Latest changes and more thoughts on the NE Multnomah project

Those plastic bollards look terrible. Seriously bad.

Also, the green bike boxes have created a “vocabulary” for bike facilities that implies that the painted areas are the places where bikes are supposed to go.

These painted buffers confuse that vocabulary. I have seen several people biking in the painted area, navigating between the bollards, instead of riding in the actual bike lane over to the right.

The wall of parking on the eastern end reduces visibility and will likely lead to accidents at intersections. A cyclist going 15 mph (a typical speed in portland) will only become fully visible to motorists for a few seconds before entering the intersection. Why does PBOT continue to build facilities that prioritize parking over cyclist safety?

Why on earth would PBOT paint a ~6 foot wide lane beige and then make it completely unusable by placing large circular planters in the middle. Its not about protection or buffering since bollards and/or concrete barriers could be placed on the outside edge of the buffer. The buffer should not be wasted space – it should be available for cyclists who need to avoid hazards or to pass other cyclists.

safe@portlandoregon.gov, or 503-823-SAFE, I’m guessing.

It’ll be great to get the planters in. Interesting photo showing parked cars where people parking those cars thought it best to park partly in the yellow buffer area. It’s consistent so I wonder if the adjacent lane is narrow. This behavior will continue unless a change is made.

Intentionally commingling buses and bikes is really folly. Put bluntly, I really hate interacting with buses. Williams is an excellent example of bikes and buses moving at the same average speed but involves leapfrogging and stress for all parties. On other occasions buses are picking up/dropping passengers and I’m forced to do a quick assessment of how quickly people are getting on and guess how many might be departing. All this calculus is done to ensure that I pass if/when it is safe. Sometimes I err conservatively only to find the bus waits for a few minutes which causes all sorts of confusion and angst to drivers behind me. Other times I pass at the exact moment the bus’s motor is at full roar as it merges left leaving me in a dire predicament.

There has to be an elegant solution to move people by bus without creating a need for hyper vigilance and fuzzy-math statistical risk assessment while riding.

Meanwhile over on Holladay….virtually no cars.

So when are they going to utilize some of that buffer space to put in green “Portland Pivot” boxes at the far sides of intersections? What is the current expectation regarding cyclists making left turns?
A) “We don’t expect cyclists will want to make left turns”
B) “Cyclists should merge across the buffer between bollards, parked cars and planters and pop out in front of drivers in the non-buffered lane, then merge across that lane into the left turn lane”
C) “Cyclists are expected to merge to the right, across the crosswalk and position themselves 1) in the crosswalk, blocking it, or 2) to the right of car traffic, then wait for the cross-street light”
D) “We expect cyclists wanting to make a left turn to overshoot their destination street by one block, then circle the block via right turns and proceed straight across Multnomah on their destination street”.
E) “What kind of turns?”
F) “If cyclists, for whatever unknown reason, want to turn left at any point, they should stop on the near side of their destination street, dismount, wait for the walk signal, proceed across their destination street to the opposite sidewalk, wait for the walk signal there, then walk their bikes across the crosswalk, then re-mount and merge back into the bike lane on their destination street”

I might be exaggerating a little bit, but this is one of my pet peeves with gilded-cage, gauntlet-style infrastructure that “give[s] bicycle operators the perception that they are protected from auto traffic”: no good left turn options. My other ones have already been mentioned: hidden cyclists suddenly appearing “out of nowhere” at intersections, inability to utilize available road space for passing or hazard avoidance, difficulty keeping the area free of hazards such as broken glass, wet leaves, or snow, etc.

I remain very skeptical of “protected” facilities such as this one, but maybe they will serve a useful purpose somehow. I’m afraid I will be very difficult to convince, though.

Great piece on Portland’s transportation strategy over on Portland Transport by Chris Smith and Randy Miller. It was published in The Oregonian. Spending on bike facilities makes things better for folks behind the wheel as well.