To say the Portland Bureau of Transportation has had a hard time keeping the elevators open at the Bob Stacey Overcrossing would be a massive understatement. The overcrossing plays a vital role in the bike network. It connects safe bikeways and is a bridge over light and heavy rail tracks in an area criss-crossed by large arterials. Unfortunately, since it opened in 2020 it seems like its elevators are closed more often than not. Vandalism and mechanical failures are to blame.
A new website doesn’t do anything to keep them open, but at least it gives riders an early warning to optimize and plan their detour.
AreTheElevatorsBroken.com is the work of Xavier Salazar, a software engineer who lives in the Brooklyn neighborhood. Brooklyn is a great place to live, but one of its downsides is how it’s hemmed in by Highway 99E to the west and south, the Brooklyn rail yard to the east, and SE Powell (Highway 26) to the north, there are already limited route options for bicycle riders.
Salazar, who gets around almost exclusively by bike, says when he’s headed north, freight trains routinely block his routes (a well-known and infamous problem that has spurred its own DIY responses). Because of the aforementioned infrastructure challenges, even PBOT’s recommended detour around the blocked rail tracks and/or in the event of Stacey Overcrossing elevator closures, requires riders to go nearly one mile out of their way. And that’s if the Powell underpass isn’t blocked by street campers. If it is, the detour is even longer. (And yes, there are stairs, but not everyone can lug their bicycles up and then down them.)
Salazar knows a few options, but they are all long and cumbersome.
“Ultimately, I’d rather just avoid the on-the-fly gymnastics to find an open route because I don’t know if the elevators are working until I show up to them,” he shared with BikePortland today. “It’s much simpler to just choose to get on the waterfront or take the Rhine-Lafeyette bridge from the get-go to avoid even biking to the pedestrian crossing I can’t use.”
So Salazar created his website to offer useful status updates on the elevators. It’s based largely in the spirit of IsATrainBlocking11th.com (which itself is currently out of order) and he sees it as more useful than PBOT’s website, which Salazar says has been too unreliable in the past (“It’s only as up-to-date as someone from the bureau knows/cares quickly enough to update it.”)
“If I know where I want to go, it’s so much less stressful to just check the site before I leave and formulate a route based on that.”
What if you forget to check the website, or don’t even know it exists? Salazar has placed two small QR code stickers near the buttons on both elevators that, when scanned, allow folks to update the status immediately to warn others.
Salazar says the ideas is, “If you’ve got a bike full of groceries, or a kid in tow, it’s a bit more straightforward to make the judgement call to rely on the elevators if you can see it was just updated yesterday and someone said they’re both working.”
The more people that know about this site, the more updates it will receive and the more reliable the information will be for everyone. So check out AreTheElevatorsBroken.com and pass it along to your friends.