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On NE Glisan, new bike lane character (and lower speed limit) earn clucks of approval

Buffered Bike Lane with a bike symbol and arrow pointing forward


chicken tall
Male? Female? The comb seems hiply unisex. Either way, it’ll now have a safer time crossing the road.
(Photo: Terry Dublinski-Milton)

Portland’s famous bike lane characters keep getting more colorful. As we wrote in December, this unique and wonderful tradition has been making a comeback, thanks to creative city staffers.

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The bike-riding chicken above, whose photo was shared Monday by North Tabor Neighborhood Association board member Terry Dublinski-Milton, is the latest addition to Northeast Glisan. Dublinski-Milton noted that its appearance accompanies another change to the street: dropping the speed limit from 35 mph to 30 mph between Sandy and 82nd.

That’s the latest safety-enhancing step for a street that saw a walking fatality in 2013 but has at least gotten dramatically safer since it was restriped as one of the city’s first road diets.

As for the bike lane characters, part of the reason they’re cool is that PBOT workers create them on their own time using scrap materials. The cool thing isn’t that the public is getting a little cultural and economic value (which these definitely provide) for free. The cool thing is that Portland is the sort of city that hires the sort of people who are motivated to do things like this on their own time.

“Thank you PBOT, we appreciate the speed reduction,” Dublinski-Milton wrote to the City’s Bureau of Transportation. “And the chicken is cute as well.”

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