Over the weekend my son and I biked to the Columbia River. We have a tradition where we load our inflatable paddleboards into a trailer, load up my bike full of beach stuff, and ride to a sandbar just east of Broughton Beach.
This year, our ride had a pleasant surprise and an unpleasant one.
To get to the beach, we ride on NE 33rd Avenue/Drive to connect between the NE Holman neighborhood greenway and the bike path along Marine Drive. As you might recall from my 2022 video of this ride or the video I shared last summer, a huge feature of 33rd Drive for the past several years has been the folks who live in RVs and other vehicles alongside the bike lane.
The presence of all those people, their car-homes, and belongings made riding on 33rd much more dangerous and stressful than it should be. That’s why I was very pleasantly surprised to see that efforts to address the encampments have succeeded. There was not one person living in a vehicle along the entire stretch of the road.
Some agency (either PBOT or Port of Portland) has placed large concrete blocks and new guardrails in the parking lane to prevent camps from being formed. They’ve also established an “RV Safe Park” just a block away. That special shelter is run by Salvation Army and holds spots for 55 vehicles. It looked full to my passing eyes and seemed to be a well-managed space.
That was such a pleasant surprise!
Unfortunately as we continued home, riding south on 33rd Drive south of NE Sunderland Ave, there was something else making this street unsafe: overgrown vegetation. A massive hedgerow and other bushes along the eastern edge of the Riverside Golf & Country Club golf course is growing well into the bike lane. With a 35 mph speed limit and a paint-only bike lane, 33rd isn’t a low-stress place to ride even when it’s unobstructed. But when people have to bike in the general travel lane to avoid overgrowth, the situation becomes much more risky.
Branches and bushes growing into bike lanes is a huge problem this year. Based on my personal experience (I got swatted in the face by a branch on N Rosa Parks Way while biking just after dusk a few nights ago) and from what I’m hearing in the community, the number of problem spots is much higher than it’s been in the past. Our wet spring and warm summer have led to ideal growing conditions. That’s great if you’re a farmer or a gardener; but not if you’re trying to navigate curbside bike lanes around Portland.
It’s time to get out your lawn shears and clippers and cut what you can. You should also have PBOT’s maintenance hotline and/or email — 503-823-1700/pdxroads@portlandoregon.gov — in your phone. This is an important issue that needs to be addressed. Thankfully PBOT’s system for tracking these is good and they will respond to your complaints (an email sent to that address got a human response four minutes after I sent it today), but it’s a bummer to have yet another thing making roads unsafe for non-drivers.
Homeless encampments are a very difficult issue to handle. Overgrown weeds and trees are simple. Just get out there and cut them back.