Southwest Portland resident Michael Reiss was so tired of leaves piling up in the bike lane, he took things into his own hands. I’m not talking about grabbing a broom and clearing a small section. He bought a high-powered gas sweeper, attached it to his electric recumbent trike, and then made several passes of a major bike route.
The result: A two-mile stretch of SW Multnomah Blvd is now clean and clear of leaves from the outside bike lane stripe to the fog line and hundreds of pounds of leaves are now in a ditch. Reiss’s DIY hack worked well he’s since bought an even larger sweeper.
Reiss is part of a long line of resourceful, fed-up Portlanders who take matters into their own hands when it comes to keeping our bike lanes free of debris like leaves, glass, and gravel. Reiss has been sharing his sweeping exploits on the Bike Loud PDX Slack channel. Bike Loud has been testing a bike lane sweeper for over a year now. The group maintains a schedule where volunteers can sign up for shifts to use the trailer. They also created a dedicated Slack channel to talk all things bike lane sweeping. When Reiss uploaded a video of his sweeper in action the other day, I had to talk with him and learn more.
He said his motivation comes from being a nice husband. “My wife bikes to OHSU from where we live just south of the Fred Meyer in Burlingame,” Reiss shared in a video interview today. “In the last couple of weeks, Terwilliger has been basically impassable.”
Reiss said the City of Portland swept the bike lane once, but within days it was full of leaves again. “That’s my wife’s bike route, so this is sort of a honey-do list,” he shared with a laugh.
Anyone who rides in southwest knows that leaf season on a bicycle is especially treacherous. Not only does the hilly area have a lot of massive trees, but there are fewer bike routes overall. So when a major bike thoroughfare like Terwilliger — or Capitol Highway or Multnomah — become essentially closed by leaves, it’s a bigger deal than in some other parts of town that have alternate ways around.
Reiss loves solving problems and this type of project is just the type of thing he said his brain likes to focus on. He and someone else he met through Bike Loud found the used sweeper on Craiglist for $300 and then Reiss fashioned a hitch and tow bar and screwed it on. After a few test runs showed potential, he picked up an even larger unit and continues to tinker with its power settings and configurations.
Beyond the power and electrical considerations, the tricky thing is setting the angle on the brush in a way that pushes the leaves aside while also making sure it pushes down on the pavement hard enough to make progress, but not so hard that it slows down the cycling. Reiss is an expert at modifying electric-bikes, so he’s used his assistive motor to great success. “The sweeper angle is only 15-16 degrees, so you start pulling all that weight and you’ve got to go slow and wait for the sweeper to push it off to the side,” he shared with me today.
Another consideration is that, so far at least, Reiss’ sweeper doesn’t play nice with pedestrians. He’s trying to tweak the angle of the brush and the speed of the brush motor so that the leaves get piled up nicely and don’t get blown on the sidewalk.
All these issues have likely been hammered out by the creators of the Bike Lane Sweeper, so I was glad to hear that Reiss has been in contact with them to share ideas and feedback. He hopes to help Bike Loud purchase one of the new sweeper models in the near future.
In the end, Reiss’ DIY effort illustrates frustration with the city for not keeping up with bike lane maintenance. The Portland Bureau of Transportation has made strides in recent years, but there are still more lane miles then they can tackle in a timely fashion.
Good thing we’ve got gung-ho folks like Reiss and others who take matters like this into their own hands. And I don’t think we’ve seen the end of Reiss and his sweeping experiments. His ultimate plan is to use a cargo trike (like the one ice cream sellers use) and mount the sweeper to the front so it’s easier to control. And future versions will be converted to electric power.
“I’ll pound away at this project until it works,” he shared. “Or until it becomes stupid or somebody else does something that eliminates the need for it — or until I get bored and move onto another project.”
If you see a recumbent pulling a loud sweeper in southwest Portland, steer clear and give Reiss a big thumbs-up!
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You’d think so, but it’s actually illegal – you may not perform work in a ROW without permission of PBOT or the adjacent landowner.
I found it hilarious a few years back when Wheeler and Hardesty were telling citizens to roll up their sleeves and pitch in, and the city attornies’ office was yelling ‘nope! nope!’ on volunteers doing almost anything with official recognizance. I asked one of the many groups that sprang up to do some of this work how they handlesd that and the response was basically ‘f&ck them; let them cite me – I’ll go straight to the media.’
out here we do guerilla rewilding, ROW clearance, and trailbuilding to bypass ROW access that’s been closed by PBOT work. Maybe SW should just secede?
Adopt-a-road allows for the removal of trash.
ODOT does Adopt-a-highway; PBOT does allow Adobt-One-Block to clean trash, but not trim brush, remove invasives, clear a path around an obstacle in the ROW, etc. PBOT used to have programs to make community trails and allow groups to improve ROWs and killed them during the last 3 years. There is apparently still a program to adopt a green space, so that’s something at least.
