Community over cars: Council lines up behind streets for people

There’s a growing consensus on city council that Portland has more streets than it needs for driving on and that in the future, plazas and other creative uses of the right-of-way will flourish citywide. With support from council and city staff, backed up by Portland’s existing transportation policy and programs, and combined with an eager network of advocates — we could be on the the brink of an exciting new chapter in how we use streets.

At a meeting of the Portland City Council Transportation & Infrastructure Committee Monday, the Portland Bureau of Transportation Deputy Director of Planning, Art Pearce, shared an overview of transportation planning. But the conversation about converting streets from thoroughfares to public spaces began before Pearce made his way to the dais.

During a presentation about a city proposal to “vacate” (a legal process to terminate public ownership of a street and turn it over to adjacent property owners) a stretch of SE Oak Street through Laurelhurst Park, Councilor Mitch Green asked a notable question: “How long does the process take?” he asked David McEldowney, who works in the city’s right-of-way permitting division.

Some people in the room knew where Green was going with his question. The economist, Democratic Socialist, and first time council member believes one way PBOT can reduce its maintenance liability is to reduce the assets it’s required to maintain. Back in February, Green suggested that PBOT ban drivers on some streets as a money-saving strategy. “Every mile of road is a liability in terms of unfunded, ongoing operations and maintenance, which will then be always costlier in the future,” he said.

Green was probing McEldowney about the street vacation process because he thinks it might be an avenue toward converting streets into plazas, cul-de-sacs, community gardens, superblocks, and so on. McEldowney said the process takes about a year, to which Green replied: “So would you say that if the city was interested in doing a lot more of these, we’d be looking at a year?”

Green is not the only councilor looking at streets with this perspective.

“Councilor Green, I think I know where you’re going with this,” chimed in committee Chair Olivia Clark after Green’s exchange with McEldowney. “I think in the future we’re going to be wanting to look at streets that are underutilized that could maybe be turned into other things.”

Clark said she was “shocked” to learn 30% of Portland’s land area was managed by PBOT in the form of city streets. “That’s rather astounding, and gives me some pause, especially when we think about the fact that we’re so far behind in asset management and taking care of those streets,” Clark said. “So many of them are failing that we’ve had some informal discussions among the committee members here about how we could convert those spaces.”

Clark is looking beyond plazas to reduce PBOT’s maintenance liabilities. After doing a walking tour of downtown, she mentioned the possibility of greening Flanders Street through northwest. “There’s a lot of interest on this committee to look at alternatives like that, not just plazas, but other other ways of looking at these assets.” “Because,” she asked rhetorically, “will we be able to raise the funds over time to really maintain 30% of the land space?”

When PBOT’s Deputy Director Pearce got into his presentation about transportation planning in Portland, he made it clear city policy supports not just turning streets into “other things,” but also that it’s the city’s goal to significantly reduce the use of cars. Pearce connected the high cost of driving to housing affordability and explained the tradeoffs in building a car-centric city: “If we are putting funds into building structured vehicle parking, for instance, that can be $50,000, even $80,000 per unit per parking space that should be spent — both the space and the money — should be spent on housing people and not on cars, and so we need to make a system that is less reliant on that need.”

After Pearce told councilors that 30% of Portland’s land area is PBOT right-of-way, he said it’s a “constant choice about how we use our space.” He then framed that choice as, “whether we want to use it for storing cars and mobility, or use it for creating public space.”

When PBOT does choose to use streets for mobility, Pearce said a recent study commissioned by the city showed how inefficient it is when cars are the majority vehicle in the mobility mix. “In just six buses,” Pearce noted, “We were moving the same number of people as 241 cars.”

Pearce knows streets will have to move more people in the future and that, as Portland becomes more dense and adds new residents, more people will need streets where they can feel free to not move at all.

Pearce sees PBOT’s street plaza program taking a more prominent role in city planning as neighborhoods become more crowded. “If you’re creating less space in each apartment or each house, you need more and more space for people to be connected outside together,” he explained to councilors. “If we’re thinking about being an interconnected community who sees each other outside, and being less stuck in our own bubble and algorithms, it’s in those public spaces where, maybe there’s music happening and there’s kids playing, that you’re having really human connection. And I think that’s instrumental to Portland’s next chapter.”

Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane also spoke highly of plazas. “A lot of us up here value these street plazas,” she said before asking Pearce what he thinks about tactical urbanism. “I hadn’t heard that term yet,” she acknowledged, “but it’s something I think a lot of us have been talking about, maybe without using those exact words.” Koyama Lane defined tactical urbanism as, “opportunities for community members, businesses, grassroots organizations, other similar entities, to lead and even fund some interventions within the public right of way,” and “working with community to make our streets safer and more vibrant.”

Pearce took that as an opportunity to share a key takeaway from a staff retreat in January where his Planning, Policy, and Projects team came up with a theme to guide their year. That theme? “Enabling co-creation.” “Creating with community is instrumental to that,” he added.

The best, most recent example of this approach in action is in north Portland where bike bus leaders worked with PBOT to install temporary diverters along their school’s morning bike bus route. Another example is when PBOT worked with a neighborhood association leader in 2023 to create a plaza in a former lane of West Burnside at 10th. Empowering Portland’s army of street advocates and neighborhood block party lovers could be a very powerful way for PBOT to leverage its impact citywide, quickly transition streets to more healthy uses, and create a base of content constituents to support the agency’s forthcoming funding requests.

If PBOT is to continue along this trajectory, they’ll need buy-in from their leader, Director Millicent Williams. And it turns out she’s on board too. “We have a tremendous opportunity,” she said in remarks to council Monday. “Now is the time to look at how we can do things differently — whether it’s a weekend, a season, a pilot, something that can become a permanent installation, to get people used to some of the change.”

When it comes to changing how streets are used, Williams wants Portlanders to know, “It’s not a threat. It’s really an opportunity to reimagine our communities and see them as we’d like to see them.”

For businesses along SE Hawthorne and 37th — the location of PBOT’s latest and greatest street plaza —what they wanted to see was a street full of color and community, not cars. A brightly painted mural and benches have helped create a welcoming plaza that’s become an instant hit (and also attracted a visit over the weekend from city council members Angelita Morillo and Steve Novick.)

What’s exciting about these street transformations is that they don’t have to take a long time. Green’s inquiry about street vacations notwithstanding (that’s a specific process and not always required), Williams was quick to point out that the new Hawthorne street plaza only took a few months to go from conversation to completion.

And they want to build more of them. PBOT is all about the bottom-up approach these days. Street design ideas that originate from residents, activists, neighborhood groups, business owners, and so on — are often more actionable than those that emanate from dusty planning documents.

So now is the time to share your dream street idea. Pearce said he wants to get conversations going now, so he and his team can take necessary steps to make it happen over the winter season, “And have it ready to bloom with the roses.”