People driving cars on the Springwater Corridor path has become something of a sensitive topic of late. With an increase in dangerous drivers on our streets, carfree places are more cherished than ever.
So when folks smash through the sanctified space of what’s supposed to a cycling only area with deadly vehicles, it’s understandable why many people have a strong reaction.
Last month a Portland bike rider came across someone parked smack-dab in the middle of the Springwater path between Oaks Amusement Park and the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge parking lot turnoff. It wasn’t a drunk driver and it wasn’t someone accessing their camping site.
The bike rider happened to be the man behind a popular Instagram account known as Cars Succ. Suffice it to say he wasn’t super happy to see the car on the path. He also had his video camera rolling to document his confrontation with the driver.
The owner of the Cars Succ account pulled over and asked the driver why he had parked on the path. The driver said he works with the nonprofit Mental Health & Addiction Association of Oregon and that he drove on the path in order to reach one of their clients. “We’re allowed to be out here as long as we have our hazards on,” the driver claimed in the video.
Mr. Cars Succ then expressed his concerns, suggested that the driver used a bike instead, and rode away.
I was curious about whether or not some nonprofits are allowed to drive and park on the Springwater path, so I reached out to Portland Parks & Recreation.
I heard back from Public Information Officer Mark Ross. Ross said, the mental health professional seen in the video was working under contract with the City of Portland’s Navigation and Outreach Teams. These teams are part of Portland’s efforts to help people who live in outdoor campsites throughout the city.
Ross said these crews sometimes need to reach people who live in areas far from trailheads and parking lots. “Some City staff and essential partners are allowed to drive on the path during emergency situations,” Ross told BikePortland. He added that PP&R has reached out to the specific nonprofit whose employee was on the path that day, “to ensure that safety is paramount in their protocols as they continue the valuable work to assist people living outdoors.”
PP&R says they will “iron out some nuances” in the policy and will do more collaboration with the nonprofit to make sure all path safety protocols are being followed.
As for the anonymous rider behind the Cars Succ account? He’s connected with a local bike advocacy group and told me today, “We’re trying to work on finding a solution that lets [that nonprofit] do their work activities on the path without a car.”
Thanks for reading.
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I’d love to see more social service providers interacting with the community while walking, cycling, or using transit.
I have no objections to PPB/PFB vehicles on trails when they’re responding (or investigating) emergencies. Station 21 on the other side of OMSI even has a UTV capable of carrying responders and a stretcher along the trail or esplanade. I wish PPB and PGE would make more serious attempts to be minimally disruptive when involved in planned maintenance along the Springwater.
My quick exploration in Google Earth suggests that the encampments I am familiar with North of Oaks Park are half of a mile from parking lots. From my ableist perspective that’s a trivial distance to walk.
This isn’t a problem that requires tens of thousands of dollars in new expenses for a nifty new e-bike fleet and vehicle racks since any employer in Portland can find a way to provide Biketown access to their staff. I presume that PPB could easily facilitate access to the Ross Island boat landing parking lot that they control for city affiliated social service providers with very minimal creative thinking. I also presume that social service providers could assign clients to case workers with basic physical fitness if they reside in locations I accessible to routine visits via car.
Overall I sense a serious case of car brain and a lack of minimal collaboration between people who should be working together but don’t.
Yet another reason why Iannarone was dead wrong when she promoted ceding our multiuse paths to camping.
Was it Iannarone? Or was it the used bookstore owner (Eudaly) who said, when cyclists reported MUPs blocked by tents, “We have a housing emergency”?
It was absolutely Iannarone who said it.
From a bike portland article during her campaign: In last night’s interview with Kessler, Iannarone explained why people like living along the paths and said she’d call for a community summit and maybe even a “ceding” of the paths
[JM, feel free to not bother publishing this – it’s not my intention to open a can of worms.]
I’ve visited I don’t know how many different communities – well over 400 that’s for sure – and some of them have public campgrounds well within their city limits. They tend to be small, fairly conservative communities. The campgrounds always have showers, usually flush toilets, drinking water, many have trailer sewage receptacles, a few even have laundry facilities. They all have clean, level, graveled, well-drained camp sites, well organized, and regular patrols by both parks staff and by the local police (plus in Canada the RCMP and in Ireland the Guarda.) Most municipal campgrounds I’ve stayed at have “regulars”, people in various states of homelessness, including semi-nomadic travelers (in the generic US sense, of a person who wanders cross-country, rather than the British/Irish term for what we call a Gypsy), locals who come out certain weekends every year, and visitors looking for a cheap but legal place to stay. Having a community-funded public campground doesn’t necessarily prevent the more explicit forms of homelessness, but it does give the community a possible outlet and a set of policies and procedures to deal with it. It’s also a lot more sanitary.
