A few months ago, I shared a story of bike lane disrespect about how construction crews often have no regard for bikeways during their projects.
Today, we have the complete opposite; a construction detour that goes above and beyond anything I’ve seen.
Hoffman Construction is building a new parking structure for Legacy Emanuel Hospital in North Portland and today they are repaving the curbside lane adjacent to the project. In order to handle the reams of bike traffic that comes down N. Vancouver — it is, after all ranked as Portland’s best bike lane — they have constructed a temporary, bike-only lane out of traffic cones.
It is a sight to behold.
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According to project engineer Jason Haslam, who smiled and waved on bike riders this morning, they did the bike detour because they’ve been working on the project for eight months and “we’d seen all the bike traffic going by.” “We’ve been planning this,” he added, “so we didn’t just throw all the bikers into the roadway.”
Seems like an obvious sentiment, but you’d be surprised at how some construction folks are not so sensitive to bike traffic. A few years ago, just a few blocks away on N. Williams, I noticed this horrible encroachment into the (already narrow) bikeway:
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(Thankfully, after I sent them the photos above, the nice folks at Adaptive Construction moved back their fence.)
Thank you Hoffman Construction for respecting ALL traffic!
See more photos of this temporary, bike-only traffic lane (including a shot of one of the workers giving me the “A-OK” sign as I rode by) in the gallery.