that makes ample use of automated bollards to
prohibit driving during certain hours, sparked
inspiration for “Going Dutch” event.
(Photo © J. Maus/BikePortland)
By now, we’ve all seen and heard numerous examples of Dutch bike infrastructure; but specific examples of how Dutch-style treatments would look applied to Portland roads is something we need more of. That’s why I’m excited to share news of an event happening tomorrow night at VeloCult (NE 1969 42nd Ave) that will do just that.
“Going Dutch” has been put together by one of Portland’s young rising stars of road design and urban planning: Jesse Boudart. Boudart, a recent graduate of Portland State University who’s currently an transportation analyst with Kittelson & Associates, traveled to the cycling paradise of Delft in the Netherlands back in July. While there, he viewed the city with a specific eye toward how its bike-friendly road designs could be applied in an American city.
Tomorrow night, Boudart will host a gallery show and informal discussion that will look at several different Dutch street designs and how they could be applied to specific locations here in Portland. He’ll share poster boards with renderings of how Dutch road designs would look overlayed on familiar places. Some of his examples will include: Dutch style protected intersection designs on major arterials like SE 122nd and Division; center-running “parkways” on streets like NE 72nd and Ainsworth; a new vision for trams on SE Hawthorne; “people places” at SE 34th and Belmont; an “alleyway transformation”; and more.
Check out these to examples he offered as a teaser:
And here’s some verbage from the event flyer:
Portland has created unique spaces which have become widely recognized across America: Waterfront Park, Eastbank Esplanade, and an extensive bike network, to name a few. But, what’s next? The Dutch have long been innovators in creating lively places, so how can we use their best practices and improve upon them? At “Going Dutch” we examine existing places and envision their future in a gallery style. Furthermore, we vet the places’ opportunities, engineering considerations, and why we haven’t already created them.
And to up the wonk quotient even more, tomorrow’s show will also be a meeting of the new Portland chapter of the Young Professionals in Transportation. Given the subject matter and the super smart young minds that will show up, I have a feeling this will be a great event. Join them for drinks and great discussion tomorrow at VeloCult starting at 6:00 pm.
Thanks for reading.
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Love the renderings above. I still have some large poster boards of the transit mall from before when it was still the bus mall I found at a 2nd hand store.
Looks great! Will the presentations from the event be made available afterwards? I’m not going to be able to attend.
Yikes!
Narrow 4 foot-wide bike paths next to a much wider MUP are not my idea of progress.
And I’d want signal priority for safe crossing at arterials.
You’re free to take the road, if you prefer.
I love the #3LL out of automated bollards.
Do you hate red light cameras? We’ll take those out and install automated bollards instead. Then we’ll see how much you like stopping in the crosswalk with a crumpled front bumper.
Automated bollard videos on YouTube: proving that people drive with a level of awareness somewhere between a cow in a herd and an ant blindly following a pheromone trail.
They have these all over Maastricht! They are awesome:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ZdLjKl0lHc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKIAvnmkfmI&feature=youtube_gdata_player
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWnfeDtnuds&feature=youtube_gdata_player
One video of vertical post bollard crashes and one video of local BBC coverage of one malfunctioning such that it would go up when someone was standing on it. Not a common failure mode apparently.
The news report is worth watching just so you can hear the reporter end with “… If drivers would just obey the road signs there would be no need for the bollards.”
The Eastmoreland Neighborhood association is asking the city to look into “Reed College Road” as a possible alignment of “The 20’s” Bikeway instead of SE 28th because they do not want “traffic calming coming from Bybee” (where the future MAX stop will be).
I wonder how they will react if the city says….OK, but then we need to put a multi-use path down the center of the “Reed College Road Center Green-strip.”
I wonder how they would react to this suggestion?
I’m actually in the Netherlands right now for a month, biking around and photographing cool stuff. One of the locals I met with (who has lived 3 months in Vancouver BC & Portland) described Portland with respect, but without any pretense that it was anything than an aspirational bicycling city in its current form, and had tremendous distance to go.
Next time I take my 70 year old mom to Portland, I’d love to be able to put her on a bike. No way that’s going to happen without a modern all ages & abilities connection from downtown (where the bike rentals are) to the residential neighborhoods (where there are 20 mph traffic calmed streets she would be comfortable riding on).
She looked horrified when I described the Hawthorne bridge approach on the eastside, and was clear she would never let me take her on it, even in a bakfiets.
The Dutch have nailed seamless AAA connections spanning residential and dense central business areas. We have a lot to learn from them.
SE Salmon directly from the waterfront. We need to push the city for these improvements: Half Million for a traffic light couplet on MLK/Grand. $250,000 for a redesign/ bulb out/pedestrian island crossings of 7th, 11th and 12th. I have no idea why the city ignored these crossings during the street car build out.
I don’t know why the City still views diversion as a four-letter word, for the most part.
It should be the rule, not the exception, on our bikeways. That’s the only way you are going to get more people to bike – remove auto traffic almost completely.
Can someone from BikePortland post some follow up/action items from this meeting for those of us that were not able to make it?
It’s on the way!