Oh, and all the stormdrains are belong to us.
I was pretty sure someone would bring up the “illegality” angle.
I will bet anyone a dollar or a donut that the city, which does NOT have the resources to sweep the bike lanes, will DEFINITELY HAVE the resources to send Michael a cease-and-desist letter, warning him not to do it again – or else.
Portland is a complete clusterf**k.
Woo hoo !!
excellent work !!!
Thanks Michael !!!!
Related news…the City of Vancouver maintenance ops bike lane sweeper has been out of service for almost two months (unknown problem; then speed sensor last week). This seems to be a common issue with the Mathieu sweeper (PBoT had similar issue of reliability, right?). Chalk it up to poor design or perhaps too many hours driving the small sweeper at high speed to get to far flung bike corridors (vs trailering it between sites) or perhaps its due to the repair manual being in French? BUT what this also is – a problem when local governments only have “one” of a type of tool…fire truck, ambulance, shovel…when the only sweeper goes down you are out of luck for peak leaf months and lot of blocked protected bike lanes.
My proposal: that all of the local cities in the Vancouver-Portland Metro region do a MOU to procure and share an extra bike lane sweeper…so that when 1 goes down they can borrow from the pool. That is until each city gets a deeper bike lane sweeper bench.
Group thoughts?
For a second I thought you were going to suggest a class action suit against Fayat Group for selling shoddy equipment to gov’t agencies en route to their €4bln annual revenue.
Sorry if this has already been covered at some point, but it seems like if there was a company that could do this, PBOT would be willing to contract with them to do it. I wonder if the inertia for PBOT to manage this, is that they don’t want to create the administrative/ departmental infrastructure. If they could just pay someone to do it, maybe they would be receptive.
I would say a nonprofit company would be my ideal scenario, where it would take on the work that folks are already doing on an individual basis. I’m not sure how much PBOT would be willing to pay any contractor to do this work but if it were a nonprofit I can imagine hopefully getting some funds from them, then also running on grants as well as community donations. Now I do think that PBOT should be the ones providing the funds to maintain bike and pedestrian infrastructure to the same standards as car infrastructure, but it would at least address the problem in the here and now while we attempt to get the new city government to give a shit about people outside cars. The concept that Reiss is using is exciting and I’m just imagining that if we had more funds and could scale this up it could really go places.
There’s a lot of money to be made by the heads of non-profits in Portland. You should look into starting one.
Even though “non-profit” doesn’t mean the tax payer wouldn’t still have to pay for it.
I’d rather see City employees and equipment doing the work. We used to have street cleaning services but the City keeps cutting that back. Maybe it’s time to properly fund it once again for the whole city and not just the rich neighborhoods.
It might have to do with union contracts. I’d surmise that maintenance positions are part of a union, and contracts dictate that only the union workers can do that work (that might underlying the issue that cct flagged above with the City encouraging private citizens to do the work -doing so by policy would violate union contracts). I’ve had this come up with non-union staff at a city government were offering to help in assessing ROW/ storefront locations for adding bike racks but learned that work is specifically assigned to a union employee and utilizing other staff to expand capacity would have violated the union contract. This was not at City of Portland, but guessing similar stipulations exist…
That may be part of the problem. But I have noticed that PBOT contracts out a lot of the work that they do. This has come up when something, like bike detours or work site clean up is done very poorly, and it turns out that it was a contractor being sloppy, or so I’ve been told.
You are both (dot and SD) correct: since PBOT workers already do street sweeping, the union will howl if PBOT tries to outsource part of the work via a contract. PBOT has more success contracting for work that is NOT already done by city employees.
I’m a big supporter of unions but clearly we need a new approach here, since the current approach to street cleaning just isn’t working.
Very resourceful….but why again am I paying taxes if I have to sweep my own bike lanes?
Why do I pay taxes for kids to go to school when I don’t have kids?
Why do I pay taxes for the road in front of your home that I will probably never ride my bike on?
Why do I pay taxes for a municipal golf course?
I pay these taxes because I live in a diverse community with diverse interests
I think you missed the point. We pay taxes to sweep the streets for everyone, and they don’t get swept and instead volunteers go out and do it. That’s the problem.
Your examples are all good, but they’re not the same kind of thing Mary was suggesting. She wasn’t saying “why do I have to pay taxes for something I don’t use” which is what your examples all are. She’s saying “why do we pay taxes for something and it doesn’t get done”.
I see your point, Surly Ogre, but here’s the thing—when I pay taxes for schools, I’m not being asked to teach the kids myself. I don’t get a “DIY Education Kit” and a stack of textbooks to sort through on weekends. And when I pay for road maintenance, I’m not expected to haul out a shovel and patch the potholes in front of my house. But when it comes to bike lanes? Apparently, it’s “sweep ’em yourself or tough luck.” If I’m paying for these services, I’d like to think the city can handle a broom or two, so I don’t have to add “professional bike lane janitor” to my resume.
