The Portland Bureau of Transportation plans to make significant changes to a northeast Portland intersection where a 12-year old was struck and injured by the driver of a car.
Back in November 2023, two 6th graders at Laurelhurst School were crossing NE Glisan at 41st when the driver of a car sped through the intersection and hit one of them. The driver was going well over the speed limit (25 mph) and didn’t stop to see what happened (I don’t know if they were ever caught). The 12-year-old suffered a broken bone in their leg and various bruises and scrapes.
Now PBOT is ready to spend $150,000 on a project that aims to calm traffic and make crossing NE Glisan safer. PBOT’s planned changes will shorten the crossing distance, add a push button-activated bike traffic signal, stripe new bike lanes with some concrete curbs for protection (the bike lanes will connect to existing one east of 41st), and reducing driving space. PBOT says the new design will “increase driver awareness of the crossing.” On the project website, PBOT says people driving on Coe Circle, “may not expect people walking and biking to be crossing at this intersection.”
This intersection is just one short block east of Coe Circle and it’s currently 65-feet to cross from one side to the other. NE 41st is a neighborhood greenway route and is classified as a Major City Bikeway in Portland’s Transportation System Plan. This crossing is just 0.4 miles south of the bike/ped bridge over I-84 that connects the Laurelhurst neighborhood to the Hollywood Transit Center at 42nd Ave.
In addition to the changes listed above, PBOT will also remove 127 feet of on-street parking on the south side of Glisan and 71 feet of on-street parking on the north side. Car parking will also be removed on both sides of 41st north of Glisan. The new signal will complement the existing HAWK (high-intensity activated crosswalk beacon) signal PBOT installed just four blocks south on NE 41st and Burnside in 2006.
Final design should be complete this month and PBOT expects to build the project this summer. The funding comes from the Fixing Our Streets program.
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This specific type of project x1000 please. Thanks PBOT!
We know a little about making streets safe, but instead of doing it now we wait until a child has been hurt and put a bandaid on the one intersection. First an ambulance, then the street crew. Ambulance; street crew. All over town.
Someone will say that we don’t have the dollars to fix this right now. They are right, kind of right, sort of right. We do have a lot of money for some things: we have a regional government that can ante up $250 million to push ahead a wider freeway project that won’t save a single life. If Metro is pushing things we don’t need, vote the council out.
I know that money from one pot can’t be spent on just anything and my answer to that is, unless they want to. If it’s not their job, take the money away and put it in another pot. It’s the year of turning government on its head.
Lynn Peterson’s term in office expires Jan. 3, 2027. A total of five Metro Council positions will be on the 2026 general election ballot, and of those five, four voted for wider freeways: Peterson, Ashton Simpson, Christine Lewis, and Juan Carlos Gonzalez. (Gerritt Rosenthal joined them but has another year before facing a vote.)
Our Metro Council President is a highway engineer by trade. There’s a reason to vote if a person needed one.
Yep, spot on Robert. Injuries/deaths are very often the catalyst for building basic safe infra. It’s pretty maddening. It’s also one of the main reasons why groups like families for safe streets exist.
This looks great, but FYI there is already a push-button signal at that intersection
True, but when our boy was attending Laurelhurst K-8, at least twice a week a driver would blow through the red. Poor compliance might be improved with revised infrastructure.
There are buttons, but they’re not easily accessible to cyclists—especially on the north side of the street.
If pushing a button is how you get your ‘ticket’ to cross an arterial street, we need a design standard for curb and parking placement to allow bike riders to approach them without dismounting. It’s clear that traffic engineers don’t ride bikes, don’t know who rides bikes, and don’t know what kinds of bikes people are riding. They may be unaware that bike trailers, the least expensive way to add serious cargo capacity to a bike, even exist.
The bike crossing of NE Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd at NE Going St is a similarly hamfisted design failure. The eastbound button is approachable on a cargo bike if you take the right line into it, but it’s awkward at best.
The westbound button is worse, with an approach line that is blocked by the adjacent parking space, a spot that is at a premium for nearby residents and the adjacent business. It’s common to see bike riders bypass the button and cross the intersection at a break in traffic or when sympathetic motor vehicle operators stop on their green light.
Naturally the bike crossing signal is timed into the light sequence on MLK which means that a bike rider on Going St may be sitting at a red light watching a clean break in traffic pass them by, or perhaps they take the opportunity to cross and then when the signal does change four lanes of traffic on MLK get a red while no one crosses.
At this point, I can’t see enforcement or infrastructure calming down raging drivers. This kind of behavior is now a societal norm and I think it will take some sort of profound societal realignment for this to change.
The only cure is to get people out of the business of driving vehicles, one way or another.
Out of curiosity, in what year, or era, would you guess that we might see a significant number of motor vehicles under autonomous control?
I think we can agree that perhaps a fourth generation autonomous vehicle would drive more safely and efficiently than most humans. What I don’t see happening is a rapid conversion unless AV have access privileges that conventional cars do not, or else punitive taxation rapidly pushes old vehicles off the road.
