Produced by:
KBOO
Program::
Air date:
Wed, 01/05/2011 - 11:00am to 12:00pm
Trafic engineers explain how our streets and their design end up working-- or not-- for cyclists.
This month on the Bike Show we're exploring how our streets and their design end up working (or not) for cyclists. Our guests include traffic engineers Rob Birchfield and Peter Koonce from the City of Portland and Jim Peters of DKS Associates Transportation Solutions to talk about where bikes fit into how our roads are shaped, their work on projects like the Broadway/Weidler couplet, and how they're working to shape how our roads, lights, and signals will look in the future.
Comments
Street Cars
I think the promotion of street cars in Portland is done with some misdirection. Given Portland's leadership role as a cycling city, I can understand why streetcar boosters like to claim that there is a linkage between bikes and rail. But the conflicts are very real and the relative cost of a mile of rail makes the return-on-investment far from clear. When I heard the streetcar presentation for my NE neighborhood, I was struck by the idea that I already have a "20 minute neighborhood" on my bike. Adding streetcars will create that for more sedentary people, but at an almost unbelievable price. This means cyclists like me invariably are shunted to secondary "parallel routs" away from the commercial areas I frequent.
The truth is that the real beneficiaries of street cars are developers, who will build the multi-story projects that street car corridor re-zoning is designed to foster. My guess is they often do this with tax breaks . . . meaning they get the big benefit while others pay for the infrastructure.