Portland’s situation (along with DC, Charlotte, Greensboro the town I live in, and so many other cities without public campgrounds) reminds me of something out of Douglas Adams – that when you make a situation nearly impossible – fixing the issue becomes totally impossible and expensive. By making camping illegal everywhere, you essentially make it common everywhere they can get away with it (the same thing could be said of speeding, jaywalking, and buying stuff online and not reporting the sales tax.) So people camp where they can get away with it, on the bike paths, in city forests, in back or inside of abandoned homes and buildings (squatting), in public right-of-way, abandoned railroad sidings, rural areas. Quite likely it will never get fixed (I’ve seen photos of tent camps in the Sullivan’s Gulch from the 1930s – people still camp there.)
By making camping “tolerated” everywhere, social service providers need to deliver services there, hence the car traffic on the bikeways. I remember seeing police cars on the I-205 path, even an ambulance.
I do remember visiting certain cities in Germany, Nuremberg is the most famous example, that had both subways (U-bahns) AND huge public campgrounds, that the two were not incompatible. I live in a town that has 300 official city parks, but only about 20 of them are well-maintained, the rest are weed lots or simply undeveloped. Portland has a bunch of the latter too, including most of the bike paths (aside from the old poorly maintained pavement, the land itself is typically huge weed patches, including on the Springwater). Why not create a Portland Bureau of Camping and use housing and urban development funds to create 20 or so public city campgrounds with full facilities, easy to patrol and regulate, keep clean, etc? It would sure beat the current unregulated mess.
David, my tl;dr version of your post is that the city of Portland could say, “You can’t camp anywhere – you must camp HERE” – and “here” would mean a regulated campground with decent facilities like the one you described.
But to many people in Portland, our fair city, telling people they MUST do anything is inhumane. Far better to let people wander around, fall down, poop on the street.
There shouldn’t be any need to block MUPs to deliver services, at all.
No community will ever cater to 100% of a targeted group (such as the homeless, or bike users, or SUV users with gun racks) no matter how hard they try, but cities do get reputations, often unearned (Portland’s platinum bike status is a prime example). Columbia SC is the state capitol and home of the U. of SC, one would think a somewhat liberal community by just being the state capitol and university city, but it isn’t – it in fact has a very conservative reputation, particularly if you are homeless and wandering from city to city – it has a reputation of treating the homeless very inhumanely indeed.
From the period I lived in Portland (1997-2015), I think the Portlanders I met thought of the city as liberal, progressive, and caring – they also wanted to shun Portland’s previous 1970s & 1980s reputation as “Skinhead City” – as well as the awful period of the Bloods battling the Crips in the West Coast drug war. Now, as you say, it’s getting a national reputation for lawlessness, likely attracting new residents who can get away with doing whatever they like. I’m trying to offer a solution that uses the resources the city has – lots of underused public land and open space, very few unrestricted financial resources, and a much smaller-than-average ratio of police – to re-create a compassionate but still livable community.
Yeah, I get it, you don’t like people driving on the bike paths, you don’t like people behaving badly in the public realm, you don’t like homelessness – none of us do – but no one is offering any sort of do-able solutions, just various unenforceable bans of this or that, a true recipe for continued failure.
You know I like nothing better than a solution that can actually be implemented.
The TASS model seems to be working well. I personally know several people who were living in on the streets in my neighborhood for (in two cases literally) decades, and who were the hardest cases of the hard (long time on the street, drugs, mental health, etc.). After MUCH cajoling, they were convinced to try the TASS. They’re still around the neighborhood, but sleeping in the shelter, and each of them says it is great.
Sure, they are not in permanent housing, but they are not on the street, and they now have access to services and a more stable community.
Whatever his other failings, Mayor Wheeler got this one right. It works, and it’s replicable.
Note that the city is likely to transfer the TASS shelters to the county, and I have some sense of foreboding that the county is going to screw it up, as they tend to do.
