Portland, Ore. – Bicycle Boulevards
Bicycle Boulevards in Portland are a thing of beauty, safety, and tranquility. They are also wonderful streets to live on. Mia Birk, former manager of City of Portland's Bicycle Program (1993-99), and Mark Lear of the Portland Office of Transportation explain a few of the many strategies employed to keep thru traffic off the boulevards and to make the riders using them safe.
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">[intro music]</font> <br>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Mia Birk:</i> [00:09]
This is South East Lincoln that we’re standing on here and the South
East Lincoln Bike Boulevard is… it’s really cool because it’s
like a metaphor for all that we’ve done in Portland. In the
‘80’s South East Lincoln here was what we call a traffic collector,
there was quite a bit of auto traffic on the street and it was a major
thoroughfare. And in the late ‘80’s and early ‘90’s the
city, really with pressure from neighbourhoods and citizens, turned
this street as well as a number of other streets into what we call bicycle
boulevards where we did traffic calming elements to make this street
more liveable and slower traffic, reduced traffic and much more friendly
for bicyclists and pedestrians. So let me tell you what we did
to this street. At a couple of key points on this street at South
East 39<sup>th</sup>, two blocks this way, and South East 20<sup>th</sup>,
which is about almost a mile that way, we put in what we call traffic
diverters and so traffic has to turn.</font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Mark Lear:</i> [01:07]
One of the biggest challenges to developing a bike boulevard is you
can’t make it easy for cars to get onto the bike boulevard off of
a busy street. If you fail to make those kinds of improvements,
what will happen is you’ll have a lot more cars on the bike boulevard
and we don’t want a lot of cars on our bike boulevards. So what
we do at this location is only allow cars to come out off the local
service street onto 39<sup>th</sup> but we don’t allow cars to come
in from 39<sup>th</sup> onto Clinton. In this case this project
has worked really well. It’s made it so bicyclists can pass
through easily, but it keeps cars off, it actually acts as a good treatment
and diverts cars that would otherwise be on this facility. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"></font></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Mia Birk:</i> [01:46]
We also put in things that slow traffic down which includes the traffic
circle that you can see over there, and speed bumps along the street
to slow traffic down so that the speed of cars is pretty similar to
the speed of cyclists, which creates a more comfortable environment
for everyone. And then more recently we have put in signs and
circles to identify the street as well as other bike boulevards as being
part of this special bike boulevard network. </font></p>
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<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">[music]</font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman"><i>Mia Birk:</i> [02:21]
People were very concerned about diverting traffic off of a street,
how are they going to get to their houses and it might cause traffic
on other streets to go up. So, and this was… that happened here,
there was a lot of fight, it was a difficult project and what happened
as a result is also very similar to what happens in many other cities
and that it’s so pleasant afterwards that property values go up, becomes
a wonderful thoroughfare for people walking their dogs and jogging.
It’s a very popular street for people bicycling, for people walking,
for kids to be out and about and it’s just become this wonderful community
street. </font> <br></p>
<p><font size="3" face="Times New Roman">[music]</font> <br></p>
http://transcriptdivas.ca/transcription-canada/
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