When Martin Greenough was hit and killed by a car driver as he rode on Northeast Lombard Street the night of December 12th 2015, he was very likely unaware of a dangerous gap in the bike lane where the busy highway rumbles under NE 42nd Avenue. Friends told BikePortland he had just moved to town and was still experimenting with his route to work.
Now, nearly a decade after Greenough’s death, the City of Portland and Oregon Department of Transportation are ready to close that gap for good. BikePortland shared this news in 2021 (after local traffic safety activist and lawyer Scott Kocher told us about it) and the agreement between the city and state was finalized last year.
A Portland Bureau of Transportation project manager told members of the city’s freight committee at their monthly meeting last week that they’ve received funding from ODOT (who owns and manages Lombard since it’s also Highway 30) to widen the road and build a continuous bike lane in both directions. The PBOT staffer referred to this as a “vital safety improvement.”
The work is part of PBOT’s project to replace the 42nd Avenue bridge later this fall.
PBOT Public Information Officer Dylan Rivera has confirmed they will stripe a seven-foot wide bike lane in the westbound direction and an eight-foot bike lane eastbound. Rivera says ODOT gave PBOT $587,000 to build the new bike lanes. The lanes will have a paint-only buffer stripe. The schematic plans shared by Rivera (above) also show an eight-foot sidewalk on the south side (eastbound) of the street. I assume this will take the place of the existing bike path, but I still need to confirm that.
In 2017 the city and state settled a lawsuit with Greenough’s family over the design of the roadway. At that time, ODOT opted to pave a bike path in the eastbound direction, instead of closing the bike lane gap.
The Greenough tragedy pressured the City of Portland to edit their official bike map to reflect the dangerous gap. Once the new bike lanes are in place, they’ll have another change to make to the map. Whether an unprotected bike lane on an urban highway with a 45 mph speed limit merits removal of “caution” markings will be up to PBOT.
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Hopefully not, but I really don’t like how inconsistent the “caution” markings are. Let’s take a sample of them to see just how hard it is to know the conditions on the road.
I find it incredibly frustrating to go over things like this. There are clear and obvious categorical differences between a place like NE 28th for riding and a state highway with a disappearing bike lane under an overpass, or a wide arterial with no shoulder. If someone rides a lot on NE 28th, then consults the bike map to see if a route will be safe or not and uses that as a heuristic for what “difficult connection” means, will they end up riding uphill on NE Glisan in 40 mph traffic with no other option?
It’s hard not to feel like some of the decisions for how to categorize certain segments have more to do with the history of how the greenways and other bike infrastructure came about. Is NE 28th labeled as a “difficult connection” because it’s difficult, or because PBOT wants to encourage use of the less direct “20s” greenway (on 30th)? And is the bridge over 99E labeled as a “difficult connection” because of the presence of the relatively new SE 17th bike lanes, or because it’s genuinely dangerous? I ride that bridge at least once a week and prefer it massively to waiting at the at grade crossing of 99E and 17th. And on 12th, before the Blumenauer Bridge was built, the crossing was just marked as a standard “bike lane” with no difficult connection included (source). Sure, these days of course I’d rather ride over the Blumenauer, but there are still times when 12th is more convenient for me and conditions are exactly the same as they were before the other bridge opened.
This is all to say that the bike map has serious flaws, but they should be fixable. Places that are more in the “sort of uncomfortable” category (NE 28th, NE 12th) really should not be marked as difficult connection when the same designation is used for segments that are almost always going to be immediately life threatening. It’s confusing and dangerous for there to be such glaring inconsistencies. If PBOT can create a whole new part of the legend for “Shared Roadways” to make the bike network more complete looking and legible (but which really amount to nothing at all), then they can have a category for “use extreme caution very dangerous”.
This is good news. Tragically, it comes a decade too late.
It amazes me how much infrastructure upgrades cost. Half a million to widen, stripe, and build sidewalk on a ~ 100′ stretch of road? Ludicrous.
Are the columns that support the 42/47th overpass going to be moved? Because it seems like their existence is the reason the nominal bike lane that now exists has a gap. The cross-section shown above (the text of which I can’t make out) seems to show two more sidewalks, two more bike lanes, and a left-turn lane (purpose=??) compared to the existing road. There is certainly not enough space to do that between the existing pillars. If the overpass is going to modified, what do the modifications look like? Will they improve bicycle connections to/from the Holman greenway? I certainly welcome completing the shoulder bike lane on Lombard, but 42/47th is a higher priority to me.
Also, it’s frustrating that it takes a fatal tragedy plus years of litigation to impel ODOT to meet the barest minimum to make bicycling on Lombard survivable.
With the construction of the paved path, why is there a gap in the eastbound direction? That bypass is probably the safest part of the route.
It’s unclear to me what the street profile will look like after construction (e.g. they closing a lane or routing around the bridge piers?), but I’m glad this gap will finally be addressed.
Good question Watts.
I don’t consider paths like that the same as a bike lane. The “gap” still exists because the bike lane ends and then picks back up a bit later. That path is OK, but it’s often blocked and it’s not really the same as an on-street facility. Also, it is only in one direction.