I’ve been really into my feelings lately. For a lot of reasons, I’ve been thinking a lot about the last 20 years of BikePortland and what the hell comes next. I’m not ready to talk more about all that yet, but one thing I’ve been doing as part of this emotional ride I’m on is to look back at the 28,320 front page stories in the archives.
I don’t have a plan for a series of history posts or anything, so I’ll probably just share interesting things I come across. Like when I searched back on this week in 2006 I stumbled on a story I did about Portland’s bikeway network signs.
In February 2006, these green signs that give mileage and timing information about key destinations were a big deal. As per usual back then, Portland’s transportation bureau was a national leader in doing cool stuff for cyclists. Our guy with his hands on the bars back then, Roger Geller (who remains PBOT’s bike coordinator to this day), was big into pavement markings and network signage. His little, round bike markings with arrows were an early innovation that sprung up before we started putting shared-lane markings (called “sharrows”) on the ground.
The signs emerged from a federal grant PBOT was awarded in August 2005.
Geller and PBOT were building America’s best residential bikeway network and they wanted to make the routes as legible as possible. It’s still a work in progress (today Geller laments that this amazing feature of our city’s cycling infrastructure is hidden from most Portlanders), but the combination of thousands of sharrows and these green bikeway network signs are — in my opinion — one of the best things about biking here.
Beyond the sheer utility of knowing where you are, where you can go, and how long it will take to get there (based on a bicycling speed of 11-12 mph), what I like about these signs is the respect they give to cycling. I’m big on respect. If a government demonstrates through its infrastructure that your mode of travel is respected enough to deserve cool innovations and bonus features, that says a lot about where you live. It sends a signal that bicycling is expected and honored.
Today when I see these signs it feels like I’m in the right place. A sense of being at home in the city. And when I’m on one of these routes, I know that Geller and his team at PBOT have done more than put up a sign. There’s a very good chance they’ve added safer crossings, a 20 mph speed limit, speed bumps, and maybe even some diverters to keep car volumes down.
You ever notice these signs. Do you use them? What do you think about them?
Thanks for reading.
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We at the Bicycle Advisory Committee in Beaverton have been working to bring similar wayfinding to our city. A lot of the work has been done, but it has stalled in engineering, and finding the money to pay for the signs may be a hold-up. One thing I like about the Portland signs is the time estimate, but as we went through iterations of designs for the signs here, everyone seems to have agreed that it is not very inclusive of different riding styles, and design guidelines for wayfinding from the usual agencies have all said not to have the time estimate going forward. I get it and ultimately agree from an accessibility standpoint.
Yet I think it helps me feel more connected to my destination. Telling me something is 5 miles away can feel far, but if you tell me that’s just 30 minutes, it feels much more doable. I can’t really explain why, but it is something I will miss if and when the ‘Tron ever gets our wayfinding.
I like the signs. But I think they are sometimes located too far before an intersection. When I get to a bikeway intersection, I want to know which way to go (because many of our bikeways are meandering and confusing). I look up to try to find a sign to help me, and I see none. So I guess which way to go, often wrongly. All the while, there was a wayfinding sign half a block back that I never even saw, because I wasn’t looking for directions until I got to an intersection.
Paul,
I agree that the placement is not ideal. Also, the font size is too small. These are often installed on greenways and they are poorly lit and impossible to read on a dark, rainy night. I think PBOT could take some inspiration from traffic engineering principals and consider font sizes intended to be read from a grater distance and at higher speeds would be a big improvement. I would say these signs are scaled to pedestrians who would get very close and read at a 2-3 mph speed. Bike riders are typically 10′-20′ away and moving 10-15 mph
I make it a point to ask people if they know what greenways are. Friends, family, random people. Almost no one I talk to other than people who are into biking and urbanism know what they are.
Yesterday I was talking to a lady at a coffee shop. She commented on how loud this motorcyle was and how that shouldn’t be allowed, and how the street needs road bumps because cars go too fast. I asked her if she knew about greenways, and she didn’t.
Sharrows and our current network signage are a good start, but I think I agree with Geller in his viewpoint that our “product” is pretty good and has a lot of latent value that needs “marketing” to capture. I suspect that if it were common knowledge that greenways exist and that you could use something like http://portlandbikemap.com/ to view them on a map, our bike mode share would increase by a fair amount.
To have more success with this marketing, I feel like we need something more ambitious. I think about how in the Netherlands they use pavers for local streets across the country. That consistent standard makes it easy for people to understand “oh, this street is different from the streets lined with asphalt; it serves a different function”. Pavers in Portland on all of our greenways actually sounds like a great idea, but for something more realistic, maybe just a continuous green stripe would do the trick.
A continuous green stripe feels to me like it would be enough to actually stand out to people. They’d wonder why all of these streets have continuous green stripes. It’d generate buzz and news coverage. People would talk about it. Some would love it, some would hate it, but I sense that most people would at least _understand_ what it is. That it signifies a greenway, which is a street that is intended to be calm and prioritize cyclists. Maybe then people would understand that we have this network of greenways and be inclined to bike more often.
This continuous green stripe idea seems politically realistic to me. It’s not inconveniencing drivers too much, and it seems like it’d be relatively inexpensive.
“Greenway” is a technical term. As people if they know what bike routes are and you’ll get a more positive response. Everyone know what a bike lane is. I never use the term “greenway” outside of Bike Portland.