Here’s another success story for veterans, but there is no reason it couldn’t be expanded and adapted to the specific needs of Portland. There are programs that work that Portland non-profits and government studiously avoid. It’s almost like they don’t actually want to solve the problem.
https://www.va.gov/palo-alto-health-care/programs/compensated-work-therapy-cwt-program/
Essentially it places people in a manual labor job (VA hospital or cemetery) so they stay busy while providing a room to stay. The caveat is that they have to report for work and they have to participate in the rehabilitation courses and therapies at the housing facility. I’ve worked with a lot of them at Willamette National and some don’t make it through and fade away, some come back for a second (or third try) and some make it through, get hired or go onto another job. It works, but there is a stick with the carrot.
The TW Program places Veterans in a rehabilitative work setting, either within VA or other federal agencies, or with private businesses in the community. The length of the program varies according to individual participants’ needs and vocational goals but generally should not exceed 1 year.
Participants in the TW Program take part in at least 20 hours of structured vocational rehabilitation activities per week through assigned temporary therapeutic work assignments.
The TR Program is a 10-bed, community-based residential program. It provides a structured therapeutic environment in which Veterans participate in vocational rehabilitation activities at least 30 hours per week. Assigned case managers will collaborate with Veterans on securing permanent housing and competitive employment, money management, time management, leisure activities, various social skills, personal hygiene, health, and wellness.
Veterans enrolled in CBES, TW or IPS may be referred to TR by their case managers. The maximum time Veterans can be in the TR Program is 1 year.
“From the period I lived in Portland (1997-2015)…”
That was a long time ago. Things change.
“I think the Portlanders I met thought of the city as liberal, progressive, and caring –…”
It was. Relatively.
We absolutely should not be providing social services for these unsanctioned camps. If you want to let them exist, sure. But we can’t incentivize the use of our green spaces for this environmentally destructive behavior.
I bike this corridor on my daily commute to work, as well as biking other areas where people without access to stable housing reside. It is a daily reminder of how broken our city and our nation are. But none of the tents along my routes have ever run a stop sign or stop light, sped, been driven aggressively, or otherwise endangered me or other bicyclists and pedestrians. So yes, it breaks my heart that in end-stage capitalism we cannot figure out how to provide stable shelter to an ever growing portion of our population. But if as Chris I proclaims we want to ban “environmentally destructive behaviors,” maybe we should ban motor vehicles rather than falling into the false belief we can end poverty simply by making it illegal for poverty to be visible to the rest of us.
Of course the tents don’t make you feel threatened. It’s the behavior of the people living in those tents that make people feel unsafe. This type of belittling of people’s safety concerns with homeless encampments gets us nowhere, and actively pushes more people to use a car out of self-preservation. Hand wringing about “our most vulnerable neighbors” gets us nowhere. It’s not anti-poverty to expect people to behave in public spaces.
I don’t see why we should turn over our most prized public spaces to bad actors that terrorize housed and unhoused alike. Congrats on being able to use the cleanest, most affluent parts of the Springwater trail. Go ride the 205 path at 10PM and tell us how you feel. Last week I was threatened with a tire iron and homophobic slurs for the gross crime of carefully steering my bicycle around an RV dweller’s giant, path-blocking trash pile.
I have not personally been threatened by the behavior of anyone “living in those tents” in the more than two decades that I have been biking, walking, and relating as a human to other humans in Portland. I have, however, had someone rush out of a tent to see if I was okay when I screamed because a motorist running a stop sign almost hit me. Being poor does not automatically make anyone a criminal.
I am glad no one in those tents have caused any interruptions in your lifestyle, that’s cool.
Did you know that about 200 people a year die in those tents in Portland. Over half the police calls are for people in those tents.
About half the murders (20-40 a year) are people living in those tents.
Your empathy for them is acknowledged.
Your lack of empathy for people who have almost nothing is acknowledged.
I’m fairly certain no one here has said that.
Would things get better if vagrancy laws were put into place to go into camps to separate the violent or deranged people who exhibit violent criminal behavior from the few desperate ones who have no place else to go and are being abused? I don’t understand how leaving everyone out there is helping anyone. It’s not some Depression era novel where the campers are boiling up some stone soup waiting for another crop to pick.
I guess our experiences are very different, but I tend to use trails and MUPs in more out of the way places (outer east Portland, Fairview, etc). I’ve been cornered by camp pitbulls twice, been physically threatened and on two instances had weapons directed at me by campers on our MUPs. COVID was a crazy time out on the fringes.
