The bike bus movement has been a decidedly grassroots phenomenon. Moms and dads have stepped up to organize rides at local schools and families have shown up to ride together. But as the trend matures and looks to expand beyond early adopters and reach its true potential, it needs a stronger foundation that must include help from local government to keep roads safe and welcoming for everyone.
“We’re saying, ‘Bring it on!’ Let’s figure out how to do this even better. We really welcome the partnership with bike bus advocates.”
– Kristin Hull, PBOT Planning and Project Delivery Group Manager
At a meeting of its Bicycle Advisory Committee last night, the City of Portland made it clear they are “all aboard” when it comes to the bike bus. Staff from the Portland Bureau of Transportation outlined three active projects worth about $650,000 that they’re working on to make bike bus routes safer.
“We’re saying, ‘Bring it on!’ Let’s figure out how to do this even better. We really welcome the partnership with bike bus advocates,” said Portland Bureau of Transportation Planning and Project Delivery Group Manager Kristin Hull.
Hull attended the meeting along with PBOT Traffic Safety Section Manager Dana Dickman. Their presentation was a direct response to Bike Bus PDX, a coalition of advocates who launched a pressure campaign directed on Portland City Council back in February. Their Bike Bus Friendly Neighborhood Greenway Resolution calls on PBOT to lower the average daily auto traffic volume threshold (from 2,000 cars per day to 500 cars per day) on 25 neighborhood greenway routes where active bike buses exist prior to the start of the 2025-2026 school year.
While PBOT strongly supports the concept, they revealed last night that they’ll only have funding to work on four corridors by next year. To help soften the blow of that reality, Dickman and PBOT Bicycle Coordinator Roger Geller outlined three active projects they’re working on to improve bike bus conditions: a $50,000 Metro grant for wayfinding and signage on bike bus routes, $100,000 from the General Fund for intersection safety improvements, and $500,000 from Fixing Our Streets program for improvements to neighborhood greenways used by bike buses.
The signage project is funded by Metro’s Regional Travel Options program. It will stoke bike buses at 10-11 schools by paying bike bus leaders and installing new signs and markings on the routes. The new signage is aimed both at drivers and bike riders. PBOT hopes people will drive more safely when they’re on a bike bus route, and they want people who participate in the bike bus to know where it’s safe to ride even beyond the school day. Bike bus leaders have heard from families that kids love riding and want to do it more often, but they face more dangers outside the safety of the group and aren’t sure where they should ride.
PBOT has developed lawn signs, rider signs (on existing street signs), “caboose signs” to be warn by bike bike bus leaders, and pavement markings that should start showing up sometime this summer. A pilot project to gauge impacts of the signs will begin this fall. Bike bus leaders will be paid $500-$750 to participate in the pilot and will be required to take surveys and stay in close communication with school communities and PBOT staff.
The $100,000 from the general fund will target intersection updates where bike bus routes cross busy streets. Any funds left over from that work will go toward daylighting intersections. PBOT says they’re looking at two intersections: SE 34th and Hawthorne and SE 34th and Division.
The biggest project will spend $500,000 to implement modal filters and other forms of traffic diversion on four (possibly five) bike bus routes along neighborhood greenways. PBOT says they’ll spend $100,000 this year developing the projects and doing any necessary public outreach and the remainder of the funds will go toward construction.
Geller said PBOT planning and engineering staff have already ridden with seven bike buses to observe conditions and receive feedback. “We’re hearing there are too many cars, side-street incursions, people not stopping at stop signs, poor motorist behavior, difficult intersections and chaotic conditions near schools where greenways overlap with parent drop-off.”
Since this project will include diverters and other infrastructure elements designed to constrain driving access, Geller told BAC members he believes they must help build community support to avoid driver backlash. “Some of the things [we want to build] are likely to be controversial in the community, particularly diversion,” he said. “So we really want to work to expand our constituency for these improvements and develop champions for identified projects.” Geller wants the BAC and local bike bus advocates to organize weekly bike rides at the schools to curry favor and spread awareness.
Geller says it will take a groundswell of community support to shake loose enough funding to treat all bike bus routes throughout the city. “We’re going to need more funding and decision makers are going to need to decide that they want to provide more funding, and that comes from political support,” Geller said. He warned against moving too quick with changes and said, “We cannot shove things in peoples’ neighborhoods,” because, “That kind of thing comes back to bite us and we don’t want to be one-and-done which threatens the long-term vision.”
