Portland Tops List of Bicycle-friendly Cities, Again
Roland Chlapowski
Portland was once again awarded the recognition for being the "Best Overall City for Bicycling in North 
America" by Bicycling Magazine in its annual review of bicycle-friendly cities. With Portland's "Best Overall" designation in Bicycling Magazine's 2006 rankings, Portland now has been dubbed the America's best city for biking by them four times. The editors were impressed not only by Portland's existing bicycle facilities such as its network of bike lanes, signed bike routs, bridge access, and bike racks, but also the thriving bike culture that exists and city government's commitment to become America's first Platinum-designated large city by the League of American Bicyclists.
You can read the entire story here, scanned into jpg format.
Posted by Roland Chlapowski on February 27, 2006
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While it is nice that Portland is your number 1 walkable city, there is more to the story.
I am writing not because I am trying to put Portland down, but because the City of Portland is doing so little to address serious problems in some parts of the city. We in SW have been getting almost zero funding to correct serious pedestrian deficiencies.
I suggest the rating organizations dig a little deeper when they do evaluations of cities to be sure they have all the facts rather than just the PR from the city. Maybe if they ask more questions, our city leaders will be moved to address more of our real problems.
I live in SW Portland, a community of about 60,000.
SW Portland is a pedestrian disaster zone. 43% of our arterials are substandard meaning they have no sidewalks. Only 15% of our streets have sidewalks.
Citizen efforts through SWTrails have resulted in the SW Urban Trails Plan. The essence of the 40 mile plan is to use little traveled streets as our key pedestrian routes. We need 5 key rights of way to make this system work correctly. After 6 years, we have yet to get the first right of way or easement. Our volunteers have constructed miles of connections, doing about 15 projects over the past 5 years. Our budget from the City of Portland has been just $5,000 per year.
We have been trying to get a survey for an easement that was negotiated with a private property owner months ago using as model a recent City Council approved easement for a parks trail. We have gotten exactly nowhere after 6 months of working through Sam Adams office and PDOT. Red tape and inaction is all that we have seen. This easement would provide a key safe connection between the Maplewood Neighborhood and Gabriel Park and Multnomah. Presently this neighborhood does not have a safe way to get out of their neighborhood on foot. That is totally unacceptable.
We are pleased that Portland is making progress on our pedestrian issues in the city core. However, much more needs to be done to bring SW and SE Portland up to a reasonable level of service.
The recent citizen survey conducted by the auditors office shows that on pedestrian issues 8 of the bottom 13 neighborhoods are SW neighborhoods. In other words, our SW citizens are not being well served with pedestrian facilities. The web site is
http://www.portlandonline.com/auditor/auditservices/citizensurvey/index.cfm?action=QuestionDetail&QuestionID=30
Where you can see the results of neighborhood views of pedestrian safety.
Portland has begun to address pedestrian safety, but it has a long way to go in areas like SW Portland.
For more information on SWTrails, see the web site:
SWTrails Web Site http://explorepdx.com/swtrails.html
Don Baack
Posted by: Don Baack | Mar 13, 2006 3:10:06 PM