You wouldn’t believe me if I described the complete destruction of the beggar’s tick area on the slough during COVID. They pulled over 100 vehicles out of the woods. Where do you think all of those fluids went when they stripped them down?
I was jumped on the Springwater. As a result of that I will never walk on there again. Nor are my neighbors children allowed to go onto the bike paths near my house. This means they likely will not take up biking.
This situation is not inevitable, as an older child I used to be allowed to ride my bike on the 205 path. I took up biking as a result.
Apart from the sort of dejected entitlement that comes with being drug addict poor, this cohort of poor people need money for drugs, which to date, no non-profit hands out for free. They don’t work, so where is it coming from?
Also meth use has a documented, peer reviewed increase in aggression.
During my FOUR decades of biking/walking and relating to others in Portland, I let a non-addict homeless person live in their Suburban in my driveway for 6 months and shower/watch TV in my home.
Your approach of dismissing others and acting morally superior to them, eg. (‘relating to other humans’) will not win people over to your side and nor is your position all that compelling on its merits.
Most of these people need to be institutionalized so they at least have a chance of not dying in their 40s from sepsis.
I don’t think it’s awesome (or even OK) for people to be camping on our MUPs. I also appreciate both that street people can be legitimately scary and dangerous and that PDX has had a tough time recently with huge amounts of unsanctioned camping and unruly behavior. I’m out on the MUPs quite a bit. I take my cans to the bottle return center at Hayden Meadows. I watch the tents and RVs (and makeshift rafts) get moved around, and I sometimes talk with folks that I see around the encampments. Like Lois, my experience is that people driving cars and trucks are a much bigger threat to me than the campers. I respect that not everybody feels that way — but the argument that MUPs are too dangerous because of campers is not well founded because it ignores much larger risks associated with using the paths. Sorry. I don’t think we should ‘cede’ the paths, but reflexive regression to a facile safety argument poisons the discussion.
“reflexive regression to a facile safety argument poisons the discussion.”
I feel the same way about claims that gteenways are too dangerous because there are cars there.
I agree. I’ve been grinding my axe about people complaining about the extralegal parking at Hazelnut Grove on another thread. I think there is a lot of really good debate and discussion in these comments (thank you, Jonathan, for fostering a rare bubble of useful discourse on the interwebs even in these bleak times!). I do get frustrated when the same facile arguments are traded tit-for-tat ad nauseum. And I take responsibility for my participation in that dynamic and resolve to avoid the temptation going forward.
Even if tents aren’t blowing stop signs (and neither is the flora they’re squashing or the fauna they disturb), the cars that drive on the bike path to support them might well be.
These drivers aren’t trained for bike path driving; if it’s safe for them to do it, it’s safe for me or anyone else who goes slow and keeps their flashers on.
On the Springwater section next to the Willamette river I have never been threatened. However on the section along Johnson Creek and on the I-205 path I have been threatened and menaced multiple times. Any claim that there is no threat to personal safety by allowing free range camping is simply false. I won’t go into details about drug induced psychosis or pre-existing mental issues or elaborate on the prevalence of weapons in camps. I am 6’-1” and hefty, and very aware of threats while cycling on Portland’s trails
I’m with you, Granpa. The scariest situation I’ve encountered was on the Springwater near Gresham, where a man who was clearly out of his mind and half naked was screaming and rushing toward cyclists. I turned around and fled and have never returned.
Its also their green spaces too.
And gatekeeping help based on where they sleep is incredibly inhumane.
It sounds like we agree — everyone should have the same right, or restriction, to set up structures and campsites in greenspaces, regardless of where they sleep.
In Portland, the homeless >> everybody else.
COTW!
uh,no.
If that were true, homelessness wouldnt exist
How about we don’t allow/enable unsanctioned camping next to paths instead of having service providers drive their vehicles where there should be none (except in a TRUE emergency) ???
I often hear people make statements like this: “How about we don’t allow xyz…”. The thing is, we don’t allow a lot of things, but they happen anyways. So when they happen, something needs to be done to address them. I’m not defending any specific policy here. I’m just pointing out what I hear when people say, “We shouldn’t allow…”
Well said. As soon as i use the word “should” i start to question my thought process and if I use it more than once I start to doubt my thought process and start rethinking it.
Why is that cycling advocates are not taken seriously?
