The stars are aligning for inner Northeast Broadway to become a true main street where people are prioritized over cars. In the coming years we could see a major transformation of this key east-west corridor as a mix of federal funding and a local paving project create a golden opportunity for a redesign between the Broadway Bridge and NE 24th.
As BikePortland reported back in March, the Portland Bureau of Transportation won a $38 million federal grant to create a “civic main street” on Broadway between the bridge and NE 7th. Conceptual drawings of that project shared publicly in September show cross-sections with wide, physically-protected bike lanes, narrower general purpose lanes, a dedicated streetcar lane, and two lanes for driving cars instead of the three that exist today.
Now there’s another opportunity to extend this cross section further east to NE 24th. Sometime this year PBOT will begin formal design and outreach for a project to repave NE Broadway from 11th to 24th. As BikePortland reported in 2022, the project is on PBOT’s paving list and planners have just enough funding (an estimated $300,000) to install new pavement and then paint new lane striping.
As we’ve seen with other “pave and paint” projects, PBOT will have a clean slate and will have the option to repaint the lanes in a new configuration. Since NE Broadway is classified in Portland’s Comprehensive Plan as a “Major City Bikeway” and with funding already secured for the project on the inner portion of the street to the east of this paving project — the odds are very good a new configuration could be in the works.
In a PBOT document that lists all paving projects for the five years between 2023 and 2027, the NE Broadway project is in the “calendar year 2024” category. In a column labeled “Bicycle improvement opportunities?” PBOT wrote: “Potential to remove a travel lane and enhance the bike lane. Needs planning and project development work. Consider extending west to 7th Ave.”
That “consider extending west to 7th” was written before PBOT had won $38 million to upgrade the bridge to NE 7th, so it’s very likely the “pave and paint” project will extend west from NE 11th to connect to NE 7th.
And an update to the design would almost certainly result in less space for using cars and more space for bicycling, walking, and transit.
Efforts to make a better bikeway on NE Broadway have been around for at least a decade. In 2014 the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (now The Street Trust) made bike lanes on NE Broadway one of their main priorities. Staffers worked to garner feedback from business owners and educate the community on why it was needed in addition to the existing neighborhood bikeway on NE Tillamook.
In 2015, we included NE Broadway as one of our four bikeways it’d take to make the Lloyd District great. And in 2016, tactical urbanism group Better Block PDX did a “Better Broadway” installation that laid out a temporary protected bike lane and a bus stop island.
But while many Portlanders are eager for a new design that vastly improves bicycling, local business owners and other area interests might have different ideas about the future of Broadway. That 2016 Better Block installation is remembered by many local advocates for how it backfired after some local business owners weren’t on board with the idea.
Members of the Sullivan’s Gulch Neighborhood Association have been meeting as a “Broadway-Weidler Working Group” since last fall to strategize on how to get changes over the finish line. They want fewer cars on Broadway because they know it will lead to a safer environment and more travel capacity overall. According to meeting minutes, their ultimate goal is to decouple Broadway and NE Weidler, make Weidler a quiet neighborhood street, and then re-introduce two-way traffic onto Broadway. (According to sources, PBOT estimates returning Broadway to two-way traffic would cost over $10 million and there are no current plans to move forward with that idea.)
Currently, the section of Broadway between 7th and 24th is 56-feet wide and has five lanes for drivers and a narrow, door-zone bike lane. There are three general travel lanes and two on-street auto parking lanes. The bike lanes were installed in the late 1990s and have never been updated. With reductions in driving since the pandemic, three lanes for driving on this section of Broadway seem like overkill.
If PBOT chooses to, there is plenty of room to reduce space for car users and add a wider, physically-protected bike lane, a dedicated mass transit lane, and medians for safer crossings. They don’t currently have any extra funding in the “pave and paint” budget, but they could lay out the striping today and identify more funding later. With the $38 million in federal funds, they’ve got bureaucratic inertia to shake more funding from the trees.
This section of Broadway would be a very important link in the bike and transit network. It would connect to busy north-south bike routes (like the NE 7th Greenway), several TriMet bus lanes, and the Portland Streetcar.
While PBOT hasn’t begun official public outreach on the project, we expect that to begin soon. Stay tuned.