Two Portland State students recently offered a proposal to get Northeast Sandy Boulevard up to compliance for the 2030 Portland Bicycle Plan, which aims to make the city’s roadways more convenient for bicyclists.
According to the proposal, Sandy is an auto-oriented commercial corridor, but the many businesses on the busy strip of 82nd Avenue could benefit from customers arriving via bicycle.
Currently, 20,000 vehicles per day travel through Sandy. In addition, bus routes and future streetcar concept plans all present issues of conflict that the proposal says needs to be considered when choosing a design for bicycle improvements.
The students, Collin Roughton and Chloe Ritter, were enrolled in Professor Ashely Haire’s “Bicycle and Pedestrian Engineering Design” course when they began working on the project.
Roughton, a bike rider himself, notes that the emphasis on the project is making the bicycling environment safe and comfortable.
“Right now, Sandy Boulevard is a very intimidating place to ride a bike, due to high volumes of motor vehicles,” Roughton said. “If we want to leverage the benefits of bicycling for everyone in the city, we’ll have to keep working to make bicycling a fun, pleasant, safe option.”
According to Roughton, the students’ plan does not outline any detailed design specifications, but “general guidance on policy, programs and infrastructure” for the road.
One of the challenges that Roughton and Ritter battled was the Portland Freight Master Plan, which designates Sandy as a major truck route, and the streetcar system plan calling Sandy a high priority corridor.
“The solutions we came up with tried to work with these potentially conflicting visions, and each comes with a set of trade-offs,” Roughton said.
The proposal highlights three options for transforming Sandy into a credible bike route, including buffered bike lanes, cycle track with flexible parking and side street routes with “way-finding crossing treatments,” Roughton said. Each proposed alternative has a list of tradeoffs, benefits and other considerations.
“The option with flexible parking fits more with the vision outlined in the Freight Plan, as it maintains capacity for cars and trucks during the peak hours, while the road diet and buffered bike lane option would support Streetcar service and create a more livable street,” he said.
Buffered bike lanes would reduce traffic volumes and create a more comfortable environment for riders, but per the proposal it also has a high cost to implement.
“One challenge with this design is that there are several stretches along the road where the road narrows, either for pedestrian crossings, bus stops or center left,” Ritter said. “In these places, either the flexible travel/parking lane or the bike lane would have to be dropped, both of which present potential safety problems.”
Ritter, while hopeful that Sandy can and will be renovated, is realistic about the options they have given.
“The most conservative option was to direct bicycle traffic to…nearby side streets, which included installing extensive wayfinding signs and making it easier to cross Sandy at frequent intervals,” Ritter said.
According to Ritter, this is not a preferable option.
“[It] was proposed with the idea that in the near future the city probably won’t have the money or political support to build extensive bike infrastructure on Sandy,” she said.
Hair submitted the proposal to the Portland Bureau of Transportation. ?