#Portland's new Deputy City Administrator of Public Works will start July 1, in transition to the new form of government adopted by the charter reform measure. Public Works will include Water, Environmental Services, and #Transportation bureaus (which will be run by a City Administrator rather than elected commissioners of our current system.) #pdxBikes
Tactical network-level changes like cut-thru traffic diversion and bus-turn-only road diets are badly needed if we want to actually connect a usable low-stress #bikewayNetwork and not waste the next decade on more non-progress like rebuilding Hawthorne or flashing beacons on 82nd. Drop in hardware, take feedback, and iterate, not this narrow, overpriced, too-little-too-late stuff like around Tilikum, Naito, and soon SW 4th. #tacticalUrbanism like Jersey City, Paris, Seville, Amsterdam 50yrs ago
"[114 mile] series of new and improved bike lanes will cover 17 corridors ... is meant to help the city reach its goal of 15% of trips being done by bike within 10 years" hey #pdxBikes is #Portland still going for that 25% they #ClimateAction-pinkie-promised? Count how many times you see 4-lane stroads in this video. It's not a "$4B backlog". Connect #PopUpBikeLanes into a #bikewayNetwork like Montreal (and Paris, and Amsterdam etc before them) or sit in traffic.
We've built transportation systems that isolate rather than connect. We need complete networks--of people, of infrastructure, of connections between modes--so all of us can get where we need to go.
@BarbChamberlain good points, you might extend that notion of the people network to the connected #BikewayNetwork and the decade of scrapped-together prototype streets that it's going to take for us to survive fossil fuels. It's not the "sidewalk network will take 160 years to build" stack of capital project plans and cast-in-place concrete curbs and ramps they want to pour. It's planter boxes and modular barriers, pop-up car-free routes to school, traffic diversion/filtering, it's people.
@shanie most people wish #transit ran fast and frequently enough to make them want to ride it, but aren't going to walk 4 miles in a ditch and cross a stroad to catch a 30-60 min bus that gets stuck in traffic. The key to unlocking suburban transit is a fully connected low stress #BikewayNetwork and secure parking + bikeshare availability at every station. Creates 4x radius = 16x as much area with access to transit vs walking, besides unclogging streets by removing school-run/ grocery cars etc
Cities' elected officials love to talk about prioritizing transit but most of them don't have a lever to pull on for that. Getting cars out of the way of bikes and buses is something within reach. And if your city ever finally takes bikes seriously, enough people will be able to actually access transit. Politics/funding of #parking, #transit, #landUse, all works itself out once you connect and maintain a low-stress #bikewayNetwork. Wishing won't get us there, because #geometryHatesCars
I've said this before and I'll say it again and it's going to stay true until your city finally pulls on the easiest #ClimateAction lever to make drivers go around the block sometimes and actually prioritize trips by bike with the low-stress connected #bikeWayNetwork we will only ever have the space and time and money to build when we take back some of what we spent making cars dominate all urban space.
Invisible Bicycle Infrastructure [we already have it] @notjustbikes
"Millicent Williams is the new Director of the #Portland Bureau of #Transportation." #PBOT "was capital program division manager and most recently worked as regional director for Otak, a Portland-based engineering and planning firm... the first Black woman to lead PBOT, and she arrives at a critical juncture as the agency is reeling with unprecedented budget challenges... "Together, we will take a pragmatic, ‘Whole Community’ approach to problem-solving"
Sounds promising, but I want to see #stuffInTheStreet, obstructing speeding #drivers. A "conversation" resulting in a rebuilt status-quo of cars dominating NE 7th-and-also-MLK is not going to get us to our #ClimateAction goals. We've over-invested in space for cars while neglecting all other modes, so some amount of removing cars from a connected low-stress #bikeWayNetwork amount of our public space is going to need to happen, and everything else is just stalling, especially capital projects.
Thursday at 6pm! ☀️ Crash Analysis ride to sites of car-on-bike crashes to study how the #infrastructure and traffic plans may have contributed, with the police reports and other data. We will document existing conditions and confirm measurements! 📏 🤓 📐 🚲 📣
#independenceDay thought about #FreeRangeKids: Can we just put one of those chalk markers on every kid's #bike and give them an unlimited supply of chalk? Then your #transportation dept can follow them around with cones, and viola you have a complete and connected #bikewayNetwork. To get out of the #carSupremacy rut, start with at least one car-free day per month and give the kids bikes + lessons if they need them.
I got your "$4B #transportation backlog" right here #Portland. Put your #trafficEngineers' #CompleteStreets fever dream planning documents in a barrel and burn them for heat. You're never going to build an entire #BikeWayNetwork at $30M/mile, and look at them sit on their hands on E 82nd transfer (as bloated as Barbur, sans train.) "Fixing Our Streets" is a cars project, free #Parking is theft, and #ClimateDenial is foundational to #PBOT's entire budget. #StrongTowns
@sanae@Loukas@jackofalltrades all of the funding you manage to give the department of cars will be spent on car infrastructure. If you're lucky it may also include a partial implementation of a #BikeWayNetwork, but this is not remotely near to getting completed even with all of Portland's unfunded boondoggles. And if money turns magic and it does get built+connected, there will still be too much driving to meet GHG goals - up until they remove lane miles from the excessive carway network.