Rick Browning, hired to manage major bikeway project, says he was fired by PBOT

Well, certainly. PBOT has an equity manager and a director of strategic communications and several other managers.

As more people become disillusioned with both Bailey and Wheeler as being too status-quo political, Sarah Iannarone is becoming the non-establishment standout. She also lives and owns a business somewhere other than SW, Eastmoreland, or Irvington. Whether she can run a successful campaign in time for May, however, waits to be seen. She also has a bit of a sharp edge reminiscent of Novick in his pre-street fee days.

No. That’s just a regular maintenance project. He was managing an upcoming repaving of E Burnside from 20th to 32nd or so.

If you’re new to street maintenance, grinding can take place just about any time, but paving needs drier and warmer weather.

Seemed well paved last night when I drove it. Needs striping though.

Jim, I know what you mean – streets that don’t seem to need attention are torn up and repaved ( SE 52nd), while ones that apparently have been carpet-bombed into oblivion (SW Main) are ignored. There is a pretty sound reason for this, which the graph helps to explain:

http://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/453877

Essentially, if you repair a street early enough (SE 52nd) it’s relatively cheap, but if you wait too long (SW Main) it’s really, really expensive. This might not be an entirely satisfying explanation, and it certainly begs other questions.

As for why streets are ground up and then left sitting for months until the pavers come ’round, there’s a reason for that, too: it takes substantially longer to do the grinding than it does to do the paving, plus certain weather conditions are needed in order to pave (dry, not too cold). So the grinding crew has to get well out in front of the paving crew this time of year. Hence a number of streets that are left in a torn-up condition for a long while during the wet months.

SW Main needs a complete rebuild, and is therefore not eligible for regular maintenance funding. It is on the gas tax project list, though.

Have you actually ridden that bidirectional bike lane? It kind of sucks. If you ride in the contraflow direction, you hit every red light. Two way on a one way street just doesn’t work as far as signal progression goes. Plus it doesn’t connect to anything. All that to say, I would rather we do this right than rush out a half-ass bit of bike lane like Seattle did.

There were two timely reasons that got done so fast:

1. The city literally didn’t have one non-terrible bike lane downtown to that point, and they were trying to head off bad publicity around launching a bike-share system in this environment.

2. There had just been a high-profile cyclist death on 2nd Ave. In Murray’s first few years as mayor he took a bit of a “let no crisis go to waste” attitude, getting quick-and-dirty safety projects implemented in the wake of deadly collisions (here and NE 75th St are the major ones that come to mind).

Murray has generally done a good job, including on cycling projects, as mayor of Seattle. But Seattle’s downtown cycling network on the whole is delayed, too. We were supposed to have a network designed by 2015, with work on the ground starting this year. Now the network design has been put off until completion of another “center city mobility plan”, which sounds a lot like an opportunity to water down the promised bike network. (There are basically three critical mobility problems near downtown: pedestrian safety, an incomplete bike network, and traffic congestion; the only way to fix traffic congestion is to reduce the amount of office parking available, but instead we permit more parking garages with every new building, and we’re so obsessed with the resulting congestion that we fail to fix our other problems.)

Note that Seattle, like most US cities and unlike Portland, has a city government that is ran by the mayor – a strong mayor system. Portland’s governance has the mayor as essentially someone who delegates city bureaus to city commissioners (who are incompetent) and has a single vote against the other commissioners. Thus, the mayor has no power and is barely even a manager.

Steve Szigethy most recently worked for Washington County, not PDC.

Annual paving maintenance projects is where the “gold” is found to get bike lanes [and pedestrian ADA] infrastructure retrofitted into our existing arterials…assuming one can wait the 20 to 30 years between pavement work cycles.