the charge on the Bike Master
Plan update.
(Photos J. Maus)
Last summer, the City of Portland’s effort to update their Bicycle Master Plan was all the rage. Fresh off an attempt by Mayor Potter to cut funding for the plan (he re-instated the funds two weeks later), spirits were high.
There were open house events and a series of well-attended Bike Master Plan Rides (led by PDOT’s bike coordinator Roger Geller).
But it’s been over a year since I reported any news about the effort.
In that time, Geller has been busy with a myriad of other, more pressing projects (Portland’s climate change policies, bike boxes, the Regional Transportation Plan, various streetcar and light rail projects, various grants, the CRC project, and many other things) and he admits that the Bike Master Plan got put on the “backburner”.
Now Geller says he’s finally “able to turn my focus to almost 100% on the Bike Master Plan.”
Geller is calling together a steering committee that will begin regular meetings on November 12th with the intent to complete the plan and have it adopted by City Council by the end of June 2009.
According to Geller, that committee’s short-term focus will be to,
- identify a new network of city bikeways (with a focus on destinations that are not served by current or proposed facilities),
- identify best practices from throughout the world in creating a bikeway network,
- lay out a new bikeway network that emphasizes the type of low-volume, low-speed, family-friendly bicycle boulevard routes that will attract more people to bicycing,
- identify the needed improvements to create these bicycle boulevards at (at least) a conceptual level
Geller also says he’ll work to develop new designs “for building our next generation of bikeways” and that he hopes to hire a consulting firm to work with PDOT traffic engineers to improve design guidelines to “help us achieve our operational targets for speeds, volumes, and cyclist comfort.”
(As for the “next generation of bikeways”, as I type this, the head traffic engineer for the City of Portland (Rob Burchfield), is touring the bike facilities in Amsterdam and Copenhagen (he’s on this trip).)
In addition to having more time to focus on the Bike Master Plan, Geller says that funds from a $75,000 grant from ODOT that was awarded last year have finally become available.
This initial work is just a part of an expansive on the plan that, when complete, will include an updated bike parking plan, and chapters on encouragement, enforcement, new benchmarks, and more.
Stay tuned for continued coverage of this effort and for opportunities for you to get involved.
— More on Portland’s Bicycle Master Plan.
— BikePortland.org’s Bicycle Master Plan coverage archives (29 articles).