separation for people walking and biking
along their waterfront. We should do the same.
(Photos © J. Maus)
Tonight, Portland is set to get schooled once again by the highly engaging and sharp Gordon Price from Vancouver B.C. Price is the director of the City Program at Simon Fraser University and he’s a noted thought leader on urban planning and transportation.
Vancouver’s transportation network and urban form is something to admire. They’ve done a lot that we should pay attention to.
For starters, according to the flyer for his talk — which is titled, The Vancouver Recipe: How to increase density and reduce fat — Mr. Price is going to share how Vancouver has added residential development to their inner City while the number of cars has gone down and biking and walking have jumped.
I also recall riding around Vancouver back in 2007. They not only already had bike boxes (although they’re not bright green like ours), but they had well-developed bike boulevards (which we are only now building).
What I loved about Vancouver’s bike boulevards was the little things. They were marketed with catchy names (not just the name of the street) like “The Mosaic”. The theme of that one was mosaic tile, which you’d see in roundabouts and on diverters and median islands. The theme made the street marketable and added a powerful sense of identity. Another thing Vancouver’s bike boulevards had were signs on the major crossings that let motor vehicle and other traffic know that they were crossing a bikeway.
Another area where Vancouver has advice to offer is with bridges. The Oregon Daily Journal of Commerce published a detailed article yesterday about the differences in how Vancouver dealt with congestion on their Lion’s Gate bridge and our struggles with the same issue with our Interstate bridge project debacle (of course, Vancouver doesn’t have a separate state and DOT to deal with either).
Here are the details on tonight’s event:
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Gordon Price Presentation
Thursday, November 19, 6:30 – 8:30 pm
Portland Building, 1120 SW 5th Ave, 2nd Floor Auditorium
Free and open to the public
Elly Blue is posting live updates from the presentation on our Twitter account.