Monday, August 31, 2015

Portland Moves to Secure Faltering Bike Network

Roger Geller, Portland’s accomplished Biking Coordinator, is touting a new study, The Neighborhood Greenways Assessment Report http://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/50518, to secure the city’s faltering bike network.   He offers three fundamental numbers: 40354, 34, and 23.  Between 2000 and 2013 there were 40,354 new commuters in Portland, 34 percent were bicyclists and only 16 percent were motorists.   Investing in this trend is essential in a city projected to add 120,000 residents by 2035.  If auto use continues at current levels it will be necessary to construct the equivalent of 23 new Powell Boulevards—a fiscal and spatial impossibility.
Portland is at a tipping point.  Bicycling is key to sustainability; along with walking it is the most energy efficient and healthy form of transportation.  Six percent of Portland’s commuters are bicyclists, the highest rate in a major U.S. city and ten times the national average.  The goal is to reach 25%, but commuting rates have stagnated.  Sixty percent of commuters would potentially switch to bikes, but only if they can ride in a “low stress” environment.  The problem is bicycling is becoming more stressful.

Traffic congestion is intensifying and drivers are inundating neighborhood greenways, the “low stress” routes that center 325-mile bike network, during the commuter rush.  Approximately 20 percent of greenways, including prime commuting routes are becoming “high stress” facilities.  The key is limiting traffic volumes on greenways to less than 2,000 cars per day, and ensuring vehicle speed limits of 20 mph.  When a person is struck by a vehicle at 20 miles per hour the risk of fatality is less than 15 percent, at 30 mph, the number rises to 50 percent.  The city did not suffer a biking fatality in 2013, but two deaths in the last two years and a rising collision rate has galvanized advocates.  Activists demanding that the city implement the new “Vision Zero” policy to minimize traffic deaths also fueled Geller’s study. http://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/66612
Activists riding for safer biking in Portland 

On August 26th, the City Council unanimously adopted The Neighborhood Greenways Assessment Report.  The next step will be updating the engineering tools that can reduce automobile speeds and volumes to appropriate levels on neighborhood greenways.  Fortunately, Portland is a leader in this field.  In 2000, less than 2 percent of commuters biked.  The number spiked after 100 miles of new bikeways were established between 2000 and 2006.  It was a unique accomplishment. In car happy America, the standards for providing bicycling facilities were primitive.  Geller and his associates looked to Amsterdam, Copenhagen, and a bevy of German cities for inspiration.  The new system was extremely user friendly.  Fatalities dropped while commuting rates increased fourfold.  In 2006 and 2008, Portland did not suffer a single bicycle fatality.  In 2008, the League of Bicyclists’ awarded Portland its Platinum rating, the only major city to receive this designation.  Two years later, the city council adopted a 20-year plan to build an American Amsterdam, replete with separated bike lanes, cycle tracks, trails, and residential greenways.  A definitive study, Bike Facility Design: Best Practices Manual, was drafted to guide the $613 million project.http://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/334689  It assessed 41 engineering techniques from the world’s most bicycle friendly cities, including eight methods to mitigate traffic speed and traffic volume.  The solution to the city’s bicycling woes are at hand, the issue is money.   
At current funding levels it will take 100 years to implement the grand vision laid out in 2010.  Portland has been getting by on the cheap.  It cost $60 million to create a 300-mile bike network, the cost of a singe mile of an urban freeway.  Increasing land values, natural constraints, and tax aversion has raised the ante, but the return on investment is priceless.  When the car is an option not a necessity, real estate values are higher and obesity rates are lower.  Safe, functioning bike networks are also a lure for the “creative class,” the driving force of the high tech industry.http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/06/americas-top-cities-for-bike-commuting-happier-too/240265/  Building a world-class bicycle system is also an investment in equity. A young woman testified to the City Council that she graduated from college with “no car, no debt, and a degree.” She earned her dream job as a graphic designer and requested that others received the “same benefits I did.”
The public good is palatable in Portland.  The City Council understands this, and they were buoyed, literally lifted up, by the reasoned and passionate testimony.  The time had come Mayor Hales announced “to make Vision Zero real.”  The shift in policy should not only prioritize investment, it must “call out bad behavior,” Commissioner Nick Fish added.  He wants fines levied for drivers “behaving in selfish irresponsible way. “Everyone is in such a damn rush they’re putting everyone else’s lives at risk.”