Except that in SW we are told that any street not up to the city’s standard is “privately maintained” so we do all of our own maintenance.
Got a pothole and try to call the pothole line? The city will tell you it’s not their problem – it’s your problem.
Portland is such a clusterf**k that it’s amazing anyone still lives here.
Kudos to the DIYers.I am so irritated by NE Multnomah in the MLK/Grand area. This is a busy route into/out of the Moda transit area. Are you kidding me with all the leaves there? Almost wiped out earlier this week in the morning with some wet/icy leaves dominating the bike lane.
It would be nice if we had a real-time pubic-updateable map of problem areas. On the first test outing with this machine the day before, I had actually intended to do Terwilliger from Barbur to Broadway, but when I got there I found that PBOT had actually swept it sometime in the wee hours. I’m assuming they did the whole length, but don’t actually know. Yay, but that was frustrating. It was a mess for at least 2 weeks prior. I did Capitol Hwy from Terwilliger to Hillsdale instead. That was a difficult stretch and I hadn’t actually figured out how to make the contraption work well so I went home after that and made a few adjustments that did the trick. It was much more effective the next day on Multnomah.
I saw PBOT out sweeping some already pretty clean looking streets in the Central Eastside last night. So they apparently still sweep some places at least.
Yep, Watts – I see the same thing. Last fall I saw a city sweeper hard at work on the hilly residential streets above Washington Park! There are no bikes lanes there – just lots of cars parked on narrow residential streets, and the sweeper was methodically working around them and only occasionally was able to return to the curb. Basically it was doing almost nothing useful.
Meanwhile the bike lanes everywhere in Portland were piled high with leaves. Let’s face it: the city just doesn’t want us to ride bikes. They have other priorities.
I live in the area in this story, and the residential streets we live on get swept every couple of months year round, whether they need it or not. The main artery streets (e.g. Multnomah) don’t get swept at all unless several people complain multiple times. The City’s policies are completely absurd.
I rode Multnomah Blvd yesterday and noticed that someone had done a better job of sweeping than ever before – really got to the edge of the bike lane!
Thanks, Michael, for your work and boo to PBOT for not being able to do much of anything right.
You’re welcome Fred!
PBOT not sweeping to the edge of the bike lane annoys me so much! There are so many areas where ivy has taken over half the bike lane and it’s never cleared to the curb or fog line.
Here’s a link to a map of Portland’s leaf pickup districts:
https://pdx.maps.arcgis.com/apps/StoryMapBasic/index.html?appid=679d021c01bd48b19dc63e03ca12cc49&extent=-122.7060,45.5386,-122.6237,45.5676
This year the pickup is scheduled by district between Nov. 9 through Dec. 21st, so in that time I guess the street sweepers are pretty maxed out doing residential area leaf pickup, including on some weekend days in school zones.
https://www.portland.gov/transportation/maintenance/leaf-day
Among other things, that page says bike lanes are swept five times per year*. In areas where leaf pickup is a thing the MO is to put your leaves in the gutter area** some time before the pickup date.
*Probably not between 11/9-12/21
**Where a person rides a bike, generally.
Thanks, X, for the info, but do you actually believe it? I don’t. I can say with some confidence that the new protected lanes on Multnomah Blvd have NEVER been swept, since the big sweepers can’t access the lanes and the little sweeper is always broken.
Very cool to read about. I wonder if Michael (and other bikeloud advocates working on bike powered street sweepers) could apply for a small grant through PCEF to help defray costs. Seems like it would fit the goals and outcomes outlined by PCEF.
I would be happy if people would stop blowing their leaves from sidewalks and yards into streets as well – especially when they get blown into bike lanes (I can’t count how many times I’ve had leaves blown into me while riding!) Too lazy to use a rake to begin with, also too lazy to pick up and dispose of their own leaves. I guess if you just throw them in the street they’re not your problem anymore, right?
I’m aware of neighborhood collections that are infrequent, but let’s be real, why again are our taxes being spent to clean up private citizen messes? And.. this collection just encourages the behavior in places where there is no collection, creating more hazards for cyclists on many of our city’s “greenways.”
So true! The contractor for PPS that maintains the grounds of Markham School blew all of the leaves from school grounds directly into the protected bike lanes on SW Capitol Hwy. That was a couple of weeks ago and all of the leaves were still there as of yesterday.
And no – I’m not reporting the problem to anybody at the city, who are useless.
I saw Michael riding up Terwilliger with his setup and was baffled until I later saw him with the contraption in action on Capital Hwy. I cheered out loud. Mike, you’re a hero! Thanks so much for this.