“I just want to thank the bike bus advocates for creating this space for us to even have this conversation. Thank you. What an opportunity we have to seize their hard work to make a difference for what we want to do.”
– Jim Middaugh, Bicycle Advisory Committee chair
BAC Vice-Chair Joe Perez said the group should push back on PBOT and recommend treating more than four greenways by next year. But Chair Jim Middaugh urged support for PBOT’s proposal. Middaugh said given PBOT’s dire budget situation, the BAC should embrace the city’s support, even if it’s not as robust as activists are calling for. “That combination of external [Bike Bus PDX] and internal [PBOT] alignment is a really strong foundation for long-term gains,” he said. A majority of the BAC seemed to agree and will now work on a letter of recommendation for city council so PBOT can take their work to the next step.
In the end, this is a classic example of how community activism can speed up progress from PBOT. After all, we are all pushing for the same thing.
“All these kids that are out there biking are all future adult cyclists in Portland, and that’s really what we want,” Geller said. And BAC Chair Middaugh added: “I just want to thank the bike bus advocates for creating this space for us to even have this conversation. Thank you. What an opportunity we have to seize their hard work to make a difference for what we want to do.”
PBOT will choose at least one school from each council district. The schools have yet to be chosen. Expect a public engagement process to begin later this summer and work on the bike bus greenway improvements should begin in 2026.
Thanks for reading.
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If your or your kid’s helmet is on your head like the red and gold helmet in the banner photo, please adjust it. There should be only two fingers of distance between the top of the eyebrows and the front of the helmet. Having it too far back provides no protection to your forehead.
Yes, most importantly because bike buses getting kids to school are high speed death traps. I wonder if you were standing face to face with the mom would you dare tell her that?
If I learned anything by having kids with helmets, they’d move them around quite often because they didn’t like them for some reason or another and I couldn’t watch them ever single second.
Horizontal speed isn’t always the problem. Sometimes a blow to the head just by falling over onto a hard surface can do damage if you land wrong.
If your kid is “moving the helmet around” on their own, it isn’t properly fitted.
That is exactly right.
I often see kids with helmets pushed way back, leaving their foreheads totally exposed. That’s arguably worse than wearing no helmet at all, because it offers a false sense of security.
And FWIW, I do indeed point this out to parents when I see it. In a cordial way, of course. I explain why it’s dangerous, and say that any decent bike shop will help you adjust your child’s helmet for free. I’ve never had a parent react in a defensive or angry way.
Yes, absolutely, I have said this to people’s faces, and will continue to do so. I’m more concerned about people’s brains not getting injured than about potentially hurting people’s egos. And everybody I’ve said this to has been thankful, not upset.
Now I wonder, if you were standing face to face with me, would you dare take this accusatory tone with me?
Christ on a crutch, no good deed goes unpunished. It’s a wonder anybody even tries anymore.
And the comments from Watts and Chris I are also correct: You can get a brain injury in a zero MPH crash; and the helmet will not move around if it’s fitted properly.
That city map is missing the Beach elementary beach bus, among others: https://www.bikebuspdx.org/beach
The most dangerous part of my daily bike commute is riding past Sunnyside Environmental K-8 school during morning drop off. It’s lovely to see the families who are walking, biking, or skateboarding to school together, but there are still many families using motor vehicles to drop kids off. They double park, they enter and exit traffic without signaling, they direct their kids to open the door of the vehicle into oncoming or passing traffic and to get out into that traffic. It’s dangerous to everyone, and the idling vehicles have an especially bad impact on children with asthma or other respiratory conditions. So in addition to whatever PBOT things some signage might change, how about a real campaign led by schools and parent groups to make it clear that getting your kid to school in a way that doesn’t endanger them or others is not “optional” it’s central and necessary? Endangering children because your family is running late is not really a tenable approach, and if we can’t make the area immediately around the school safe from automotive dangers, it’s hard to believe we’re going to convert more families to bike bus or other healthy options.
The alignment for a solution is there: It’s a problem that directly impacts kids, caused by the parents of those kids, and a solution could be organized by the PTA or school those kids attend, which already have lots of organizing going on that could be leveraged for this purpose.
It would be much harder to make an impact as an external actor.
Seems like you and Lois are in violent agreement?
I’d say we totally agree that using cars to pick up and drop off kids at school is highly undesirable even if violent would not be my adjective of choice.
We need to kill the school facilitated drop-off/pick-up systems where kids are delivered to or retrieved from their parents cars by school staff with an exception for special needs students who aren’t as capable as their peers and have an alternative specified in their IEP. If we don’t make it convenient (or mandatory in some communities) to join the line of cars fewer parents will do so.
I’d love to see a full street closure for a 1-2 block radius for these neighborhood schools during drop off and pick up. If you drive, you park a few blocks away and walk like everyone else. It would increase the percentage of families walking and biking, and massively increase the safety for pedestrians. The logistics might be tricky, though.
Are you imagining something with the force of law, accompanied by enforcement?
Wouldn’t work.
Parents would still just drive up to the nearest point accessible by their vehicle, they’d wait in a line, blocking the street (they don’t care) until their child appears and hops into the vehicle and they drive off.
I agree — I think trying to manage the flow of cars is a fools’ errand; it would be easier to eliminate car dropoffs altogether than make parents comply with an orderly system.
But I don’t really know how to do either of those. As I said above, I think change has to come from within.
I think this is great!! Every kid deserves to be able to walk or bike to school.
Is the implication of PBOT looking at SE 34th and Division/Hawthorne that they will put in diverters there? SE 34th is a route that could really benefit from reduced car traffic. It already gets a lot of use by people biking and sections of it aren’t wide enough for two cars to pass anyway so there’s lots of conflicts.
34th is one of those route I go on the most with my bike (along with 16th). It’s okay most of the times, but gets more dicey between Division and Hawthorne in rush hour.
It’s hard to take PBOT seriously when they say four modal filters will cost half a million dollars. A few of us could do the same thing in one afternoon with some planters + soil + paint. It wouldn’t be perfect, sure, but it would be $495,000 cheaper. They are demonstrating an absolute inability to get things done in cost effective manner which makes me question their entire budget model/asks.
Maybe I’m missing something?
You (and all of us) are missing the hundreds of thousands they will spend on “outreach” because PBOT’s bicycle coordinator:
Citizen led was one of the key words…
Here’s a PPS approved design to cover bike racks at schools:
https://bikeportland.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/PPS_Bike_Shelter_Guide_March_2012.pdf
and here is a rendering finished product at Chief Joseph Elementary.
The street in front of Chief Joseph Elementary has been closed for more than 17 years !
And in 2015… thanks to a collaboration between the City, Portland Public Schools, and dedicated parent volunteers (who happen to know how to use some high-tech planning tools), this vacated street got a major facelift that improved its looks and make it easier to access by bike
https://bikeportland.org/2015/01/23/street-gets-improvements-better-bike-access-thanks-city-school-district-parent-volunteers-131313
Yeah Rufio I’m also kind of in awe of that figure. But I think it shows that those projects are a relative piece of cake if we use non-fancy materials and volunteers and IF we had support from anyone in the city.
My guess, as Geller said, is that it’s primarily a political issue of getting buy-in from somewhat wealthy neighborhoods who mostly have people who drive. That means very few, fancy, high profile projects. Both homemade volunteer solutions and fancy, expensive solutions divert traffic. But one can essentially transform the city in a week through the massive potential of traffic diversion. The latter adds a few diverters per year. It results in a slow creep within mediocrity.
We pay our public employees well (and just gave them a raise even in the face of our huge revenue hole), and that is reflected in the cost of everything they do.
On top of that is a layer of legal review, engineering review, equity review, accounting review, review review, and so on.
You really can’t compare that to a couple of neighbors buying some concrete planters and renting a bobcat for the weekend.
I’m salty. Looking at that map, I’m not seeing the Lloyd to Woodlawn greenway that was promised several years ago. Not even partially. Show their intent to finish what they started. 🙁
Listed as complete on their website and has the old plan that they updated – never delivered on the new phase. Sigh.
https://www.portland.gov/transportation/pbot-projects/construction/lloyd-woodlawn-neighborhood-greenway-ne-9th-ave
I know. I know. I’ll get in line.
I nominate Ventura Park for the District 1 elementary school! Glad to see institutional support for grassroots efforts!