Pearl District bicycle update
Posted by: MichelleJul 24 2008, 9:53 pm
The Pearl District could, in theory, be an easy place for anyone to bike. Its streets and buildings look very much like some of the most bicycle-friendly cities in the world. It boasts retail, housing, jobs and grocery stores (though no schools, yet) within easy biking or walking distance of one another. It's on a grid, which should make wayfinding and picking low-traffic alternatives easy.
Yet it's not an easy place for most people to bike, not yet. People are not as comfortable riding downtown and in the Pearl as we might expect them to be – parking and storing bikes isn't very easy, there are few streets where it is comfortable to ride slowly, and people are afraid of biking near cars and between streetcar tracks.
But the Pearl District may see some changes in the next few years. Right now a number of creative, cooperative and exciting discussions are happening among the Pearl District Neighborhood Association, the Portland Office of Transportation, the BTA, Alta Planning + Design, Portland Streetcar Inc., PNCA and PSU.
Here's what everyone is talking about:
Streetcar development
The next phase of Streetcar development will run a streetcar on the east side of the river, over the Broadway Bridge and into the North Pearl District. The North Pearl District (north of Lovejoy and south of Naito) is primed for major residential and commercial growth.
The route of the streetcar in the Pearl has not been decided yet – it may go west on Lovejoy and then turn south onto the existing tracks on 10th and 11th, or it may do a loop to the north first, to access more development.
But either way, it looks like Lovejoy and Northrup, both currently two-way streets, will be turned into a "one-way couplet," i.e. Lovejoy will be one-way eastbound and Northrup will be one-way westbound. This begs the question: What to do about the Lovejoy bike lane?
The BTA has been tracking these developments, and in our discussions thus far most people seem to agree (as do preliminary results from the BTA's bike/transit survey) that the present arrangement on Lovejoy is not good for most bicyclists. Currently, the bike lane lies between parked cars and the streetcar tracks, goes up onto the sidewalk behind the streetcar stops and then returns to the roadway at the intersection.
Bicyclists and pedestrians sometimes interact badly behind the stops; bicyclists in the bike lane are stuck between parked cars and tracks if someone opens a car door or if a pedestrian steps in front of them; and there is no clear way for bicyclists to make a left turn off Lovejoy without merging across the tracks, a particularly dangerous movement.
The BTA feels quite strongly that this kind of bicycle facility should not be repeated, neither on the new one-way Lovejoy nor anywhere else. This seems to be generally agreed upon by the Pearl District, PDOT and Portland Streetcar.
But if we don't want to replicate the old Lovejoy design, the Pearl District is ultimately faced with a choice between two solutions.
Option #1 is to remove one side of car parking from Lovejoy to make room for a separated bike lane (also known as a "cycletrack") that would keep bike tires safely away from streetcar tracks, would allow for two-way travel, and would enable bicyclists to turn north or south from Lovejoy without having to merge over tracks.
This could be a great place to try out a cycletrack, like this one in Copenhagen:
Left turns could be accomplished as "jug-handle" or "Melbourne-style" left turns, in which bicyclists pull off to the right at an intersection, wait in the crosswalk, and then head in their new direction when the light changes.
A cycletrack would take space – either a travel lane or, more likely, a car parking lane. But parking is at a premium in the Pearl District, particularly on such a busy commercial street.
Option #2 is to enhance a nearby street and make it a Bicycle Boulevard, allowing people to easily access the Pearl District and pass through it on trips between NW Portland and the Broadway Bridge.
NW Johnson to the south and NW Overton to the north are decent bike routes (see the bike map excerpt above), but they don't yet connect to NW 9th and with a six-block spread in between those two streets it's unlikely that bicyclists headed for the Lovejoy area would detour so far out of their way to use them.
In a detailed analysis by Alta Planning + Design of all possible Pearl District bike routes – including Lovejoy – the street that scored highest was NW Marshall. The Portland Bicycle Advisory Committee was unanimous in its support of creating a NW Marshall bicycle boulevard over squeezing bike lanes onto Lovejoy.
