Our Guest Post last week by Don Baack focused on southwest Portland’s problems with getting pedestrian and bicycle networks built. The area relies on private development — and the city’s frontage requirements that are supposed to accompany it — to cobble together its networks. The area has the worst sidewalk coverage and most incomplete bicycle facilities in the city, so obviously this system is not working very well.
HJ jumped in to say that it’s not just southwest, that West Hills struggles with the same problem. But HJ added another wrinkle — jurisdictional control. And boy is that true!
When we say “jurisdictional control,” people usually think of all the ODOT-owned orphan highways, but the complications also extend to the ragged edges of our city borders. County lines, unincorporated county lines, and city-borders don’t respect the layout of surface streets, and the locations where they intersect end up being some of the most dangerous spots in the area.
HJ sums up the problems pretty well:
Not just SW. This is happening all over the west hills. For example the French American school is planning a big expansion. They just took over the rest of the corner at Cornell and Miller and will be developing it.
Word on the street is they have tried to work with the various road agencies that control the edges of their property (poor guys get Washington County, Multnomah County, and PBOT to deal with) to get bike lanes and sidewalks established, but have gotten stonewalled. The impact of the school on local traffic has become outright dangerous, yet parents that live a mere block away have no safe way to walk their kid to school. So they drive.
Will anything change with their new development? I’m skeptical. But if we don’t make it happen with this project, which is on the Ronde PDX route, it never will. Locals have been begging for this area to get addressed for over 30 years and the demand lines in the dirt are well worn.
It would be a major step forward to getting folks out of their cars as a sidewalk and or bike lane on Miller in particular would give people in the area safe access to both basic essentials such as groceries as well as public transit.
Nobody seems to want to help because it’s a jurisdictional nightmare spot and because it’s at the edges of everything. CPO1 has declined as it’s the edge of their area and they want to focus further in, BikeLoud never looks past the west edge of downtown, WashCo Bikes doesn’t care because non-Washington county spots are involved. Please tell me how are we supposed to fix this spot?!
Thank you HJ. I don’t have an answer, maybe someone else has an idea. It’s the same problem on SW Scholls Ferry Rd — unincorporated Washington and Multnomah counties, with a tiny stretch of Portland. It seems like an impossible street to fix.
You can read HJ’s comment, and all the others too, under the original post.