Red line shows closure.
A section of the Fanno Creek Trail southeast of Beaverton will be closed an estimated 6-8 weeks due to a sewage leak.
Stephen Sykes, a spokesman for the City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services, says a water leak was discovered last Friday (7/22) on the trail near SW 82nd Avenue. When tests confirmed the water was sewage, BES closed the trail until repairs can be made.
Sykes says trail traffic will have to make a half-mile detour south to SW Garden Home Blvd to get around the closure, which is between SW 82nd and SW 83rd Avenues. Check this link in Google Maps for detailed look at the area.
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Well this is certainly disappointing. This section of trail just recently reopened after extensive sewer work.
Wow that is a bummer. Garden Home is a really unpleasant road to ride on, too. Wonder if we could get some temporary bike lanes set up?
“…closed an estimated 6-8 weeks…”
Try doing that with a section of freeway and witness the rioting that would break out. Nice to know where non-motorized transportation sits on the priority scale.
To be fair this isn’t one of the heavily used sections of the Fanno Creek trail. It’s hilly and has lousy connections to other bike routes.
and it really doesn’t go anywhere (and it gets there very slowly (curvy and slow)).
Paranoid much? Are you really stating that a bicycle path that handles a couple of hundred riders per day should be given the same or higher priority as a freeway that handles tens of thousands of commuters as well as commercial freight? Not too mention that you are comparing apples and oranges. The same agency is not responsible for the Fanno Creek sewer trunk line repair and highway construction and repair. PBOT, ODOT and the federal DOT have no control over the pace of the trunk line repair. Having some knowledge of the situation with the Fanno Creek trunk line, problems with shoddy work by the contractor who built the trunk line is necessitating reconstruction of the entire line. Believe me the neighbors and DEQ are not at all happy with sewer overflows and spills and Portland Bureau of Environmental Services is highly motivated to complete this project as quickly as possible.
It doesn’t take paranoia to see a pattern here. According to Jonathan’s article at http://bikeportland.org/2010/10/19/oaks-bottom-project-delay-will-postpone-springwater-trail-closure-41298, BES is planning to close the Springwater trail in the summer of 2012. It seems obvious to me that BES thinks of multi-use paths as convenient corridors in which to do work BES thinks is important, without having to worry too much about inconveniencing the “real” commuters in motor vehicles.
Because you never see a road or lane closure for sewer work. Infrastructure repairs and improvements sometimes require us to put up with some in convenience. Show me how the work can be done at the least cost without closing Garden Home or Springwater and maybe you will have an argument.
Ironically, Google’s overhead view shows the trail closed for the initial sewer line installation.
I wonder if they couldn’t leave a reduced-width path open during most of the repair work? Maybe one-way at the worksite itself, with flagger. The pics look wide enough for 2 trucks plus room for a narrow path.
the area they are talking about, is indeed pretty wide.
This is my daily commute! I would much prefer to ride on Garden Home, but has no shoulder and ditches on each side of the road. West-bound, I can do it as it is downhill and I can do about 30. Coming home, however would be suicide on that road.
This whole project is turning into a boondoggle. It was supposed to be complete by October of last year. The pavement they left behind on Multnomah, for both cars and bikes, is horrible. Now this…
–Bill
I was there yesterday and they had signs up that didn’t exactly appear to close the trail.
I ride Garden Home eastbound on the way to work, but it is before 6 am. Later in the day – No Way! The upper Fanno used to be an attractive variation riding home once and a while, but not since last year.
Yes, this trail DOES go somewhere for bike riders.
You only have to ride garden home for a block and there is the psuedo bike lane on the north side.
Which argues that off-street grade separated multi-use paths like this one are a poor choice to promote bicycle transportation. Agencies such as the Portland BES view them as corridors in which they can do work that BES thinks is important, and to heck with those darn bicyclists. The bicyclists can just do their recreation somewhere else. Would BES cause the closure of a street for as long as the Fanno Creek trail was closed? Did BES let Multnomah Blvd., which was also part of their TWO attempts at this sewer project, stay closed as long as the Fanno trail?
There’s an additional wrinkle here, too. This section of Fanno Creek trail is 100% in Beaverton…
–Bill
Here’s a link to my youtube video of that trail: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLuhpDlWs_s
…which is OK – but rough and narrow, there is a really nasty ditch on the side that becomes a danger when there are pedestrians or others on the path that can’t seem to get the idea of sharing right, and you have to divert through the local neighborhood to get there. However, since they started screwing around with this project a year and a half ago, I’ve just stopped using the trail completely and use the detour – at least, it’s reliably open. I wish they’d focus on getting Multnomah Blvd fixed instead.
Aww, this stinks. Like Bill and Bikesalot, I ride this route regularly in the summer, and when it’s open it is a reasonable oasis in a bike desert. I had to put up with that closure all last summer (and fall … and part of the winter …) and now it’s shut down again? It’s indeed been a boondoggle.
Meanwhile, the Garden Home “bike path” is the biggest embarrassment of a path I’ve seen in a while. It was woefully substandard even in whatever godforsaken decade it was built. Whoever is responsible for it has washed their hands of liability (and dumped it 100% onto cyclists) by installing STOP signs every freaking block. Despite not being ideally aligned, the Fanno Creek Trail is a nice alternative to that effing travesty of a bike path.
To clarify, my preferred route already avoids the easternmost 4 blocks of the trail. Coming into the Garden Home area from Multnomah Blvd, I ride Garden Home as far east as 78th Ave (only using the “bike path” for a block or so) and using 78th to access the FCT. At 90th or 92nd it’s fairly easy to connect from there to Elm through the Pinehurst neighborhood, and then into Beaverton on 5th. Eastbound, the last 4 blocks of Garden Home prior to Oleson have enough shoulder to be reasonably safe in most traffic conditions.
But forced to be on it as far west as 84th, and Garden Home is a deathtrap. At that point I’ll consider Hall and Oleson as an alternative to get between Beaverton and Multnomah, even though it is hillier and adds about 3/4 mile to the ride.
BES just finished a huge sewer project on that trail – you have to ask what they messed up to have annother major repair on their hands this soon. There’s no easy “bike around” here – they are putting children and families out onto Garden Home Road, which is not safe – the sidewalk is not continuous and is very narrow and filled with tree roots. The road has no shoulder worth mentioning. THPRD (the owner) should make BES do their repairs with night work and accomodate the many bikers and pedestrians that use this path.
It’s been reopened:
I’m also on Mr. Sykes’ email list. I got the following email from him on Friday, 8/26/2011. Mr. Sykes does not mention if this will mean additional trail closures:
I wrote Mr. Sykes to ask if the second pump station would mean additional trail closures. Here’s his reply: