On Monday, the City of Portland announced a new focus on cleaning sidewalks citywide. Utilizing contractors and a budget of about $2 million, the plan is to focus on sidewalks along major business corridors and commercial centers.
Among the new tools that will employed to do this cleanup work are pedal-powered cargo trikes. These trikes have already proven themselves as perfect vehicles for navigating tight spaces and still having room to cart sizable loads of garbage and debris back to a central location. Last year I profiled a downtown nonprofit that used the same style of trikes in their programs to great success.
Seven trikes were purchased for this program from Icicle Tricycles, a Portland-based company that sells trikes to businesses all over the world and recently moved into a 30,000 square-foot warehouse in Old Town.
In a statement about the new program, the City of Portland said the trikes will be accompanied by a truck and will, “visit Portland’s busiest locations on a regular basis to clean up trash and biohazards from the sidewalks that people rely on to go to school and work, go shopping, keep appointments, and enjoy their neighborhoods.”
Clear and clean sidewalks are important not just for walkers, but in many parts of the city they are a refuge for bicycle riders as well — especially in locations where the adjacent street has no safe space for cycling. (Note: bicycle riding on sidewalks is allowed in Portland, except for a small part of downtown, as described in City Code Chapter 16.70.320.)
Below is a list of streets the city will keep clean as part of this initiative:
District 1
- NE Sandy Boulevard
- SE 122nd
- E Burnside
- SE Division
- NE 82nd
- SE Powell
- NE Halsey
District 2
- N Lombard
- NE Killingsworth
- N Williams
- NE Alberta
- N Mississippi
- N Vancouver
- NE Broadway
- N Interstate
- North Ainsworth
- NE MLK
- NE Cully
District 3
- NE Sandy
- E Burnside
- NE 28th
- SE Hawthorne
- SE Division/Clinton
- SE Belmont
- SE Foster
- SE Woodstock
- NE & SE 82nd
- SE 79th
- SE 80th
- SE Milwaukie
- SE Powell
- SE 12th
- SE 7th
- SE MLK
- SE Grand
District 4
- NW 21st
- SE 13th (Sellwood)
- SW Beaverton Hillsdale Highway (Hillsdale)
- SW Capitol Highway (Multnomah Village)
- NW 23rd
- West Burnside
- NW Everett
- NW Glisan
- NW Lovejoy
- NW 10th
- NW 11th
- NW 18th
- NW 20th
Learn more via the official statement.
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I’m all for keeping the sidewalks tidy, but I’d trade that for a bike lane I can actually ride in during leaf season. And if Portland really wants to cut down on trash, maybe focus on the root cause, the inhumane street camping crisis. Bit hard to keep things clean when people are left to live in the muck
PBOT has been pretty good about sweeping bike lanes lately. Mayor Wilson has mentioned several times that keeping streets & bike lanes clean is very important to him. Most of the street trash I see is people throwing stuff out of their car windows. I’m not denying the concentration of trash around homeless camps, but there’s plenty of people who are housed making a mess out of our streets.
Really? You must not ride much in leaf season or at least not in the Portland I do.
It’s by no means great yet, but noticeably better actually. I was pleasantly surprised they swept SW Naito the other day; by past years standards I just expect it to be a solid layer of slimy leaves until mid Dec and they have to get rid of it before it freezes. Clinton wasn’t nearly as leaf covered as normal either. There’s always room for improvement and we should always push for that, but I believe in taking time to appreciate efforts in the right direction too.
I can’t speak for PBOT’s efforts, but FWIW most of the clean bike lanes that I’ve seen this year have been due to the efforts of volunteers with BikeLoud, not PBOT.
Yeah, we live in different parts of town I guess. I’m with Angus on this one.
It would be cool if PBOT and P&R could use these on the Esplanade instead of their Tacomas
x100. COTW.
If the city had this program 5 years ago, you can bet that Killingsworth and 122nd would not have been on this list, that it would have only been on inner Portland streets that have more tourism. Fortunately for poorer folks living out in the “burbs”, Portland now has districts.
5 years ago, we were already well into our “put everything in E Portland” phase. You’re about 10 years behind in your timetable.
Given who represents these districts there isn’t much improvement.
This seems like a great idea that can be expanded to more parts of town. I hope the sidewalk cleaning doesn’t lead to sweeping, or pressure washing more debris into the street (bike lanes). It’s already illegal to blow leaves into the street, but it doesn’t stop people from doing it and making cycling more challenging.
The people who do lawn care around the moda center absolutely blow all the leaves on the sidewalk directly into the bike lanes. I’ve witnessed it several times.
Oh, ha, I think I saw one of these on Wednesday. I was biking home from Rose Haven, and the trike was parked in the bike lane on 19th blocking the entire bike lane.
Someone in a safety vest was cleaning up trash, and I thought “well that’s a wild choice for a bicyclist to block the bike lane to clean it”.
Not sure how to officially give feedback on that?
If the trike was in the street or on the sidewalk, and the worker was in the bike lane doing their work, wouldn’t that be a worse situation?
You mean the city employee who is working in harms way to clean our public infrastructure?
Sometimes things have to close so they can be worked on, and City employees deserve to work in a safe environment. Using your vehicle to block upstream traffic from crashing into you while you are working in a space is a best practice, and we shouldn’t be critical of it.