Jennifer Anderson
The Portland Tribune
The unexpected downpour this week didn’t throw Eva Frazier for a loop at all.
The 24-year-old snapped on her bike fenders, zipped up her blue jacket and rode her bike over the Hawthorne Bridge into downtown, the route she takes nearly every day.
Thousands of cyclists throughout town also were unfazed by the weather, pedaling furiously in a bike lane or along with cars, trucks and buses in the rush of midmorning traffic.
This is Portland, after all, where there certainly is an abundance of fair-weather riders but also a serious collective of bike commuters who don’t let a little precipitation get in their way.
If the city has its way, that number of regular riders will grow exponentially, building on the momentum that already exists.
“We want to make Portland a world-class cycling city,” says the city’s bicycle coordinator, Roger Geller, who’s leading the effort to update Portland’s 11-year-old Bicycle Master Plan.
“If you look at what other cities have done – the investments they’ve made, the quality of their facilities and way they’ve integrated it into all forms of transportation and land-use planning – we still have a pretty good ways to go.”
A lot of people, however, feel excluded by this line of thought and think the city shouldn’t be in the business of funding bike infrastructure improvements.
“If people want special amenities for bikes, they need to find a way to fund them,” says Craig Flynn, a Parkrose resident who ran for Metro Council in 2002 and speaks around town on transportation and density issues. “If bikes are getting more than their fair share, they need to find a way to fund it through their user fees. We need money for cars.”
Flynn doesn’t support bike lanes or bike boulevards, which are low-traffic side streets marked with “sharrows” to indicate shared use between bikes and other vehicles. Stretches of Southeast Lincoln and Ankeny and Northeast Tillamook streets, for example, are designated as bike boulevards.
He thinks city transportation funds should go toward relieving congestion on freeways and other main roads, specifically adding lanes or building new freeways. Bike lanes, he says, make the vehicle lanes even narrower and take up more space on the crowded roadway.
When he does occasionally ride his bike for fun, Flynn says, he avoids bike lanes because he fears getting hit by car doors. He prefers to stay on neighborhood streets – yet he doesn’t see the point of creating bike boulevards since he says they don’t connect him to where he wants to go.
Surveys point to local streets
Flynn’s sentiments aren’t shared by anyone working on the city’s bike master plan update. Geller now is midway through the process of gathering information to update the plan, which includes holding monthly “bike master plan network rides” to solicit public input on existing conditions and desired routes.
The rides are held the first Tuesday of each month, starting at Terry Schrunk Plaza at 5:15 p.m. They span all parts of the city; next month’s ride heads to Southwest.
According to the Portland Office of Transportation, bike boulevards will go a long way toward attracting the 300,000 or so people (about 60 percent of the city’s population) who are dubbed “interested but concerned” about riding on the city streets.
They would ride more if there were more safe, quiet networks around town, the city has found through various surveys. Since funding sources are scarce, the expansions would take place little by little, over time, mostly through state or federal money with limited city investment.
Such initiatives would make a seasoned rider like Frazier worry a lot less about getting killed, she says.
“There’s definitely close calls, all the time,” she says. “It’s buses mostly – they’re so wide, they creep into the bike lane. I’ve had them brush my shoulder.”
Other groups plan rides
Another series of bike boulevard rides is being held in Southwest Portland, sponsored by a group called SWTrails – a volunteer pedestrian advocate committee that’s part of Southwest Neighborhoods Inc.
The group will hold its next ride Sunday to map out potential routes to recommend as part of the master plan update. It starts at 3 p.m. at the Gabriel Park Community Center parking lot.
Southwest has lagged behind Northeast and Southeast Portland in bike amenities because of its geographic challenges: sloped terrains, winding roads and blind curves, as well as more storm-water runoff due to the clay soil.
While there are bike lanes on some major roads in Southwest, the need for safer facilities is there, says Keith Liden, one of the organizers. “A lot of people are not comfortable on busy streets, and in a lot of cases not even busy streets with bike lanes,” he says. “If the local streets are available but you don’t know where they go, you just don’t do it.”
The nonprofit Bicycle Transportation Alliance [1] sponsors a separate bike boulevard ride set for Wednesday. It will begin at 6 p.m. at Alberta Park and wind through identified gaps in North and Northeast Portland to see what street features riders like and don’t like.
The BTA also will get community feedback, advocate for the supported features in the city’s master plan process and help the city secure grant money for their construction.
Some question speed bumps
Scott Bricker, the BTA’s director of policy and education, said his group has an internal working list of 112 miles of potential bike boulevards which would cost about $20 million to implement.
“We already have low-traffic neighborhood streets,” he said. “We just need small improvements such as on-street pavement markings like the sharrows, speed traffic calming; they could even go through some neighborhood parks.”
Currently, low-traffic bike boulevards have no more than 3,000 cars per day, but that threshold might be lowered in the new bike master plan, Geller says.
The city also adds speed bumps and other devices to slow vehicle traffic, which seems like a waste to Flynn, the former Metro candidate.
“When you put them on one street, it pushes everyone else to the next street,” Flynn says. “I feel like honking my horn going over a speed bump to irritate the people who want them there. They’re just unintended consequences of not having more capacity on the roads – cars stay off main roads and cut through neighborhoods.”
Joshua Bass, a Portland State University instructor who commutes daily by bike, thinks everyone on the road will benefit more by slowing down a bit. To pit cars against bikes is “a false dichotomy,” he says. “It’s a problem between good travelers and bad travelers. It’s disrespectful of people of all types.”
jenniferanderson@portlandtribune.com