The Portland area has a big problem with people driving cars where they’re not supposed to. On March 19th, BikePortland reader Joe R. faced that reality head-on when someone driving a large SUV entered a bike path he was riding on and nearly forced him off the pavement.
It happened just after four o’clock as Joe was heading northbound on the bike path located in between I-5 bridge on-ramps and the Residence Inn hotel just north of N Marine Drive. “I was enjoying my ride and began to accelerate when I saw the large black vehicle pulling onto the path,” Joe shared in an email with BikePortland. The driver turned onto the path at the culdesac of N Anchor Way.
Back in July, Joe read an article on BikePortland about this exact location. In that article, I reported that the Oregon Department of Transportation has been aware of “ongoing issues with bollards being stolen or ran over” as far back as spring 2023. Despite this acknowledgment of the problem however, a representative from Ask ODOT said, “Staff is exploring options for better bollards or a fix to the problem and do not have plans to reinstall them at this time.”
It appears ODOT has done nothing to improve the situation. In fact, when I shared a video about Joe’s run-in with a driver, several folks said they routinely see people driving on the path at and around this same location. “I see it a lot,” said one person in an Instagram comment. “Same has happened to me there… it nearly took me out,” said someone else.
Thankfully, Joe was riding carefully and managed to stay safe. “I realized there was nowhere for me to go except off the path if I didn’t want to be killed,” he recalled.
After the close call, Joe pedaled over to the opening in the path the driver used. He saw no bollards or other preventative measures in place. Joe frustrated and he sees this problem as another example of the “destruction of Portland” that “horrible leadership” has let go for far too long.
Hopefully the actions taken by ODOT on the I-205 path several miles away will be expanded the entire path network. ODOT, Portland Parks, and PBOT need a coordinated strategy to defend and protect these spaces. Until then, we cannot let this type of driving behavior become normalized. These drivers — and other illegal activities like blocking the path with tents and other personal belongings, dumping trash, starting small fires, and unsafe behaviors — endanger individuals and also send a chill through the entire region that results in many folks giving up on using them altogether.
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I wonder what would happen if you ask Rian Windsheimer and Kris Strickler to be interviewed in the shed or to speak about why they seem to care more about IBR than the safety of vulnerable road users.
They would probably gush on and on about how the IBR improves the bike path here and how it’s impossible to fix anything without the megaproject.
No plates and probably illegal window tint to boot
Pretty new vehicle and not at all dirty. Maybe an unmarked police patrol?
They stopped making this body style in 2006. Seems unlikely it’s a police vehicle.
Definitely not a police patrol. Joe said he saw the driver laughing with a passenger as they went by. Joe said he thought they were drunk or high or both.
It looks like a 9th gen Suburban/Tahoe – produced between 2000-2006. Unlikely to still be in service with a local PD.
Why not put a few of boulders that are being installed at the western terminus of N Victory Blvd (at N Expo Rd) to guard the inlet from the motel parking lot? There are already many of these boulders under the overpasses…. BTW, who funds the boulder installation projects? Boulder fields to discourage urban camping seem to go in all the time without a hitch, but traffic diverters on greenways (much smaller scale) take forever.
You can see on streetview that ODOT makes generous use of bollards and protective hardscaping at their offices in Portland and Salem. They understand how to use actual (not paint) infrastructure when they need protecting.
But you can’t just slap some jersey barriers up and call it good. Then it’s impossible for first responders to access the path when someone ODs or starts a fire on it. Which is practically every day.
I think this is the fundamental design issue; how do you block folks in SUVs from driving on the path while allowing emergency access.
Lockable bollards are one obvious solution, but unlocking or disabling one without a key is pretty simple, and now you’ve added the complication that every emergency responder needs the key.
Enforcement in the moment is another obvious solution, but it only works if you can get the cops to respond in a timely manner, and if there are some actual consequences for the driver.
I think the best answer is to reduce the number of destinations on the path, which means reducing camping there. That, of course, presents its own set of challenges.
This is the best argument for camera’s, I run them as well as lights front and rear, GPS, helmet and mirror 24/7, 365 period.