In the 21st century, the ability to stymie road rage and secure safe passage through the city for children and adults is a measure of civilization.  Civitas, the Latin word from which civilization is derived, describes not only the collective body of citizens in a city, but the contract binding them together in common cause.  Portland’s contract is laid out in its new comprehensive plan.  One of the definitive goals is for 80 percent of the population to have access to low stress residential greenways by 2030.  There will be quantifiable benefits--deterring greenhouse gas emissions, traffic deaths, and obesity rates--but securing the civility of a free people is the most important measure of any plan.
One of Portland's most traveled greenways, Ladd's Addition



Tuesday, August 18, 2015

John Portman is in the House, Retro Modernism in the Pearl District


The Cosmopolitan, the 28-story glass tower between Fields Park and Tanner Springs Park, is deadening the Pearl District’s visual kaleidoscope. Rising like a giant roadway reflector, it marks the edge of an eviscerated vista. When Fields Park opened two years ago, a stunning panorama greeted visitors.  Looking south, intimate plazas, greens, walks, and a regimen of trees embellished a street grid lined with buildings that honored the neighborhood’s industrial past. The Cosmopolitan ignores history.  It pays homage to the modernist vision of a sterile hygienic city personified, in the United States, by John Portman, the 1970s starchitect who designed grandiose antiurban buildings. 


Cosmopolitan & F-50 Highway Reflector
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Portman’s architecture did make a statement.  In fact, I remember feeling like Saul of Tarsus when I first encountered his work. I was driving from Florida to The Ohio State University to take up graduate studies in city planning. Even though the somnolent interstate had inured my senses, I was nervous with anticipation.  I was only 21 and had never been to Ohio.  My uneasiness vanished when Atlanta came into view at twilight. Rising above it was a soaring 73-story glass cylinder awash in a golden hue. The building (Westin Hotel) celebrated the city, and I was moved by the prodigious talent of the human hand.  I was also reassured; studying urban planning was going to be okay



Westin Hotel Peach Tree Plaza
After a short career as a city planner, I returned to Atlanta to work on a PhD at Emory University.  By then I perceived planning through the lens of Ian McHarg, the champion of ecology and carrying capacity analysis. http://www.csiss.org/classics/content/23 At Emory, I studied under a Frederick Law Olmsted scholar and delved into the origins of McHarg’s concepts.  My research soon centered on designing human scale, walkable communities, and John Portman, I learned, was not nearly so impressive at the ground level. 

In the mid-1980s downtown Atlanta was a dead zone, so innervating even the homeless avoided it.  Portman’s Westin Hotel set the standard.  A glut of blank walls greeted the guest, it was an impenetrable fortress that gave the impression you checked in but never out. Inside, a seven hundred foot high atrium offered an expanse of light and nature, but one felt insignificant.  Vertigo, agoraphobia, and panic attacks were not uncommon (see James Kunstler, The City in Mind). The building’s insouciance to humanity had a perverse artistic quality, as it was the setting for a memorable death scene in Sharkey’s Machine.  In this 1981 Burt Reynolds film, a villain is thrown out of an upper level window, a stark insignificant life falling to death in a soulless environment.
Villan Exiting Westin in Sharkey's Machine
Hollywood lives to recycle movies.  If Sharkey’s Machine is shot in Portland, the Cosmopolitan offers a prime location.  The top choice, however, would be the Portland Plaza, the hermetically sealed “Norelco Building” towering over Keller Fountain.  It is the definitive statement of the machine lording over nature.
Norelco Building
With its thin sliver of balconies, the Cosmopolitan has a bare human presence.  Mostly it is an amalgam of glass that will seal off Tanner Springs and cast its reflection on an oasis of restored nature.  The park will be more isolated, and in ecological systems isolated wetlands wither and die.  Tanner Springs will not suffer death but diminishment, dominated by a building that, like the Portland Plaza, is destined to be known by the mechanical device it replicates.
Tanner Springs before Cosmopolitan
Tanner Springs Today 





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