Streets are what make a city a city. It’s not the buildings themselves, but the chance to move among and between them, that creates the joys and economic blessings of city life.
Of course, those joys and blessings make city life popular—and the popularity of moving between a city’s buildings causes one of the main challenges of city life: traffic.
That’s why it’s so exciting when a Cascadian city comes up with a plan that would actually make its streets work better, permanently.
The proposal going before Portland City Council Thursday afternoon avoids the false promise of bigger roads: 39 percent of the central city is already dedicated to street space, it notes. So, instead, it’s planning to dedicate an additional 1 percent of those central streets to bike lanes and another 1 percent to bus lanes.
That little shift in urban space, which would take the form of 18 street projects over the next 10 years, would boost the people-moving capacity of the affected streets by an average of 60 percent.
Image: City of Portland, based on figures by NACTO.
That’s based on calculations from the National Association of City Transportation Officials. It’d be the city’s most important bus infrastructure investment in 40 years, and its most important biking infrastructure investment in 20.
Price tag: $72 million, or about the cost of a single mile of urban freeway.
It’s worth noting that boosting the potential capacity of a street isn’t the same as getting people to use that potential by riding a bike or getting on a bus. And one potential risk of Portland’s current plan is that a big part of it—a connected lattice of low-stress bike lanes throughout central Portland—might not pay off much until the entire network is finished.
Just like a road network or a computer network, low-stress bikeways have little value to anyone until they’re connected to other low-stress bikeways.
Some cities—Vancouver, BC; Calgary, Alberta; Sevilla, Spain—have recently shown the power of installing a simple protected bike lane network all at once, with relatively cheap and adjustable materials, so transportation habits can shift quickly and everyone—voters, nearby businesses, politicians themselves—can see the payoff. It’s not clear whether or not Portland is planning to learn from that example as it builds its own network.
That said, the only way a city can truly fight traffic is to better use the street space that already exists. If Portland moves this plan forward, it’ll become the latest city to show the rest of the world how to fight congestion right, letting more people enjoy the promise and joys of the city.
Simon
Great point re people not using the bike Lanes and buses. My work doesn’t allow it. I have to drive. This plan will just be further encouragement for people who must drive to locate their business outside the city. I guess that will help with traffic, but likely not the economy.
Michael Andersen
Fortunately for you, though, there are thousands of people who go to work or school in the central city who do have the option to bike or bus but who drive anyway. Seems to me your commute (and the economics of doing business in the central city) will be better served if more of those people find it worthwhile to shift to bike and bus—especially when the alternative to this plan is doing nothing as the population grows and auto-dependent downtown streets grind ever-closer to a standstill, trapping 40-person buses in a sea of one-person cars.
Damian
“Less than 10 percent of adults in the United States feel comfortable riding in mixed traffic or painted bike lanes, yet more than 80 percent indicate they would ride in protected bike lanes, which separate bikes from traffic. ”
This statement from the proposal is very important to the success of this proposal. I feel a little uncomfortable in traffic but I do it. And saying you would ride in a protected lane is fine, but not evidence. How many people are actually going to make the switch once it’s complete?
These study responses wouldn’t give me confidence that this proposal would substantially increase the number of bikers. Was there better evidence later in the proposal?
Still, in terms of safety, it could make sense. But the capacity argument seems wishful thinking-
is there a bike lane in the US that moves 2500 people per hour?
Michael Andersen
I don’t think there are any such bike lanes in the U.S. yet, though a few bridges probably come close to that.
https://medium.com/@raydelahanty/what-is-north-americas-busiest-bike-bridge-3ac84cf8b8c3
But there are definitely bike lanes with that volume in the downtowns of cities with extensive protected bike lane networks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuR4ycpFEGs
Agreed, the quality of the biking network is essential … it needs to actually be good enough and convenient enough, relative to driving, to get people to change habits. And there is quite a lot of evidence that bike infrastructure changes people’s habits. Exhibit A is Portland itself, where bike commuting quadrupled as a share of population in the five years after the city’s previous investment of this magnitude (the Eastbank Esplanade and downtown bridge sidewalk improvements).
Bill Frisinger
It is worth keeping in mind that a great fix for commutes in August may not be used much at all during the dart and rainy month of December.
Also Portland is a lot flatter than Seattle.