They can win the lawsuit and force insurance payout hands down as well as give law enforcement what they need to pursue this.
With out it they may not be inclined to bother at all.
This is also an argument for PPB not pursuing any car theft complaints until such time as drivers become human.
Not sure how that follows. Seems more likely that the driver of the stolen video would be more reckless and endangering to others than the original owner.
Or perhaps I’m putting too much weight on the “drive it like you stole” adage.
Vans — I had a nice chuckle at the idea of wearing a helmet and mirror to bed to make the 24/7 metric.
Well it does help me sleep better at night no matter what time of the day I ride. ;-}
The cyclist somehow avoided being killed without getting off the path (or even coming to a stop), and the vehicle involved in this incident was probably traveling at 5MPH. More “annoying” than “harrowing”.
The SUV driver was clearly in the wrong, and absolutely should not have been there, but no one was in danger of being killed. I am glad there was no collision and no escalation.
This was a categorically different type of incident from the blue truck posted yesterday; that driver really is life threatening.
What is wrong with you? Why do you insist on playing this BS devils advocate? It adds nothing to the conversation. I’ve been in low speed collisions with drivers and have had significant injuries. Minimizing this is gross.
Just Watts being Watts. Sometimes I wonder if JM invented Watts to increase engagement in this space.
hahaha LOL that’s a good one. And I thought I’d heard it all.
I know Watts bugs a lot of people. But they have a right to comment IMO and as long as they stay within certain boundaries I’m not going to stymie them. If you don’t like it, just keep scrolling, just like you’d do w any other content on the web you don’t like.
Wel, you *would* say that, wouldn’t you
I’m not “minimizing”, I’m saying the threat was exaggerated. Obvious exaggeration does not lead to people taking the concerns of cyclists seriously. Am I allowed to say that? No one is going to see that video and think they saw someone almost die. Not even you.
I thought I was clear that I was in no way defending the driver. If that wasn’t clear, let me say that I’m in no way defending the driver or minimizing his actions. They were in the wrong and absolutely should not have been there.
I disagree, but I’m not going to state my reasons because I don’t want to get into another extended thread of your picking at every nuance of every reason I’d give, and then your ending it with stating that I must be “confused”.
I agree, there is some hyperbole here, but the bigger point is that “going off the path” to avoid being “killed” is exactly what the rider should have done.
Before I saw the video, I assumed this must be on a stretch of MUP with no escape – fences or walls on both sides of the path.
The moment the driver turned onto the path, the rider should have rolled right down that gentle grassy slope and shielded himself among those big trees.
Being prepared to bail, or make a quick evasive move, could save your life.
It was the hyperbole I was remarking on, especially when the rider said that they had to get off the path to avoid being killed when the video showed they did not get off the path, and made no effort to do so.
I for sure would have got off the path.
People speak in hyperbole all the time. Its a normal part of conversation. Its odd to try and pick it apart everytime someone does it when they are trying to make a point.
Yes, and those people don’t have much credibility.
According to who exactly?
Massive amounts of people who use hyperbole have plenty of credibility to plenty of people.
You dont get to just declare people dont have credibility simply because you have a very immature view on completely normal ways of orating.
People are creatures of emotion, not facts and logic.
“According to who exactly?”
According to everyone. Surely you know the story about crying wolf. If not trusting unreliable people makes me immature, so be it.
The danger of this one incident may have been exaggerated, but normalizing this and not calling on ODOT and PBOT to address is urgently is critically important, IMO. I think it is pretty widely accepted that PPS broadcast their intentions to stop ticketing for traffic violations, and that, combined with emptier street, changed our driving culture significantly and in ways that are hard to roll back. Speeding, red light running, double parking, u-turns, illegal turns, etc. are all common, and were much less common 5 years ago. Driving on paths is something that was nearly unheard of 5 years ago, but is widely occurring and even accepted now. If a behavior is allowed for long enough, it becomes standardized and it is very difficult to change. So maybe this driver was going slow and this cyclist was alert, but lets take that as a very lucky coincidence delivering an urgent message. We need to keep all motorized vehicles off bike paths at all time and at any speeds. The only exception should be police, fire and ambulance operating with their flashers on.
