At the suggestion of my oldest son, I’m going to make bicycle commuting the primary focus of my blog. I’ve been using my bike as my primary mode of transportation for more than a year now. While Portland is a very bicycle friendly town, I live in the SW hills which is the unfriendliest part of town. The hills mean that the streets don’t have a regular grid and the flat routes around the hills have long ago been allocated to large busy streets.
Beginning Sept 1, I will be keeping track of my mileage and the amount of gas I consume. Sightline.org says that people in the Northwest consume an average of 8.5 gallons of gas per person per week for their transportation needs. This is low for the USA, but more than double the consumption in the best European countries. My goal is to be under 3 gallons of gas a week (0.43 gallons/day). According to Sightline, energy consumption is the biggest barrier to overcome for the NW USA to achieve a sustainable lifestyle. They estimate it will take another century to lower the average gas usage to the level that I’m talking about… though I think “peak oil” will force change at a much faster rate pretty soon.
We live in a pretty typical location… single family home on a cul-de-sac without a particularly friendly biking environment. We benefit by living close to downtown & even closer to several small communities that can cover most of our shopping needs. I’m retired which helps, but I continue to have meetings around town as part of the volunteer work I do. I’ll be talking about routes, gear, mental attitude, and of course my gas mileage. For trips I have 4 vehicles to choose from: my bike, my feet, a Prius (47 mpg), and a Mazda 6 (22 mpg).
Well Portland unveiled a new bike lane approach this week & its on a route I use pretty regularly… so I got my first taste of it today.
The new stretch is about 5 blocks long and replaces a normal bike lane with a “cycle track“ this means that the bike lane has been moved over to be in between the parked cars and the side walk (instead of between the traffic lanes and the parked cars). They did a nice job of adding a couple feet of buffer space to the right of the parked cars so the chance of getting “doored” is pretty low.
Compared to the normal bike lane, the cycle track feels very protected & isolated… much more relaxing without cars rushing by your left elbow. It almost felt like I was on a separate street, without any car traffic at all… a very nice feeling. I’m sure this approach would get more women out on their bikes on these busy streets. I don’t really mind taking a whole car lane when I’m biking downtown, but my wife will never do that… she refuses to be forced to ride that hard & aggressively in amongst a bunch of cars.
Now for the downside that I noticed on my first ride. Cars making right hand turns are not going to see bikers. Fortunately this stretch has only one spot where cars can make right turns… but I can see that it will be a problem & bikers will need to be very alert. These days I find that most Portland drivers are quite aware of bikers in the bike lanes and are very careful when they turn right… but on the cycle track the parked cars really shield the bikers from the drivers’ view and the cars from the bikers’ view (no way you could see a turn signal)… so instead of some mutual visual warnings that a potential conflict may be coming up, this setup will lead to a big surprise happening right at the intersection.
A second problem is that pedestrians encroach into the cycle track as they begin to cross the street. Since the pedestrians often cross against the lights when they have a chance, they were tending to move out into the cycle track & then behind parked cars to shorten the distance they needed to travel once they decided to go for it… once again this leaves bikers exposed because the pedestrians’ focus is on the car traffic and it is easy to miss a bike headed their way.
So I see some real upsides with this approach, but I can also see problems. I’m glad that Portland started small with this project because I can see that some kinks are likely to appear and will require some thought before solutions are worked out. Of course some of the issues may be resolved as car drivers and pedestrians get used to the new space & go the extra mile to watch out for bikes.