This past Friday afternoon, while many of you had already started your weekend, the Portland Bureau of Transportation released details on significant changes to their Northeast Skidmore Street Corridor Safety Project.
Instead of a protected bike lane from NE 33rd to 37th on Skidmore adjacent to the north side of Wilshire Park, the revised design will have a protected bike lane for just one and will have sharrows (shared-lane markings) the rest of the way. Here’s what happened…
There are neighborhood greenways on 32nd and 37th avenues; but there was a seven block, east-west gap between the two of them. In July of last year we shared how PBOT wanted to connect these greenways and create a safer bike crossing of the off-set intersection at 33rd (a major neighborhood collector). That project on 33rd led to discussions with people who live in the Beaumont-Wilshire neighborhood about how best to create safe conditions on Skidmore between the new bike lanes on 33rd and the existing neighborhood greenways on 32nd and 37th.
In January we shared PBOT’s initial design concept for Skidmore. It included a two-way, 12-foot wide space for a bike lane between 33rd and 37th. It would be protected with plastic wands and would run curbside right next to Wilshire Park. People would still be able to park on both sides of the street and the existing driving space would be narrowed from 40 to 28-feet to slow people down. PBOT also planned to remove a handful of parking spaces to improve visibility at the intersections.
PBOT knew creating a dedicated bike lane next to a park and making this dramatic of a change to a neighborhood street would require some deft communications. So, in mid-February, they mailed postcards out to 1,000 residents and held a meeting with the Beaumont-Wilshire Neighborhood Association. At that meeting, some folks gave PBOT an earful. “So this is supposed to be a neighborhood park yet you’re talking about reducing parking spaces? That doesn’t sound very neighborhood friendly,” one of them said. Others were worried about parking their cars away from the curb. “You open a door one way and you might hit a car, then open the door the other way, you might hit a bicycle.” (And if you read BikePortland comments, you’ll note that it was more than just neighborhood residents who had quibbles with the design.)
But the PBOT project manager handled the pushback with aplomb and it appeared the project would go on as planned. I hadn’t heard anything about it until Friday afternoon and assumed the design was finalized. I was wrong.
The new design will create a bike lane on Skidmore for just half a block, and there will no longer be a floating parking lane. The driving space on that one block between 33rd and 34th will remain the narrower 28-feet, but will expand to 40 feet east of 34th. PBOT will add a speed bump at 34th “to slow vehicles speeds before the transition from a shared street to the bike lanes.”
PBOT’s rationale for the change was that the shorter bike lane will allow their maintenance crews to get the striping done at the same time they do the repaving work on 33rd, thus ensuring the main thrust of the project — making it safer for bike riders to connect to the new crossing on 33rd — happens sooner rather than later. But PBOT also acknowledged that the pushback played a role (“community members had mixed reactions to the initial design”) and that doing less for a bikeway now could leave open the possibility for more later (“the updated design allows future projects to consider a range of options, including a shared street neighborhood greenway with full traffic calming improvements or a multi-use path along the park. Multiple options remain available for a future capital project”).
Interestingly, several of the “project goals” on the PBOT website have changed along with the new design.
In March, PBOT said the two-way bike path would eliminate conflicts with drivers on Skidmore. That sentence has been removed. They also removed passages about how the narrower road would reduce speeding and improve safety by narrowing the crossing distance for people on foot.
The new design is expected to be constructed sometime this summer.