PBOTch Watch!

September 13, 2019

The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) geniuses who engineered the northeast stretch of Glisan Street deserve a shout-out! They are partway through the double-down-Weidler/Halsey-fication of Glisan.

Four weeks in, the transformation of my own personal critical-access street is working like a well-oiled cluster-fuck.

What could possibly go wrong when you squeeze a busy thoroughfare from four lanes of vehicle travel down to two? Plus curbside (“buffered”) bike lanes ad nauseam? Plus occasional off-curb parking?

Like in Europe?

Hans and Gretchen may never have visited northeast Portland but these European visitors would surely recognize the street design that PBOT is striping and pouring a few houses away from my own home and my wife’s home business on Northeast 128th Avenue.

PBOT thinks that if everyone would just stop driving and instead park their vehicles and start bicycling, life in Northeast Portland would be idyllic. And Vision Zero’s soaring goal of eliminating vehicle-caused pedestrian deaths by 2025 would be guaranteed and immediate.

I imagine my wife’s hair clients would MAX or bus, then bicycle to and from her salon, with their coifed hair in trim prophylactic head wraps. More likely, they will have to slo- mo navigate too many glaring white and incomprehensible paint lines and the lane- merging “zipper” between 122nd and 128th Avenues on Northeast Glisan Street.

The bike lane lines are eerily curvy to accommodate former mayor Sam Adam’s heretofore perennially neglected and nearly forgotten deep-welled concrete bio-swales.

Envision ample wiggle room for speeding bicycles, zero wiggle room for grid-locked cars.

Riding a bike curbside has never felt safer for the rare bicyclist. And never on a more circuitous path along a more perfectly straight street.

Parallel-parking your car to erect a ‘crash wall’ between drivers and cyclists has never been a more exacting or exhilarating science.

All this to further PBOT’s bicycles-over-cars agenda.

Thus, PBOT spends your ‘dime’ on social (not traffic; not safety) engineering.

Come on, Portland, genuflect to PBOT’s ideological hard-on for the dedicated bicycle lane!

But Wait, There’s More: Already, big yellow Menlo Park Elementary school buses descend twice a day on the intersection of Northeast Glisan Street and 128th Avenue. Soon, dozens of schoolchildren and parents (and bicyclists, of course) will serially activate the planned and half-baked, full-stop, double-wide, demand pedestrian/bicycle (“pedestrian hybrid beacon") crosswalk coming to Northeast Glisan Street at 129th Avenue.