Why is Marshall such a good option? Marshall is currently low-traffic and slow, running between Lovejoy and Northrup (the future one-way commercial streets). To the west it passes underneath I-405 thereby making a connection between the Pearl and Northwest, and to the east it goes underneath the Broadway Bridge and past Union Station into downtown.
One challenge with NW Marshall is the two blocks of old cobblestones (between NW 12th and 14th, running next to the Bridgeport Brew Pub). The cobblestones are very pretty and probably slow down car traffic on these blocks, which is a benefit, but they're annoying to bike over. (Well, on my fat-tired Dutch bike they were annoying; on my road bike they were downright unpleasant.)
We’ve heard that Pearl residents really like the cobblestones and don't want to see them go, and no one else does either – they have historic, aesthetic and traffic-calming value. But if NW Marshall were to become the Lovejoy/Northrup alternative for bikes, something would have to be done to make them more "bikeable." A truly excellent bicycle boulevard needs to be just that – excellent – rather than mostly good but unpleasant for a couple of blocks.
The good news about Option #2 is that other countries have lots of experience making historic cobblestone streets bikeable in very appealing ways.
Here is one nice example of cobblestones-with-bike-lanes, which also accommodates on-street car parking, from the Netherlands:
And another design from Copenhagen (colorwise, this looks more like NW Marshall):
Photo credit: Alta Planning + Design archives.
Because Alta Planning + Design identified Marshall as the top scoring bike route, they spent some time sketching up how it could be modified for bike travel without losing its stony charm. Here is one possibility:
Plus, the cobblestones on Marshall are currently in rough shape from repeated digging and patching for utility access, so perhaps a bike-fix and an overall face-lift could be done at the same time. It’s also possible that the cobblestones removed from the bike lanes could be relocated to another street or stretched out for another block of Marshall, expanding the reach of cobblestone streets in the district.
Another challenge involved in turning NW Marshall into a bike boulevard is creating easy access from the Broadway Bridge. Westbound bicyclists coming off the bridge towards Lovejoy would turn right on NW 9th and then left onto Marshall.
For experienced cyclists this 
maneuver is simple, but for everyone else making a left turn across oncoming traffic with car traffic backing up behind them would be intimidating. This transition might be achieved with a ped/bike bridge that flies down from the Broadway Bridge directly to Marshall; shared-lane markings on 9th to help drivers understand the importance of the bike route; and a left-turn lane for bikes at Marshall on 9th.
The Pearl District a "Bicycle District"?
The Pearl District may become interested in adding a "bicycle district" overlay to its current "pedestrian district" designation. In keeping with that, and with completion of Portland's Bicycle Master Plan update, the Pearl District might want to develop it's own neighborhood-scale bike plan.
In a recent meeting with the Pearl District Transportation Subcommittee, Portland Bicycle Program Manager Roger Geller described the successful strategies Portland and European cities have employed to increase bike use, safety and comfort. He pitched the Subcommittee on the idea of making the Pearl a "bicycle district" with it's own specific Bike Plan. The Subcommittee was warm to the idea, and they'll probably be discussing it more in the future.
Bicycle Boulevards in the Pearl
A couple of Bicycle Boulevards may be in the works for the Pearl District. While some streets in the Pearl are slow and safe enough to support limited bike traffic, we've still heard from residents and workers that they'd like genuinely low-traffic places to ride bikes.
First, as an alternative to Lovejoy and Northrup, NW Marshall could become a bicycle boulevard as I described above.
The BTA has been calling for NW Flanders to be a bicycle boulevard, with a bike and ped only crossing over the freeway. (I-405 is very difficult and dangerous to cross without a car; pedestrians and bicyclists are forced onto high-traffic Everett and Glisan and across freeway entrance lanes). A major step forward in this effort would have been acquisition of the old Sauvie Island Bridge as a freeway crossing, but that effort failed, so a new bridge will ultimately have to be built for this purpose.
