(Photo/video: Ted Timmons)
Our story about the City of Portland’s new traffic circle on SE Milwaukie and Mitchell spurred a robust conversation about its strengths and weaknesses. New drone footage (below) sheds more light on how it works.
Many readers feel the circle is over-engineered and circle portion is too small and narrow.
“Cyclists can easily handle navigating around each other,” wrote Clicky Freewheel, “all this roundabout does is limit the amount of space given to cyclists and creates a very tight turn for no good reason other than ‘it looks cool’.”
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Oliver wrote: “Who’s in charge of this stuff? Stop making infrastructure to slow cyclists down, this is like the irritating 90 degree turns that are showing up everywhere.”
Others think it’s a major safety improvement.
“I live nearby to this and have ridden this section of Milwaukie to access the Springwater as part of my daily commute for over 10 years,” Otis chimed in. “While I agree the overall design has flaws, it’s a massive improvement over the previous scenario, and leads to a far safer crossing situation for most users.”
To help deepen our understanding of this new piece of infrastructure, friend of the blog Ted Timmons captured some excellent drone footage. It shows several people riding through the circle and approaching it from different angles. Hopefully the comment thread and this video give PBOT more solid feedback they can in projects going forward.
— Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org
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