I think this is something we can all agree with. No need to make exaggerated claims; this statement stands on its own. The video is evidence that what we’re doing isn’t working, and that should be enough.
The behavior one allows is the behavior one will get.
“I realized there was nowhere for me to go except off the path if I didn’t want to be killed,” he recalled.” Sound harrowing to me.
Did you watch the video and honestly find it “harrowing”? If so, we might simply have a different understanding of what that word means.
We certainly seem to have a different understanding of what “annoying” means.
This is a good point. The bike community has pulled the outrage lever so many times that the community at large has stopped listening to us. It’s our default mode, sadly: exaggerate, knee-jerk react and escalate.
All in service of the “war on cars”, never addressing the real problem, which is lawlessness created by the promotion of illegal drugs and camping.
No one promoted illegal drugs and camping. Those are caused by economic issues.
4 tons @ “5mph” reply is bs. Me AND my family would be crushed because our reflexes are not yours, Mr. Racer.
What are the odds the vehicle is associated with the local urban campers bivouac?
Maybe it’s a bike parts dealer looking for some of those upstanding open air bike repair shops that are open in many locations in the City.
Given Mr. T’s new national sales tax on imports, I’m guessing we’ll see a lot more of the public bike parts recycling light industrial facilities.
High….I’m surprised Maus put your comment through…..unlike him.
Not true.
The elephant in the room. When will Portland progressives accept the reality that they’ve created for us?
Portland progressives didnt cause the underlying economic issues that have caused so many to be in such a desperate situation.
Does this kind of thing happen elsewhere, like the Corvallis Bike loop? Just wondering how common this behavior has become outside of PDX…
It’s actually pretty common in small towns where a path goes through a large park with ball fields and sports events, where there is never enough car parking and attendees feel free to park on the grass and drive on the path to get to patches of open grass. It’s generally tolerated by the police and parks officials. It’s also common where a path goes by a fishing stream – I saw it often enough in Portland even when there wasn’t a major homeless problem, on the Willamette and Columbia rivers – and I’ve seen it in so many other communities including in Canada and Europe. None of this is new, in fact it’s very old, it’s really the same issue with the commons, who owns it and has control over it.
Not the main issue here, but communication often suffers when organizations create a separate group of staff for communication with the public, as ODOT does with AskODOT.
I’ve used AskODOT several times. Invariably, the staff is polite, and almost invariably, they don’t answer my questions,–not through any fault of their own, but because the engineers or maintenance people responsible for the issue don’t give them meaningful responses. They use AskODOT to buffer themselves from the public.
The same thing happens with Portland bureaus when they use public liaison staff. Fortunately, most bureaus don’t wall off their staff from the public the way ODOT does with AskODOT. I understand the need for gate-keeping to some degree, but it can also be frustrating and counterproductive for everyone.
I agree with you. When I worked at PBOT as a low level technician 2000-6, I would work with planning, design, and engineering staff but never the public. Later when I was a volunteer advocate for East Portland 2008-15 I found that it was hard to connect with the same engineers I had worked with, that planners would act as a wall in between, and as an added layer there were various outreach sections that dealt with the public, including the PBOT director, Smart Trips, etc.
What I have learned over the years is that at engineering-dominated agencies like city and state DOTs (as well as water and sewer departments) is that engineers are numerically a small minority in such agencies but ultimately hold the pursestrings for any project funding – they decide what gets put in front of elected officials who pretty much rubber stamp whatever they see – and so I find it more productive to advocate with city engineers than any other type of city official including politicians.
