Just a reminder that tomorrow PDOT is hosting a special edition of their monthly Bicycle Master Plan Rides. Last month we rode in the wake of a potential funding cut, but now we ride with renewed confidence on our journey to making Portland a better place for bikes.
A crucial phase of that journey starts tomorrow at the first of three Bike Master Plan Open Houses.
If you’d like to join other cyclists on a guided ride from downtown, meet at Terry Schrunk Plaza (SW 3rd between Madison and Jefferson) at 4:15. We’ll ride to the Open House at the East Portland Community Center (more details here).
Here’s a map of the route (PDF).
This is it folks, this is what we’ve been waiting for. The time to be a part of the solution begins tomorrow! I hope as many of you as possible can make it.
If not, there are two other open houses. One in southwest and one in north Portland.
Aww, cancha take the lane on Division? Do a little P.R. on the way to the P.R.?
Sorry, don’t mean to sound degrading…
But, seriously, that’s a ton of unnecessary elevation gain and one of the routes I’d like to see improved by the city (south of Tabor Harrison-Lincoln connection).
I agree, one thing the city’s bicycle routes should do is limit unnecessary elevation gain. So far, I don’t see much attention being paid to this aspect of making it easier to use your bicycle for transportation; the city’s primary focus seems to be to keep bicycles from interfering with motor vehicle traffic.
IMO, these priorities are misplaced, sure it’s nice to have quiet residential streets to ride on, but real transportational cyclists (as opposed to purely recreational cyclists)want to access the same destinations that motorists want to access, and these destinations are more often than not on arterial streets.
The city’s philosophy should be: every street is a bike route. And the arterial streets are the ones that need the most work in the way of improvements to make cycling safer; the neighborhood streets already are pretty safe for cycling.
The question is, do you want to ride on congested streets w/ fast moving traffic, higher risk, and more polution in your face, or do you want a safer, lower speed route that is usually a few blocks off the main arterial streets. By being only a few blocks from these big arterials you still have decent access to all the good destinations without the auto traffic. Elevation is an issue, and the path of least resistance is good when possible, but doesn’t always jive with other existing infastructure. In the end it’s all about the best balance for autos, peds, and bikes (at least until everyone else starts to ride bikes more).
You should be happy:) Portland is so ahead of many other places in the country or even it’s own neighbors. Come down to Milwaukie sometime and try to make some of the difficult connections we have.
We are in a planning process (Transp. System Plan update aka TSP) which is looking forward 20 years and hopefully we can solve some of these things, but it is a long way from where Portland is.
Just my 2 cents
Every street is a bike route, and bicycles should be at least equal to, if not above motor vehicles in the ‘transportation heirarchy’.
Then you can ride where you want, and engineering improvements should be prioritized where they are needed most for safety.
That’s pretty simple, isn’t it? But I don’t think PDOT is quite there yet. I think they still consider their first priority to be moving cars and the bike infrastructure they provide is intended to segregate the bikes and cars for this reason.
Bike routes on parallel streets are fine and good up to a point, and I know a lot of cyclists in PDX are enamored of the Amsterdam model, but it’s inevitable that the bikes and cars will still have to mix at many locations, like river crossings and downtown, for example. At best we will probably be able to achieve a hybrid system like Vancouver BC.
We’ve seen the police enforcement component, and we’ve got a pretty good idea of the engineering improvements PDOT will be proposing, what I’m still waiting for is the motorist education campaign.