South Waterfront Greenway is open — Go check it out!

How nice would it be if this style of separated bike path/walking path could be extended all the way from the Sellwood bridge to the Steel bridge? A girl can dream!

I know Rome wasn’t built in a day, but uh, it doesn’t look like that path connects to anything.

Nice looking path and I’m happy for the separated walking and biking spaces. It would be great if there was also a car-free connection to the Moody cycle track to the northwest and the Willamette Greenway trail to the south.

are all the joggers using the bike path yet? that’s where they’ll be so they can jog on the soft asphalt…

I’m not sure how many families with kids live on the South Waterfront but that sure looks like a nice place to learn how to ride a bike.

Hopefully this won’t be an isolated section of trail for too long. The gap between SW Lane and the Old Spaghetti Factory is all owned by a single group—Prometheus Properties—whose property extends to the water’s edge. They once had grand hopes for that site, and even got some towers through Design Review circa 2007. Obviously those plans were killed off by the recession. They’ve just recently had a Pre-Application Conference with the City to discuss developing Block 41, which is the site between the river, SW Lane, SW River Parkway and SW Abernethy. Before they can build this they will need to go through a Land Division process, which will presumably result in them dedicating a portion of their land along to the river to the City, similar to what exists between SW Gibbs and Lane. After that, the only remaining gap to the Willamette Greenway is behind the former Benz Springs building.

I’ve seen some prelim drawings showing it go around the slip Zidell uses to drop the barges in to the river, it will connect to a riverside trail that goes under the Tilikum Crossing (also connecting to it) and eventually to downtown portland.

At long last, South Waterfront finally gets something nice. /s

If Portland bridges were built like its bikeways, we’d still be using ferries.

There should a naming contest for the new gaps created by this isolated trail. I propose “Zidell” for the north and “Ross Island” for the south.

Whatever their names, these gaps will be stars in a constellation of legends like Naito, Sellwood, and OMSI, the gods of frustration, futility, and ineffectuality.

We were there today actually, by accident. nice path, nice benches, nice park….there actually are a lot of orphan paths like this on the river. Swan Island, NE Industrial District….by Ross Island Cement Plant. Over the course of a century a path will be built by the private sector….

It can be done only slightly faster through the public sector….or so it seems.

KGW news had a story about the new greenway, and sure enough, there’s a clueless woman walking a dog (on a long leash) on the bike path.

Let’s see how long till a homeless camp bike chop shop is set up.

This is really great! Vancouver’s Seawall took decades to make (and the work still continues). Any step is good. People come from all over the world to walk on our Seawall.
Re. people walking on the cycling path, you just ding your bell well before you approach them, then thank them when they move to the side. They get the point quickly.
Signage and some benches or bushes between the two paths help a lot with that too.