(Photos © J. Maus/BikePortland)
Even amid the virus outbreak, the Portland Bureau of Transportation is working on our streets. On Sunday, city work crews were out in north Portland installing new signage and markings to fill a key gap in our bikeway.
PBOT spent spent 2018 and 2019 adding infrastructure to North Willamette from Interstate to Rosa Parks to make it a “low-stress, family-friendly” street. Most notably they installed diverters at North Greeley, North Villard, and at Atlantic and Jessup.
Willamette’s north-south cousin is Michigan, which was established as a greenway in 2011 and has been beefed up with more diversion several times since.
But these greenways were separated by a bikeway gap and difficult crossing of N Interstate. PBOT says the work they just completed was meant to close that gap and is the “final piece” of the Willamette greenway.
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To help folks get from Michigan to Willamette via Killingsworth westbound, PBOT has added a left turn box to the northwest corner of the Interstate/Killingsworth intersection. In addition to the green box, there’s green “cross-bike” markings across the intersection and a new bike lane on N Interstate between Killingsworth and Willamette (adjacent the gas station and MAX station).
Going eastbound, PBOT has added a left turn bike lane on Willamette that directs riders to northbound Interstate where there are now two sharrows prior to the Killingsworth intersection. To connect to bike lanes on Killingsworth, PBOT has added a new section of buffered bike lane all the way to the Interstate intersection through the existing TriMet bus stop.
These are relatively small changes and they are still don’t provide bike riders with unprotected space away from drivers; but they are a step forward. And as anyone who has biked on Interstate knows, anything that adds institutional and legal respect for bike riders is very welcome.
In related news: PBOT has also recently striped a brand new bike lane on North Mississippi between Cook and Fremont.
This is a sketchy block that has been a frustrating gap for many years. The bike lane used to drop completely north of Cook where on-street parking is still allowed (boo!). Given the steep hill, the speed differential between bicycle and car users added to the stress. As you can see in the image above, PBOT simply moved the centerline over, removed the sharrow, and installed a standard bike lane. (It’s still very unfortunate that free car parking takes precedence over riding space here and on the commercial section of Mississippi, but that’s a conversation for a different day.)
— Jonathan Maus: (503) 706-8804, @jonathan_maus on Twitter and jonathan@bikeportland.org
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