Bike bus group presses city council for safer neighborhood streets

The bike bus movement in Portland isn’t all about fun bike rides to school. It’s also a platform for advocacy. And as those rides have grown, so too has the ability of their leaders to pressure city council for safer streets. After all, an elected can’t say they support bike buses if they don’t also support making sure kids can join them safely.

At the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee meeting in City Hall on Monday, Glencoe Elementary School Bike Bus Leader Rob Galanakis told councilors it’s time for Portland to step up and capitalize on the remarkable bike bus momentum. “The bike bus is the software for change, the social infrastructure,” Galanakis said, wearing the bright yellow rain poncho that’s become a de facto bike bus flag. “But we need the city to provide the physical infrastructure, the hardware.”

That “hardware” is modal filtering — an approach that uses hard infrastructure to limit cut-through traffic while still allowing people to walk and roll. (“Modal filtering” is a preferred word of some activists who feel talk of “traffic diverters” leads to irrational opposition.) Modal filters are cheaper, quicker to install, more effective and more modular than speed bumps.

Galanakis (a candidate for Portland Public Schools Board) spoke on behalf of Bike Bus PDX, a coalition of 25 bike bus leaders from across Portland. Galanakis said all the time he and other bike bus leaders have put on the roads in the past four years have made it clear that even Portland’s vaunted neighborhood greenways are still too littered with car drivers. The number one threat to the success of bike buses are drivers and their cars. It’s essential that Portland limits the number of drivers on residential streets if our city wants to see more kids and families ride bikes — not just to school but in their daily lives.

Bike Bus PDX has gone further than just ask for more modal filters. They’ve submitted the “Bike Bus Friendly Neighborhood Greenway Resolution” and are asking councilors to force the Portland Bureau of Transportation to strengthen their approach to traffic diversion.

Currently, PBOT’s preferred average daily traffic volume on a neighborhood greenway street is 1,000 cars per day (measured as average daily traffic or ADT). According to their 2020 Neighborhood Greenways Assessment Report, 1,500 cars per day is “acceptable” and 2,000 cars per day is the maximum. The reason those thresholds are in place is so they can trigger a variety of infrastructure responses by PBOT. Depending on traffic counts, PBOT will decide what type of mitigation is necessary, and (in a perfect world) they’ll continue those interventions until the number is acceptable.

The Bike Bus PDX resolution calls for a pilot program that would change the lower volume to a maximum of 500 cars per day. The idea is modeled after guidelines in use by the City of Vancouver, British Columbia. Their “all ages and abilities (AAA)” cycling routes aim to have fewer than 500 motor vehicles on them per day, which will result in most cyclists encountering just less than one driver per block (in peak hours) on average. The resolution also calls on PBOT to try the lower ADT threshold on 25 neighborhood greenway routes (where active bike buses or walking school buses already exist) prior to the start of the 2025-2026 school year.

To pay for the resolution, Bike Bus PDX says they’d target PBOT’s Fixing Our Streets program which has money set-aside for safety projects (and which the group helped PBOT pass when it was up for another vote last year).

During his testimony yesterday, Galanakis said if PBOT isn’t given the tools to improve safety on neighborhood greenways, the bike bus movement will lose momentum and, “We will lose this critical opportunity to advance city goals.”

Read the full text of the resolution here.