It’s gotten to the point where local transportation agencies need to have a summit to figure out best practices for keeping drivers off bike paths.
Yesterday I learned that a driver of a car managed to roll onto the bike path alongside I-5 north of Marine Drive. A video posted to Reddit shows the driver going northbound on the path over the Columbia River en route to Hayden Island. The video is accompanied by the caption, “They almost hit a bicyclist!” but I didn’t see any rider in the video. The person who shot the video shared with me that the driver and bike rider were headed straight towards each other, “and the car slowed down and the biker swerved then he yelled something at the car and the car sped up and continued on their merry way.”
Yikes. I’m glad no one was hurt; but the mental scars of incidents like this often last longer than physical injuries.
This is just one in a very long line of attacks on carfree spaces. It is impossible at this point for transportation agencies to shrug this off as a random incident. A quick search of the BikePortland archives reveals that drivers have sped onto the I-205 path (several times), the Springwater Corridor (most recently back in May), the Columbia Slough Trail, the Peninsula Crossing Trail, the path along the Willamette River on Swan Island, and so on and so forth.
And just this morning as I typed up this post, a reader told me she watched a driver turn onto the paths in Waterfront Park from Naito Parkway.
What would the response be if a freight train operator steered intentionally down a neighborhood arterial street? Or if an airline pilot tried used I-5 as a runway just for fun? Or heck, imagine the response if a bicycle rider felt like pedaling along at 12 mph on I-5 just because they could?
We need DOTs, parks bureaus, and any agencies that oversee multi-use paths to come together, trade notes, learn why this keeps happening, and devise a strategy to prevent it. Having drivers on spaces where people go to get away from them is an unacceptable outcome of a system that’s already way too tilted toward people in cars.
Whether it’s people who get confused and think it’s a legit lane, or folks who live along the path and are just driving “home”, pranksters who think it’s funny, or selfish scofflaws avoiding congestion — we need to make it more difficult for cars to enter these paths.
In this most recent example, there are several spots where a driver could easily roll off the street and enter the path system. I counted four places where a driver would encounter little to no resistance. Take a look at the photos below and you’ll see just how easy it is for someone to roll onto the bike path:
I sympathize with DOTs because they must balance access restrictions with making sure it’s still easy and safe to enter paths by bike or wheelchair or whatever other non-car vehicle someone has. We’ve seen clunky attempts to address this problem many times in the past with large gates and huge concrete barricades.
Surely there’s a better way to do this. But until these agencies coordinate and make an intentional, concerted effort to remedy the issue, we’ll continue to see breaches into these carfree spaces. And with each one, we further erode the trust and confidence of the non-driving public.
We must defend our carfree spaces from these dangerous interlopers, or risk losing these precious refuges forever.
UPDATE, July 12th, 8:30 am: A reader told me he reported a missing bollard onto this path (at Marine Drive and Union Court) to the Oregon Department of Transportation. According to an email from Katherine Wentzel from the Ask ODOT office on April 5th, 2023, “Maintenance staff shared they are having ongoing issues with the bollards being stolen or at times ran over. Staff is exploring options for better bollards or a fix to the problem and do not have plans to reinstall them at this time.”