Mason and Skidmore, PBOT needed to do something about the offset crossing of Mason where it dead-ends into Wilshire Park at 33rd and they wanted to create a stronger connection between existing greenways on 32nd and 37th. Their solution was to put two separate projects together and do the 33rd crossing and the Skidmore bike lanes at the same time.

For the crossing, PBOT has installed a mix of signal upgrades, colored bike lanes, and concrete medians and curbs to create a short section of two-way protected bike lanes on the east side of 33rd between Mason and Skidmore. PBOT then continued the two-way bike lanes one block on Skidmore to 34th, where they dump back into a shared-street environment via a sharrow marking.

PBOT still needs to install some sort of signal actuators for bike riders to cross 33rd, but otherwise the new infrastructure worked well during my short visit. It was intuitive and I felt relatively safe.

Perrin Smith in The Shed. (Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland) Inset map: Smith’s Strava heat map.

43-year-old North Portland resident Perrin Smith has done something extraordinary. In a quest that was part of his life for nearly three years, he walked every single street and alleyway in the City of Portland. That’s about 2,100 miles of pavement, gravel, grass, mud, and sidewalks.

Born and raised in rural New Jersey, he “escaped” the East Coast and came to Portland in 2006 after graduating from Northern Arizona University. A veteran of competitive running, Smith was geared up for a big season in 2020 when Covid hit and everything changed.

“I was bummed and really needed something to do,” he told me in an interview Monday for the BikePortland Podcast. “I started following people on Instagram who were running every single street and it looked like fun. And I thought, ‘Sure. Why not? I’ll do it’.” (Smith was inspired by Rickey Gates, an author and notable endurance runner who popularized the “Every Single Street” movement.)

Smith fired up his Strava app and, since he was still in competitive-mode, started his challenge running all the miles. When an injury struck, he switched to walking and the real journey began. “I started to realize that I liked walking even more, because I was going slower. I was stopping to take photos, I was looking at graffiti, or someone’s weird artwork in their front yard. And I just I kind of slowed down life and I looked around more, which is not something that I ever did. I was always so focused on running, but it became more about exploring and learning.”

Yes, it happens to kids on bikes too.

There was the usual anger and frustration when Rob Galanakis shared an incident of driver road rage with a group of bike advocates online last Wednesday. Portland bike riders have become numb to the bad behavior and disrespect shown to them by many drivers. But Rob’s story was different: He was not only raged at, but physically assaulted by a driver — and it happened as he led a weekly “bike bus” ride!

Bike buses are group bike rides to school where kids (and some parent leaders) meet at pre-determined spots and ride to school together. Rob leads the Glencoe Bike Bus, which swings by several schools in southeast Portland.

Last Wednesday Rob posted to the BikeLoud PDX Slack looking for advice. He wanted to know how best to follow up after experiencing road rage on his ride. “We had a driver tailing within a couple feet and honking… He was yelling he’s a special ed teacher and was late,” Rob wrote. “He got out of his car, grabbed my bike, threw it down, and tried to rush back into his car and drive past me.”

Rob, the kids, and a few other parents were riding north on SE 61st Avenue and were about to cross E Burnside when he first heard the honking from behind. He immediately swung into action and engaged the driver in an attempt to de-escalate the situation. Rob credits his experience doing “corking” (when riders stand in front of drivers at intersections to let large groups pass through intersections together) for giving him the training that led to a mostly positive outcome on Wednesday.

It was a short comment, but it had the urgency of an epiphany. And it was thought-provoking.

I spent a lot of minutes wondering if the comment was just simple, or if it crossed over into being simplistic. I mean, did these stroads ever work well? Maybe when they were first built? I ask because the neighborhood I grew up in, in another city, half a century ago, is silly with four-lane roads, and they were safe for a kid to walk and even bike on. I walked to school on them, crossing at the light was not a problem. Drivers stopped at red lights, driving like an idiot was unusual.

Here’s the comment that sent me down memory lane. Fred wrote it, in response to another commenter, under last week’s comment of the week:

What you’re missing here is how the street design affords – and actually rewards – aggressive driving behavior.

Because four-lane urban highways are ubiquitous in Portland and the USA generally, many drivers today expect to be able to speed around cars that are obeying the speed limit – and there are absolutely no repercussions for bad behavior. In fact, there are rewards: drive dangerously, with no regard for anyone outside of your vehicle, and you get where you’re going faster.

Welcome to the week.

