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 26^th, 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 21^st 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

Bicyclists are most at risk in Florida http://www.tbo.com/news/politics/floridas-bike-death-rate-highest-in-nation-20150829/