This guest opinion is by BikeLoud PDX Vice Chair Kiel Johnson. It’s a response to news that the District 4 Coalition is opposed to planned bike lane upgrades in Southwest Portland.
In cities where bicycling has grown rapidly, local governments have streamlined the installation of curb-protected bike lanes. They treat them as standard transportation infrastructure, not as optional amenities. Portland already has the policies in place to do the same. If we want to become the best bike city in North America, we must follow the policies we’ve adopted instead of second-guessing them every time a project moves forward.
Portland’s Transportation System Plan classifies every street in the city. Engineers and planners have determined what type of infrastructure belongs on each classification. Those policies were vetted through multiple layers of review and formally adopted by our elected officials. We have clear design standards for transit, freight, automobiles, pedestrians, and bicycles. Bicycle infrastructure should be treated no differently than any other mode — and it should be applied consistently across the city.
Our policies call for protected bike lanes on Southwest Capitol Highway, SW Bertha, and Beaverton-Hillsdale Hwy. The opportunity to build them is in front of us, and we should take it.
The recent effort to oppose protected bike lanes amounts to a rejection of this adopted framework — but only for bike infrastructure. It suggests that the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) must secure a vague and undefined “community support” threshold before installing protected bike lanes. We do not apply that standard to other forms of infrastructure. PBOT has installed hundreds of ADA curb ramps across the city. If each ramp required broad community approval, we would have only a fraction of them. We recognize ADA access as essential infrastructure. Protected bike lanes should be treated the same way.
There are times when PBOT gets things wrong. Public oversight matters. When Commissioner Mapps attempted to remove the Broadway protected bike lanes — despite their consistency with city policy — the community spoke up and stopped it. The claim at the time was that there wasn’t sufficient “community support.” But policy already provided the direction. Those lanes should have been installed a decade earlier.
Community engagement is important. The city should communicate clearly, gather feedback, and make reasonable adjustments when warranted. But we do not require a popularity contest to install water lines, traffic signals, or sewer upgrades. Protected bike lanes are basic safety infrastructure.
Everyone has opinions about where lanes should go or how they should be designed — curb height, parking removal, materials. Those are fair implementation questions. But at some point we must trust our adopted plans and our professional staff to execute them.
If every bike project is subjected to repeated demands for undefined “community support,” we will continue to spend disproportionate time and resources debating whether to build rather than actually building. Portland cannot afford that delay.
We have the policy. We have the standards. We have the opportunity. Now we need to follow through — and build the protected bike lanes our city has already committed to.
Thanks for reading.
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Perfect! I couldn’t agree more.
Well said Kiel, time to build to the plan.
Well, at least until someone at PBOT reads this article
https://lapublicpress.org/2026/02/why-isnt-la-repaving-streets/
Not actually true; the city had to be sued into even pretending to put ramps in at any sort of scale. I would argue that a wheelchair user may see their needed infrastructure as being on a higher level of need, rather than equal to, bike infrastructure.
I think this opinion piece illustrates a big issue here in a backhand way: people are seeing this money as being taken from something else, as if it were a new project; rather, it is a continuation in some ways of the ‘start-imperfect-and-gradually-improve’ approach other places have used. It may well be that cycling advocates at PBOT are trying to leverage this issue and achieve the goals Kiel champions. This is under ‘maintenance,’ and there is no answer yet from the city on whether those funds can be redirected. There is no evidence yet that these monies were in competetion with funding new projects. I would argue that if the bureau tried to take 700K from Maintenance and put it in Development, people would scream about all the unfilled potholes that money could fix.
So if PBOT Maintenance is sick of repairing/replacings wands and paint, it is actually a win if the bike side convinced management to kill two birds with one stone. Get rid of the maintenance hassle, AND move the infrastructure up a notch. There is no indication the money to harden this section under other programs was ever going to be forthcoming. And as in other cities, hardening the city’s bike/ped infrastructure is the long-term goal. Whether you agree or not with the details or the order things get done, this IS what advocates have been championing for decades.
I think there’s a bit of shouting past each other in this argument. Both sides should be pressing PBOT for clarity on whether the money is fungible, or if rules prohibit it being used on new projects. If fungible, while I support hardening on BHH, I agree that much of that money could be better used elsewhere in the area to connect to the imperfect BHH route. If not movable, all parties should support putting this piece of the puzzle in.
To bring us back to the ADA issue, some aspects here reflect the controversy of PBOT taking out an existing, now-incompliant, but there ADA ramp and replacing it with modern ones, vs concentrating on putting ramps on corners that currently have nothing at all. Sometimes rules, budgets, and siloing prevent perfect solutions. Perhaps PBOT can help both ADA and bike/ped issues by being more upfront on how these factors figure in their decisions.
I personally prefer a public democratic process like SWIM, no matter how flawed, over a government agency making decisions for us, and I had thought most Portlanders would too, but apparently I’m wrong. According to Kiel, they in fact seem to prefer to have PBOT tell them what to think, to implement new projects not passed by City Council but those proposed and dictated by unelected city “expert” bureaucrats. Perhaps those same Portlanders can then understand why so many millions of Americans prefer to hear and take comfort in the lies and opinions of the current POTUS rather than those of our democratically-elected Congress? Not only is democracy dead, but so apparently is public process, at least in Portland Oregon. Good luck with that.
Cities have adopted plans and we elect leaders to support staff when they implement the plans.
This process should not be subjected to a case by case public vote or government would be ineffective.
We should also build the bike network we already committed to. I don’t exactly disagree with this opinion, but I think it misses the point being raised by the people questioning the proposed SW protected lanes: People are not saying that PBOT needs to meet an arbitrary level of community approval, they are are saying PBOT is spending limited resources converting isolated segments of bike infrastructure from an OK condition toa much better condition, when what is needed is better connectivity. If resources were not an issue, or is wand-protected bike lanes extended further, I don’t think anyone would quibble about improving part of the route with a concrete curb. The issue is the missing links and extremely limited resources. Once PBOT spends these funds in SW, it could very likely be 10 years before they spend any more money. For people cycling daily, I can see why they would desperately want the money to be spent where it could go father and provide more benefit.