Last week, I published a story recapping a wonderful train plus folding bike trip my kid and I took to Portland shortly before the start of the school year. Though we had a great time biking around and exploring the city together, I was surprised by the lack of complete and connected protected bike lanes downtown. Especially since so much of the city’s biking experience is very friendly and low-stress, it felt incongruous to be biking in mixed traffic on busy downtown streets. So I noted, “Seattle is learning for itself what Portland learned previously: Many more people will bike if there is a safe and inviting space to do it. Has Portland forgotten its own lessons?”
Jonathan Maus over at the venerable Bike Portland responded yesterday with a recap of some of the frustrating behind the scenes political and institutional struggles that have gummed up progress on downtown bike lanes. As I assumed, the city has been working on plans for all ages and abilities bike routes through downtown for more than a decade, and they’ve even funded a plan in 2016 called Central City in Motion. But then, well, most the bike stuff didn’t happen for a variety of reasons, some of which make sense and some of which do not.
So what happened?
As Portland loves to do, we first formed a committee and then created a plan before we could spend $8.4 million on new bikeways. That took time. In fact, it took nearly six years from the time PBOT first began working on the concept in earnest to when City Council adopted the CCIM Plan in November 2018. (A staffing problem with the original project manager likely hurt the timeline.)
It’s important to note that around this time there were two approaches to reforming our streets being forged simultaneously by PBOT planning staff: protected bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes. While I always felt Central City in Motion was intended to be bike-centric, it ended up with several priority bus lane projects on its final list. But bus lanes also had a plan of their own, Enhanced Transit Corridors, which was adopted by council in June 2018.
Then politics shifted even more in the favor of bus lanes two months later when Chloe Eudaly began her turn as commissioner-in-charge of transportation.
Eudaly and her staff looked at PBOT and saw two plans, both of which were fully baked and ready-to-go: one was bike-centric, the other was bus-centric. They chose buses. Why? Because, in the words of Eudaly’s policy director Jamey Duhamel, “[Transit] was the issue that was most complementary and intersectional with our social, environmental and economic justice issues; and so we really went big and bold for increasing transit service.”
In 2020, the pandemic as well as the intense police action against protests in downtown Portland shifted focus away from bike lanes, which was understandable at the time. But then new city leaders seemed more interested in removing bike lanes than adding new ones, and safe streets advocates had to fight hard to protect the Broadway bike lane. Advocates won the fight over Broadway, and now plans are also moving forward to build a 4th Ave bike lane despite similar opposition. With a big mayoral race this November, the city’s politics could be on the verge of big changes. Whether those changes will be good for the downtown bike network has yet to be seen, but there are reasons to be hopeful, Maus said.
I certainly hope so. Portland is such a unique and wonderful city. Yes, it has big problems just like Seattle. But there’s also so much good and so much potential. With the extreme exception of when they are playing the Sounders or Reign, I’ve got nothing but love for Portland. I look forward to a trip in the not so distant future when my kid can ride her own bike safely and comfortably around downtown searching for more hidden wonders.
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