The plan for a future West Burnside/Couch one-way couplet (with or without streetcar) includes the establishment of NW Davis as a low-traffic east-west bicycle boulevard, as far as I-405.
The Park Blocks, already quiet streets, could also become a bicycle boulevard. A Park Blocks boulevard would connect PSU and downtown to the Pearl, the Broadway Bridge and PNCA's new outpost, and would be the first low-traffic downtown bike route.
For people to bike among these destinations today, they have to ride on SW 3rd and 4th (three-lane streets with heavy bus traffic), Broadway (with one of the most difficult bike lanes in town), or 13th and 14th (where a bicyclist was killed in the bike lane last year). Once the new transit mall is done, there will be bike access, along with car, bus and MAX traffic, on SW 5th and 6th.
A low-traffic option would not only give current bicyclists a nicer, safer option; it would also let people who aren't biking (because they aren't comfortable with any of the current high-traffic routes) use bikes to get between downtown and the Pearl. And because the Park Blocks are used by cars primarily for parking (or looking for parking), it could be done with hardly any impact on car circulation.
It's a slam-dunk chunk of low-hanging-fruit if I ever saw one!
I'm not sure I understand the Lovejoy cycletrack option. Where would the cycletrack go in relation to the platforms? Would it still pass behind the platform? If so, that seems like we're back to the same problem as the current sidewalk bypass today — mixing bikes & peds in a facility that seems like a ped facility to pedestrians and a bike facility to bicyclists (and thus may lead to conflicting expectations). Am I just not imagining this correctly?
While we're on the topic of bike lanes and streetcars, I rather enjoy the bikes lanes that are on the opposite side of the road from the streetcar stations. They would only work on one-way streets, obviously, but if Lovejoy is being converted, I say go for it. The street would be wide enough; the problem is that the streetcar tracks would need to be moved over to where the bike lane is now. Such reconstruction would largely be a waste of money.
And how exactly will these bike boulevards work in regards to stop signs? They work great on the east side where they rarely cross major streets, but when nearly every cross street is relatively busy, how would stop signs be arranged?
I am all for the bike boulevard on Marshall. I was riding with my girlfriend the other day on Lovejoy, and she got stuck in the track and fell in traffic. This is not the kind of thing that encourages people to bike. As for crossing major streets, perhaps a system like the one at 50th and Burnside (I think thats the location might work. There is a button similar to a pedestrian crosswalk button, but it is accessible to riders on the street. It also seems to work really quickly. Just a thought.
I ride this route daily. Eastbound, I take Northrup. There are no streetcar tracks this direction. As it's downhill I can ride at speed in the center of the lane, safely away from car doors.
Westbound from ninth, I take Northrup and ride in the center of the streetcar tracks for just one block to 11th where I jog over to Overton. Where I have to cross busy streets such as NW 21st or NW 23rd if traffic is heavy, when there is a break in traffic one way, I make a right turn, go one block, signalling to turn left, wait at the next street until it's safe to turn.
NW Johnson past REI is another good bike route east and west. With all the traffic on Lovejoy, it seems foolish to ride there.
Regarding the current bike lane design along Lovejoy, this is the exact same design that was replicated in South Waterfront. However, it seems to work well there.
Anyways, while I am in favor of using Park as a bike boulevard, Marshall is not a very good choice for a bicycle street. First, there are really no businesses along it. Secondly, there are stop signs, block after block. It is painfully slow to use it to get anywhere. Third, the hospital cuts it off at 22nd.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, is the fact that Marshall has always had low traffic, but when I lived there for several years, I never saw any other cyclists using the street, despite the fact that it is safer.
The Pearl and NW are the two densest neighborhoods in the state of Oregon, perfect candidates for cycle tracks. Besides, people who live in the neighborhoods don't drive that much – so all that free parking just goes to the Beavertronians who drive into the neighborhood in their Hummers anyways.