Here are the most notable stories our community came across in the past seven days…

Blazing a trail for US cycling: American crit racing owes a huge debt to teams like the Miami Blazers, who are adding excitement and fresh energy to the sport, and who also happen to be the most diverse team in professional cycling. (Rouleur)

Dead weight on cities: It gives me warm fuzzies to know that the elimination of minimum car parking rules has become a mainstream idea and now cities that don’t do it are the weird ones. (NPR)

Better bike lanes coming soon! (Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

The much-anticipated North Willamette Boulevard Active Transportation Corridor project  won’t be finished until 2026. While it’s a buzzkill to wait a few more years for three new miles of physically-protected bike lane between North Rosa Parks Way and Richmond Ave, we don’t have to wait much longer to realize many of its benefits.

The reason for the long timeframe between public outreach (summer 2021) and completion (2026) of this project is because it was mostly funded ($4.5 of its $6.1 million price tag) from federal grants. All that US DOT red tape takes a long time to cut through. But the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) often tries advance projects like this as quickly as possible, and in this case their opportunism means we’ll actually be riding on new, safer bike lanes before the end of this year!

PBOT says they’ll take advantage of a repaving project slated for this spring on Willamette from Portsmouth (at the Chiles Center) to N Carey (entrance to Peninsula Crossing Trail at “the cut”) to re-stripe the road in the way that mimics the dimensions for the 2025 project. In other words, instead of the narrow, door-zone bike lane we have now, they’ll replace the striping with a 10-foot wide bike lane (seven-feet and a three-foot buffer) and two, 10-foot wide general lanes. Doing this now means they won’t have to grind off paint and damage the new pavement later on.

The first day of the new year following a regular Oregon legislative session is always fun because that’s typically when new laws go into effect. In 2023, several notable transportation-related laws were passed and are now laws of the land. I’d been meaning to round them up when, lo and behold, the Oregon Department of Transportation sent out a press release today with a handy summary.

ODOT framed the new laws as important progress for road safety. And I agree with them! Three of them in particular are safety-related laws you should be aware of. And a fourth is more of a technical policy change that will have safety implications down the road.

Below (via the ODOT press release) are four noteworthy new laws now in effect in Oregon that will impact our streets:

I really like the bicycling under the influence law changes. Whenever the legislature recognizes the vast difference between cars and bicycles in terms of their respective ability to do harm to others, it’s a win for everyone. A similar line of thinking applied to the fight to change the stop sign law for bicycles (a.k.a. “Idaho Stop”). Since bicycle riders have such a different vehicle and operational context, the thinking went, why should they be required to do the same behavior as car drivers at stop signs?

Ride graphic from Warpaint Mag on Instagram.

A ride in Portland on Saturday will be a show of support for Palestinians and their ongoing struggle against Israel. The Gaza Sunbirds Solidarity Ride will coincide with dozens of similar rides across America and the globe. The rides are being coordinated by Native Women Ride: Indigenous Cycling Collective and were inspired by Gaza Sunbirds, a team of para-cyclists based in the Gaza Strip who are raising money for war victims.

The local organizer of the ride is Ruandy Albisurez of Warpaint Mag, a Portlander we profiled in February last year.

Albisurez says the idea behind the ride is to, “Bring people together in a peaceful manner in solidarity with the Gaza Sunbirds and the Palestinian people, as we continue to advocate for a permanent ceasefire, and an end to the occupation.” The ride will also aim to raise funds for three Palestinians living in Portland who are helping families flee Gaza.

Saturday’s ride is billed as an easy, family friendly event open to everyone. The route will leave from Irving Park in northeast Portland and take participants on a 5-6 mile loop. The ride meets up at the south end of Irving Park at 1:00 pm and rolls out at 1:40 pm. Expect about an hour ride at a family pace where no one gets dropped. For more information, see Warpaint’s post on Instagram or the Shift Calendar listing.

(Photo: BikePortland)

By Matt Kalinowski. Matt is a writer and publicist who lives in Portland. He bikes for fun, exercise and convenience — very slowly and safely — on a hulking, 1965 Sears Spaceliner.  

Over a dozen European countries require pedestrians wear reflectors at night. When implemented, statistics universally show a 30–50% reduction in pedestrian fatalities.

There are certain statistical constants in human behavior. Worldwide, pretty much 75% of pedestrian traffic deaths occur at night, for obvious reasons — people are difficult to see at night. Of course, that 75% rate will vary depending on how many pedestrians are typically out at night, how many streetlights are installed, speed limits, area of sampling, etc. In Portland, a notoriously early town with low speed limits, around 50% of pedestrian fatalities happen at night or low-light conditions (and every Portlander knows “low light conditions” can mean high noon).

Another key Portland statistic is that — according to advocacy group BikeLoud PDX which analyzed Portland Police Bureau data — 38% of pedestrians killed by a car are intoxicated, crossing mid-block, ignoring do-not walk lights, or not yielding to cars as required by law. In other words — drivers were not necessarily at fault. “The top causes of pedestrian deaths are mistakes made by sober, everyday drivers,” said Vivek Jeevan, co-founder of BikeLoud PDX. No matter how experienced, careful and aware a driver is, they can’t avoid pedestrians they can’t see.

