Seattle Bike Blog author leaves bad review of downtown Portland bikeways

“Where are the downtown protected bike lanes? I was surprised by how disconnected it all was.”

– Tom Fucoloro

Tom Fucoloro has tracked Seattle’s cycling politics, projects, and people very closely since he launched Seattle Bike Blog in 2010. Last year his book, Biking Uphill in the Rain: The Story of Seattle from Behind the Handlebars was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

Suffice it to say, Fucoloro knows a bit about what it takes to create a good urban bike network in a Pacific Northwest city. And after a recent visit to Portland it’s clear he doesn’t think our city is up to snuff.

To be clear, Fucoloro and his young daughter had a wonderful time. A recap of their trip on Fucoloro’s blog shares much of the magic that makes Portland such a cool place: bombing downtown from the Zoo in Washington Park, discovering public art, playing in our parks, and riding bike-friendly bridges across the Willamette River.

But when it came to riding downtown with his soon-to-be first grader, Fucoloro was not impressed. “Where are the downtown protected bike lanes?” he wondered. Since his last visit to Portland seven years ago, Fucoloro wrote that, “I had assumed the city would have built some proper protected bike lanes through the downtown core in those years.” He added that in the past decade, planners and advocates from Seattle were inspired by Portland and used that inspiration to build a network of protected bike lanes through their downtown core. “Has Portland forgotten its own lessons?” he asked.

He gave us kudos for NW Naito’s protected bike lane. But as we all know, one great facility does not a network make. Our wide, green bike lane couplet on SW Harvey Milk and Oak are nice, Fucoloro found, but they have no physical protection and therefore, “there was pretty much always someone parked in the bike lane,” he noted. Even SW Broadway only provides protection in one direction.

“I was surprised by how disconnected it all was, and we ended up biking in mixed traffic or walking the bike on the sidewalk at some point on nearly every trip we took around downtown,” Fucoloro wrote.

A few commenters on our Monday Roundup (where we shared a link to his blog post) agreed.

“I largely agree with Tom’s assessment,” wrote commenter dw. “Where are the protected bike lanes? Every street downtown should have nice, two-way protected bike lanes to make getting around by bike as easy as walking or driving.”

And Anomalee added, “As a working class person who can’t really afford a car, it’s really disheartening and infuriating to see how bad downtown is for biking. I guess it’s just one example of the broader problem we’re up against, a handful of good infrastructure projects here and there but no connected network.”

As I processed all this, I recalled an opinion piece I wrote in January 2013. Here’s the lede:

“The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) is prepping a $10.2 million list of active transportation projects they hope to get funded through a federal grant. According to sources at PBOT, conversations have already begun to focus all that money on a package of projects that would focus specifically on downtown bike access in the form of protected bike lanes and cycle tracks.

This is a golden opportunity we should not pass up.”

And we didn’t pass it up. A year later advocates jumped on board with a lobbying campaign from The Street Trust (then known as the Bicycle Transportation Alliance). By 2016 PBOT had support from City Council, strong backing from the community, and a bucket of funding filled with $8.4 million to implement what would eventually become known as the Central City in Motion plan. And according to PBOT CCIM Project Manager Gabe Graff, that money was set aside to, “preserve and enhance the pedestrian environment, preserve and enhance the transit access, at the same time we fill in a more comfortable and protected bicycling network.”

In 2016, Graff said downtown Portland was doing fine when it came to transit access, walkability, and driving convenience. “But cyclists coming across the bridges from the east side into downtown Portland feel like the infrastructure is not as intuitive, is not as comfortable,” Graff said.

Eight years ago, Graff shared a similar assessment about bicycling downtown that Fucoloro experienced a few weeks ago.

So what happened?

As Portland loves to do, we first formed a committee and then created a plan before we could spend $8.4 million on new bikeways. That took time. In fact, it took nearly six years from the time PBOT first began working on the concept in earnest to when City Council adopted the CCIM Plan in November 2018. (A staffing problem with the original project manager likely hurt the timeline.)

It’s important to note that around this time there were two approaches to reforming our streets being forged simultaneously by PBOT planning staff: protected bike lanes and dedicated bus lanes. While I always felt Central City in Motion was intended to be bike-centric, it ended up with several priority bus lane projects on its final list. But bus lanes also had a plan of their own, Enhanced Transit Corridors, which was adopted by council in June 2018.

Then politics shifted even more in the favor of bus lanes two months later when Chloe Eudaly began her turn as commissioner-in-charge of transportation.

Eudaly and her staff looked at PBOT and saw two plans, both of which were fully baked and ready-to-go: one was bike-centric, the other was bus-centric. They chose buses. Why? Because, in the words of Eudaly’s policy director Jamey Duhamel, “[Transit] was the issue that was most complementary and intersectional with our social, environmental and economic justice issues; and so we really went big and bold for increasing transit service.”

Eudaly went all-in on the Rose Lane Project in late 2019 with an intentional focus on using buses to combat racial disparities, and it was adopted by city council a few months later.

It wasn’t until February 2020 that Eudaly began to focus on cycling. But then Covid happened and later that year Eudaly lost her council seat to Mingus Mapps.

With a pandemic raging, nightly protests following the murder of George Floyd, the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, and a stark increase in unsheltered homeless on the streets; it’s easy to understand why building a safe and convenient network of protected bike lanes downtown hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves. But a lack of priority doesn’t explain everything. The CCIM plan itself simply isn’t building the type of protected bike lanes some of us hoped it would because it includes all types of treatments and projects.

Of the eight completed projects listed on PBOT’s website out of the 18 total projects recommended in the plan, just two are protected bike lanes (Better Naito and NW/SW Broadway). CCIM projects include traffic signal timing and upgrades, bus lanes, neighborhood greenways, crossing treatments, paint-only bike lanes, and so on. Those are important things, but each one of them means less focus on a connected network of protected bike lanes. And keep in mind, CCIM was passed just two years after we detailed the myriad reasons PBOT has had trouble building physically protected bikeways in constrained environments like downtown.

But there are reasons for optimism! After the huge success of Better Naito and the rescue of SW Broadway’s protected bike lane from the jaws of PBOT Director Millicent Williams and her former boss Mingus Mapps, PBOT is now working hard on the SW 4th Avenue protected bike lane project. SW 4th was always meant as the northbound couplet of Broadway and it’s addition to the network will create important connections. I hope that project creates urgency for protected bike lanes on W Burnside leading onto the bridge, a project that’s in the plan but remains unbuilt.

We need as many protected lanes for bicycle riders as possible. Because Fucoloro is right. The combination of our huge investment and decades-long focus on the neighborhood bikeway network and our legacy of a strong cycling culture, means a high-quality protected network downtown would be “an instant success.”

“It feels like Portland has done all the hardest parts,” Fucoloro writes. “And then has failed to actualize that previous work by plugging it into a network of routes people can use… Come on, Portland. Stop resisting your city’s bike successes and choose to embrace it instead.”