One of the few things I really like about living in my current (highly mediocre) city of Greensboro NC since 2015 is that we volunteers can easily connect with the city DOT engineering staff directly as our transportation planners are pretty useless and incompetent. Our engineers still mostly say “no” to anything safe or progressive, but they immediately and patiently explain why they aren’t going to do it or can’t, rather than wait 15 years to cancel the project for the same reasons as they do in Portland. Essentially I’ve learned over the last 9 years from staff here in Greensboro both why the projects I helped get funded in Portland were delayed for so long and later done not the way I thought they would, and why so many otherwise reasonable projects are never approved in the first place by Portland or ODOT. It’s not just AASHTO, MUTCD, and engineers being generally conservative in their outlook (all of which is true), but also for practical reasons having to do with driver behavior, the physics of moving cars and trucks, an chronic lack of police enforcement (police and engineers generally avoid each other), the irregular funding, the many expensive years it takes to train engineers, and so on.
The most progressive engineers I’ve ever met are the very few who have ever traveled overseas and the even fewer who have attended foreign exchange engineering opportunities to work at other cities outside of the USA (they exist).
I agree that AskODOT is largely useless. In the event you get an actual answer, they will parrot autonormative rhetoric about how their facilities are allowed to be dangerous for bikes, peds, and other non-auto uses – they are all about moving cars and trucks and seem really annoyed that anyone would waste their time asking for basic bike-lane maintenance.
My favorite AskODOT response of all time, to my question about safety of a walking path that crossed an ODOT highway:
“We are not maintaining the path because we are not required to.”
WTF?
The missing bollards is what enabled the Islamic terrorist from Texas to cause a mass killing December 31, 2024 in New Orleans.
Terrorism is not Islamic. Would you call Robert G. Bowers (the Pittburgh synagogue shooter) a “Christian terrorist”?
No, Terrorism isn’t solely any one religion or factions, but in the New Orleans case, Shamsud Din Jabbar was Islamic so the description is accurate.
Nah…he was a failed businessman suffering from a mental health crisis, not a global religious identity. The fact that you can’t understand the difference is appalling.
The man suspected of plowing a truck into a crowd on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on New Year’s, killing 14 people and injuring 35 others, pledged his support to ISIS, the FBI said Thursday.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/suspect-new-orleans-attack-bourbon-street/story?id=117247072
Debate whether its proper to identify a terrorist by their religious or political views and/or skin color all you want, but he was radicalized and considered himself a jihadi even if you don’t.
Oh, and I just want to give a thumbs up to Army training (except for having a hard time figuring out how to detonate the explosives). if one wants to commit actual resistance, its best to learn how from a good source.
What are the odds in Portland it was an “unhoused”, mentally ill person, or junkie!?
No for the narrative, we’ll assume it was a white middle aged male, likely a *gasp* conservative if not MAGA *gasp*, that wants to stick it to cyclists taking up space that should be used for vroom vroom fossil fuel vehicles! This revisionist perception is better for espirit du’ corps!
As a bike commuter I universally assume the former scenario when i avoid, dodge, or merely observe a vehicle acting in a manner unfriendly to my fellow cyclists!
I am confused! Who am I supposed to be outraged with? The murderous cager? A cyclist riding something that cost more than $500? PBOT? The current occupant of the White House? Detroit? The person that didn’t name this bike path after indigenous peoples? Robert Moses? 400 years of White oppression on this continent? The asphalt-automotive industrial complex? The monster under my child’s bed?
Are you seeing somewhere here that people are pushing that conservative/MAGA/etc. narrative?
I just went through the article, the video and all 49 comments, and didn’t see that mentioned once. I did see the unhoused/mentally ill/junkie version several times. Did you see something I overlooked?
Water bottle caps are an “indicator species” of sorts, and there are lots of them littered around Delta Park.
This area’s been struggling for a while, and the same thing happened to me on the other end, riding the Columbia Slough Trail, maybe a year and a half ago.
That said, there is always some damn thing going on with that Marine Drive ramp plot. Maybe one way it’s uneventful, but then the other it’s sketch city, and that’s in daylight. I hate it. Just imagine living on Hayden Island with this as the only way to walk or bike into the rest of your city.
Motor vehicles on the trails is pretty common, and not just campers. Motorcycles using the trails as shortcuts is common in some areas. Design to stop that is inconvenient for everyone. Enforcement is required, but not happening in my lifetime.