The detour means bike riders will need to merge across these lanes on Highway 30 into that left turn lane to get up to the St. Johns Bridge.

The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) plans to close NW Bridge Avenue for six months starting Monday, January 8th. The closure will impact bicycling and other vehicle access to the St. Johns Bridge and will increase freight truck traffic on N Lombard between Kenton and St. Johns.

The closure of the southern section of NW Bridge between the west end of the St. Johns Bridge and Highway 30 will allow ODOT crews to address a persistent problem of landslides on the hillside above the road. We covered a rockfall that closed the street for a few months back in 2022. ODOT says there’s been about one major rockfall a year for the past five years.

The planned detours (see maps below) will impact bicycle riders in two major ways.

First, if you are riding north on Hwy 30 and want to get up onto the St. Johns Bridge, instead of using the signal south of the bridge to get onto the southern section of NW Bridge Ave, you’ll have to bike one additional mile north. The detour will take you under the St. Johns Bridge and then you’ll need to merge over two lanes of Hwy 30 (and its 45 mph speed limit) to use the left-turn signal that will get you onto the northern side of NW Bridge. (And similarly, if you’re on the St. Johns Bridge and want to go south (toward downtown) on Highway 30, you’ll be routed north on NW Bridge Ave and will need to ride an additional mile.)

I’m trying really hard to look back at 2023 with a smile, like this person did on the Cat Ride during Pedalpalooza on June 29th. (Photos: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

Turmoil and turnover at the transportation bureau, a change in Portland’s bike-friendly narrative, advocacy to be reckoned with, a stronger community — these are just some of the phrases that describe 2023 from my perspective.

After going through the past 12 months of Front Page stories (all 750 of them), I’ve got a pretty good sense of where we were. Where we’re going? That’s anyone’s guess; but this recap of the big stories and ideas should at least make your guess an educated one.

So settle cozy up and settle in for a look back at my big takeaways from 2023…

Just three months into the year we received data from the Portland Bureau of Transportation that validated hunches: bike traffic counts were down significantly in 2022 compared to previous years. Even though the decline mirrored other cities and reflected historic shifts in work commutes, it was no easier to stomach. It was also not easy to explain. I had my explanation, PBOT’s chief bike planner had his, and we heard from hundreds of readers. There’s simply no simple explanation, and we can only hope the changes needed for a riding rebound aren’t nearly as complicated.

2019 rendering of skate park and plaza as seen from NW Everett.
(Image: DAO Architecture)

“The skatepark near the Steel Bridge will be a world class attraction.”

The Portland Parks & Recreation (PP&R) bureau will use $15 million in Parks System Development Charges (fees paid by developers) to build a skatepark near the Steel Bridge just west of Waterfront Park. The news was announced this morning by Parks Commissioner Dan Ryan, who said the investment will be enough to “fully fund” the Steel Bridge Skatepark.

The site has been eyed by advocates since 2001 when Portland’s first skatepark was built at Pier Park in St. Johns. The idea for a park in the 35,000 square-foot parcel bound by NW 1st, Everett, and Naito Parkway was first formalized as the “crown jewel” of 19 facilities in Portland’s 2008 Skatepark System Plan. In 2011, Portland-based DAO Architecture developed a plan for the site (available here) under the guidance of the City of Portland and an advisory committee. BikePortland has covered this project several times since an effort to re-launch the idea was first announced in early 2019.

At least two previous attempts to build this park fell through, but it seems the urgency around downtown revitalization — combined with growing popularity in skating since the pandemic — was enough to finally get it over the hump this time around. Beyond the need for funding, the project is additionally complex because of overlapping jurisdictional boundaries. The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) manages the city streets, TriMet light rail vehicles use one of the overpasses, Union Pacific Railroad operates a line nearby, PP&R is in charge of the riverfront paths, and the Oregon Department of Transportation owns the ramps on and off of the Steel Bridge.

(Photos via Nextdoor)

Portland’s motor vehicle menace spread to someone’s living room in the Lents neighborhood in the early morning hours of December 30th. According to a post on Nextdoor shared by Portlander Lucy Dao yesterday, her family is now homeless because a driver piloted their Mercedes SUV into the front of their home.

“A drunk driver and three passengers drove their SUV through our fence and a tree into our living room, bathroom and barely missing my brother’s bedroom right where the head of his bed lay. Luckily no one was injured and no one was in the living room when it happened,” states a post on GoFundMe where the family has raised over $3,200 so far.

Photos show that the car came to rest inside the home and did extensive damage to several walls. The driver and passengers allegedly fled the scene and the family faces thousands of dollars in repairs and months of alternative housing.