It’s 450-feet long but it could be the difference between life and death.
(Photos by J. Maus/BikePortland)

The State of Oregon has completed construction of a new bike path on NE Lombard (Highway 30) at 42nd. The path is about one-tenth of a mile long and is separated from motor vehicle traffic by a guardrail.

It doesn’t have an official name, but I’ll always think of this as the Martin Greenough Memorial Bike Path.
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A small but important change.
(Graphic: PBOT Citywide Bike Map)

The City of Portland has edited a section of their official bike map to more accurately depict a dangerous gap in the bike lane where man was killed in 2015.

As we reported at the time, Martin Greenough might have been on his first-ever bike commute when he was hit and killed by an intoxicated driver on NE Lombard. Greenough was hit while bicycling through a dangerous gap in the bike lane that occurs where the lanes narrow to go under an overpass. Unfortunately, the official City of Portland bike map Greenough used to plot his course did not show the gap. The map incorrectly labeled that section of NE Lombard where it goes under 42nd Avenue as having a continuous bike lane.
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The new bike path being built where Martin Greenough was hit and killed while riding in December 2015 is being built as I type this. While the path nears completion, so too does the lawsuit filed by his family last April.
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Where the bike lane ends.
(Photos: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Martin Greenough died on December 12th 2015 after being hit by a reckless driver on NE Lombard. Greenough was struck in a notoriously dangerous spot where the road narrows and the bike lane abruptly disappears — forcing bicycle users to share a lane with vehicles that regularly travel 50 mph.

In light of Greenough’s death, the Oregon Department of Transportation will fill that deadly bike lane gap.

By this summer (at the latest) there will be a new bike path in the eastbound direction of NE Lombard Street where it goes under NE 42nd Avenue. According to ODOT the path will be 450-feet long and six-feet wide. It will be constructed off the highway and will go behind existing guardrails and columns that support an overpass. Here’s the official statement from ODOT:[Read more…]

The bike lane gap at NE Lombard at 42nd, where Martin Greenaugh died in December.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

For the first time, BikePortland’s reporting has been chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists as some of the best from small newsrooms in the Northwest.

In the annual awards announced Saturday, Jonathan’s December report about the circumstances around the death of Martin Greenough (“Why would anyone ride on that scary stretch of Lombard?”) took first place for general news reporting in the five-state contest among news organizations with 10 staff members or fewer.

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A lawsuit (PDF) has been filed in the death of Martin Greenough, the man who was killed while bicycling on NE Portland Highway (a.k.a. Lombard) on December 12th of last year.

Greenough’s family filed the lawsuit yesterday. The suit says that the City of Portland, the State of Oregon, and the man who hit Greenough, Kenneth Smith, are all at fault for his death and are asking for $3.6 million in damages.

As we covered at length here on BikePortland, Greenough was hit in a section of Lombard — where the bike lane stops and the road narrows under the NE 42nd Avenue overpass — that was a known danger spot. We reported on the exact location just one day before he was hit. Tragically however, we learned Greenough was new to town and was very likely following the route suggested on official city and regional bike maps.

In the lawsuit, Greenough’s lawyer claims both the Oregon Department of Transportation and the Portland Bureau of Transportion had been aware of the “pinch point” for at least a year before the collision and that they failed to “failed to provide for safe travel for both motor vehicles and bicycles.”
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One month after he died, a ghost bike for Martin Greenough remains locked
to a rack outside ODOT’s Region 1 headquarters in northwest Portland.
(Photos © J. Maus/BikePortland)

One month ago today Martin Greenough died while cycling on NE Lombard at 42nd. Martin was new to our city. In fact, we learned from his housemate that his ride home from work that fateful Saturday evening was very likely the first bike ride he’d ever taken in Portland.
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Where the bike lane ends on Lombard under 42nd Avenue.
(Photos © J. Maus/BikePortland)

For years now, whenever I drive on Lombard where it goes under 42nd Avenue, I’ll shake my head and mumble angrily to myself. “So disrespectful… Makes me sick they can just drop a bike lane like that… Look how dangerous that is!… Grrrr…” My poor family just rolls their eyes in a “There goes dad again” type of a way.
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This dangerous gap in the bike lane on Lombard — where a man was killed on December 12th — is now listed as a caution zone on Metro’s Bike There map.
(Photo © J. Maus/BikePortland)

Maps matter. On December 12th Martin Greenough was killed while biking on a road that looks like a safe bikeway on popular bike maps. While infrastructure can take years to change, maps can be edited quickly. And that’s exactly what is starting to happen.

Metro, our elected regional government and publisher of the Bike There! map, has responded to our reporting on Martin’s death by adding a caution symbol to the bikeway gap where he was killed.
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If you haven’t read Jonathan’s haunting, exclusive report that Martin Greenough seems to have been killed on his very first bike commute, two weeks after moving to Portland, it’s not one to miss.

Part of the story is that the city’s official bike map inaccurately suggests that Lombard is a fine place to bike. But as BikePortland reader El Biciclero pointed out in a must-read response, the problem here is not really with the map.

The problem is that the only way to bike around Portland without near-death experiences is to use a map.

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