On Tuesday night in east Portland just over 50 people attended an open house to offer feedback and learn more about PDOT’s Platinum Bicycle Master Plan Update process.
The format of the evening was a work session and “facilitated discussion”. Signs on every bike topic imaginable were hung around the room and PDOT staff and project consultants encouraged attendees to take an active role in the process. There were boxes of pens next to huge printouts of maps labeled “Where do you ride?” and folks were asked to draw in their routes to and from work.
PDOT staffers manned various stations around the room to educate and ask for comments: PDOT traffic safety staffer Greg Raisman hosted an area where people placed stickers on a map to judge the bike safety of various spots around the city; city bike coordinator Roger Geller was available for questions; and PDOT Transportation Options’ Linda Ginenthal told all about her SmartTrips outreach and education programs.
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Next it was time for the discussion. Leading things off was City Commissioner Sam Adams. He said he chose the east Portland location (on SE 106th near Mall 205) because it,
“…is one of the the most bicycle infrastructure deficient parts of town and we want to do something about that. And in order to not just rely on our own take on things, we’re coming to the source. We have far too many injuries and fatalities in east Portland for bike riders and pedestrians because our system out here if far too inadequate.”
After Adams came Mia Birk. Birk is the former city bike coordinator who is now the consultant on the project as the principal in her firm, Alta Planning.
Birk led the facilitated discussion portion of the evening. She shared slides that told the Portland bike story and it was interspersed with questions and people shared their answers out loud and wrote them down as comments that were collected at the end of the night.
Birk was primarily interested in hearing from the crowd what works and what doesn’t in Portland’s current bikeway network. She wanted specific examples of experiences in bike lanes, on bicycle boulevards, and shared-use paths. Birk repeatedly asked the crowd to put themselves in the shoes of someone who doesn’t ride, “What is the one thing you think the city could do to get them on a bike?”.
I grabbed PDOT planning manager Paul Smith in the hallway. According to him, all of this feedback is vital for the first phase of the Bike Master Plan,
“The ‘existing conditions’ portion of the plan will be completed by the end of July and it will lay the groundwork…giving us a full year to delve deeper into the issues.”
He also said the new Bike Master Plan will be less “facilities-centric” (than the ’96 version) and more focused on things like education and outreach.
(File photo)
Closing out the night was city bike coordinator Roger Geller. He looked ahead at future tasks and said that during this update process PDOT will “re-think policies” and will take a hard look at where to focus their priorities.
For instance, should they invest in areas that are already bike-friendly and make them world-class? Or should they focus on places with inadequate bike facilities (like east Portland) and bring them up to par with other areas (like inner southeast)?
Some priorities Geller mentioned were: increasing the number of mountain bike trails in the urban core; splitting the city up into 32 different “cycle-zones” to better analyze conditions; and improving bike-transit connections by evaluating bikeways within a four-mile radius of transit centers.
Other faces in the crowd included River City Bicycles owner Dave Guettler, Bridge Pedal chief Rick Baumann, and Parks trails planner Gregg Everheart.
There are two more open houses on the horizon; Tuesday (6/12) at the Portland Building downtown (info here) and Thursday (6/14) in north Portland (info here).
For an up-close look at the evening, check out the photo gallery or view the slideshow below:
Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.