A city contracted mental health professional providing care to a vulnerable human being on city property >>> Mr. Succ’s[sic] social-media outrage over a trivial inconvenience
prioritarian,
Notice how your hypothetical question refers to “cycling advocates” but then this story and your own comment and this specific case involves just one person.
I point this out to underscore that the behaviors of one person with a social media account do not necessarily represent the sentiments of “cycling advocates” more broadly.
That being said, I think I agree with you about how social media accounts like this put cycling and cycling activists in a particular light.
However, it would be nice if said social-service provider would not block the path with his/her car. I see this behavior all the time by car-users of all types on the paths, not just SSPs.
To be honest I have seen far more utilities workers parked on the springwater/trolley trail than I have homeless outreach people, and in any case this seems consistent with Portland’s general policy of “no matter how nice the bike infrastructure is, we’re going to let cars park in it some of the time” (see also, Naito)
Exact same thing happens weekly on Thursday evenings under the Burnside Bridge. A big dinner is put on for homeless people, it looks like a great event, but you get people driving on/parking in the Naito lanes and sometime parking on the Waterfront path, too. There are also frequent car trips on the Greeley bike path to drop stuff off at the camp there.
And sometimes cars parked outside of Hazelnut Grove. That facility is much less functional than the old approach of riding downhill in the shoulder. Hit the beg button, wait for the light, then pick your way past Hazelnut Grove.
There’s an automatic sensor at Going; you don’t have to hit any button. The light almost always changes for me as I coast to the signal — I estimate I click out of my pedals on < 2% of my trips down Greeley. You also had to wait for (or run) the light at Going before the separated bike path. Cars are always parked outside Hazelnut Grove. Cars are also frequently parked at Adidas. Luckily, all the cars are usually well off the path, although the weird signals at Adidas warrant caution. The one time I’ve had to wait at Hazelnut Grove was for a service provider (porta potty service). The driver was very courteous and friendly. I think complaining about that kind of interaction is a dick move.
If the bike people don’t want cars driving on the bike paths, maybe they should show some courtesy themselves. Like not riding their bikes in the leaf lanes.
I laughed out loud at “the bike people.”
It is a constant battle to remember that every solution involves tradeoffs, and that following any single principle to its extreme ends up being absurd.
In this case, I do not think we should hamstring local agencies and NGOs in their efforts to address the homelessness crisis by insisting that they follow some kind of restrictive transportation mode rules.
I think we all agree that homeless camps have become a problem, right? If that’s true, does it really make sense to decrease the efficiency of the work to address this problem?
I like having car free places to ride, but do I think that’s more important than cleaning up homeless camps? No!
I commute on the Springwater and have seen CCC and Rapid Response Bio-Clean dozens of times. They take up room on the path, for sure, but I just slow down and scoot around the side. They’re always driving very, very slowly. What’s the big deal??? I’m glad someone’s doing the work!
Someone in the comments suggested that service providers should walk half a mile to the camps from nearby parking lots; do you *really* think we should force Rapid Response to clean up camps by *walking* all the garbage back to their trucks????
Are you going to volunteer to move the garbage on your cargo bike?
Are you concerned that we’re working too quickly and efficiently in solving this crisis??? If so, making service providers work on foot will certainly help!
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Sometimes it just feels like *everyone* in Portland has some sacred cow, and the reason we can’t solve the homelessness crisis because every necessary solution or policy will insult *someone’s* sacred cow. It’s gridlock!
We can’t expand involuntary commitment because of the civil rights advocates.
We can’t do housing first because homeless advocates insist on high quality (expensive) housing.
We can’t build enough housing because the we like our regulations and don’t want to sacrifice too many of them.
We can’t build enough shelters because every neighborhood complains bitterly about the local impact.
We can’t pay for mental health/addiction treatment because no one wants higher taxes.
We can’t lock up the drug dealers preying on this community because of equity/justice/whatever.
And now, some bicycle advocates are saying that we shouldn’t allow service providers to access the camps unless they walk or use bikes????
This is so unserious!!!
—————
Sorry, but this has struck a nerve!
I remember that when I moved here in 2007, I viewed Portland as a city that proved liberal/progressive politics could deliver a great quality of life. We were the example!
Obviously, homelessness is a tough, complicated problem, and it’s not like local voters control all the levers needed to solve it. But it’s just laughable to me where people draw the line on this issue.