Beginning tomorrow (9/13), SW Broadway Drive just south of downtown Portland will be closed to all traffic for three months.
The closure is for an unscheduled retaining wall project that will be conducted by the Bureau of Transportation. PBOT says the work is necessary to prevent a future landslide and/or roadway failure. SW Broadway is not the main road in this area, but it is a popular alternate bicycling route to SW Terwiliger.
To accomodate bicycle traffic during the closure, PBOT will sign a detour. The route uses SW Hoffman and then switchbacks up to SW Davenport. See a detailed map below and download a PDF of the detour here.
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Note that there are stairs connecting Hoffman & Broadway Drive. They are near the north end of the lowest stretch of Hoffman = almost the bottom of Broadway Drive.
You can see the stair ROW in the map as a gap between property lines in the NE corner of the detour.
While I know it is important to do something right, I think a 3-month timeline is beyond question ridiculous. Little annoyances like these only further the notion that the city is slow, inefficient and dumb
Here’s a list of what they’re doing:
“Beginning September 13, city crews will relocate utilities out of the work zone, remove and replace the retaining wall and rebuild the adjacent roadway. The work will require excavating soil and fill to a depth 20 feet below the current roadway height.”
How long do you think it should take to do all of that? Maybe you can clue the city in on how you’d decrease the amount of time it takes for them to perform the work, I’m sure they could use an expert like you.
TriMet’s interns have this on the map, again, a couple weeks lead-in time is generally advisable so everyone’s toolchains (the cyclemap renderer, MapQuest, garmin map generators) can catch up.
Bummer. For those of us who have to commute over the west hills, this is one of the most efficient (i.e., fastest — also one of the most fun) routes down the hill. But fortunately not the only one.