Near term political developments make me think that existing, and therefore conventional, motor vehicles are going to be at a premium for a while. With increasing levels of tech, new motor vehicle ownership may be out of reach for many people.
Bike riders are already effectively excluded from a large part of our road network and a wholesale conversion to AV would have an interesting impact on bike access. I suspect that the Portland Bike of the future may be full suspension, e assist, with an electronic dashboard incorporating active signalling to an AV standard. That sounds expensive but if those features are standard to a large number of bikes it wouldn’t have to be prohibitive.
The other Portland Bike will be a flat black single speed bike trials setup with tubeless tires. Both of these setups presume that pavement accessible to bikes will get worse if it doesn’t go away entirely.
I don’t know. But I do know that humans make terrible drivers for a number of reasons.
There are many ways to get people out of the business of driving; automation is one, but transit and urban redesign are others (as is, I suppose, getting everyone on a bike or a pair of rollerblades). Automation is the only one that feels like it could be incrementally retrofitted onto our existing urban landscape, and while I won’t name a timeline, I think it is highly likely to occur before we make major reductions in driving by those other means.
It is of course possible that automation will ultimately fail, in which case I see no way out of our transportation status quo in my lifetime. TriMet could get an order of magnitude better every decade, but since it still needs to contend with reality, it probably won’t. AVs probably will, at least for a while.
PS Regardless of what happens with automation, I sincerely do hope that taxation and other policy measures remove gasoline powered cars from the roads as soon as possible — electrification is an urgent task that is advancing too slowly.
PPS I disagree with your statement “Bike riders are already effectively excluded from a large part of our road network” While true in a literal sense (I can’t ride on I-5, but I could drive on SE 16th), I feel I have plenty of decent route options for riding around Portland. AVs would likely improve the situation because it would be easier for the city to implement virtual diversion policies without having to build anything, and vehicles will actually follow traffic laws.
I want cars off the road, not driven by computers.
Other nations are figuring this out already.
SE Cesar Chavez needs a road diet through there immediately. To go through the Coe circle roundabout it drops to one lane anyway. Also makes no sense that the roundabout has stop signs.
The street paint is a joke; but not really because people’s lives are at stake.
To think there are people who make 6 figures and get pensions who designed this. No wonder “trust in institutions is at an all time low” or DOGE or “East Portland drivers hate bike infrastructure” or whatever.
Paint can do a lot; I think of all of the roads I’ve driven a car on where the lanes of traffic were just separated by a yellow line.
There’s concrete curbs, too.
They are putting in several concrete curbs.
The paint may do some good while it’s new. OTOH, it will cause a lot of confusion at first. The use of green paint here, as in other recent PBOT installations, is inconsistent though. For best understanding by all, the entirety of the bike route should be solide green from one edge to the other. Seemingly random polygons of green are confusing to all, and don’t give you the image of a coherent path.
Solid green paint won’t mean squat unless every person knows that green paint means there’s a 1.5m gap between steel or concrete bollards within two blocks ahead.
I realize there are points where a bike path crosses a car path, or crosses a crosswalk. The “cross-bike” is, I’m afraid, more confusing than if it wasn’t there. I don’t know what would be better, but in this case, it just adds to the collection of isolated gren splotches. Moving curbs out, and filling in the intervening space up to the curb level would at least show were paths are better. (And perhaps even understandable to the visually impaired? That would require direct, right-angle crosswalks to even be remotely readable, it would seem.)
Odd choice of words considering that PBOT is only interested in making driving more frustrating: removing access to businesses, creating congestion, tolling, etc.
But we’re supposed to ignore our lying eyes and keep pretending this is “calming”, lol. It’s like 1984 in here sometimes, with all the Newspeak.
PBOT has a tolling program??? News to me.
Bike infrastructure increases access to businesses. It’s not weird or radical or a taking, it works right now.
You havent lost any access to any buisnesses. You can still go to them, and even when they had parking in front of them, you likely wouldnt have gotten one of those spots because someone else was already parked there.
And studys have shown that buisnesses get more customers when there are less cars around. So why do you want all these buisnssess to do poorly? If you actually cared about buisnesses you would go lool at the data.
Where is this tolling you speak of? I wish we had tolling for cars. NYC new congestion prining (tolling) is already highly succesful. People are sitting in way less trafic and more people are out on foot.
There is nothing about traffic calming measures that is newspeak. You just refuse to understand it. It means it gets drivers to slow down.
If you have road rage, its not up to the state to fix that for you. Go see a therapist and stop gobbling up right wing propaganda.
As someone already mentioned… There’s already a signalized crossing at this location. I’m not sure paint is going to make any difference if drivers aren’t obeying traffic lights. Is this the best use of these funds when PBOT is screaming that it’s broke? How many diverters and speed humps could be put in elsewhere for the same price?
I used to use this crossing when I’d bike from my apartment to Hollywood TC to catch the MAX to Gresham. I like that they’re doing something to improve it, and I appreciate the strategic use of concrete curbs.