As any Portland State student with 10 minutes between classes will tell you, Southwest Broadway is one of the busiest thoroughfares on campus, whether traveling by foot or bicycle. The wait for a traffic signal to change near Cramer Hall can seem endless, and it’s not uncommon to see impatient students dart across the street, regardless of the color of the light.
This, too, is true regardless of whether that student is traveling by foot across the street or by bicycle along Southwest Broadway’s cycle track, making a few specific intersections around campus particularly dangerous. For a campus that prides itself on bike-friendliness, this creates a problem.
Shortly before winter break, a Sophomore Inquiry class research project came to the same conclusion. As part of their Natural Science Inquiry class, a group of students observed the behavior of bicyclists and motorists at three intersections around campus. They selected Southwest 6th Avenue and Mill Street, Southwest Broadway and Montgomery Street, and Southwest Broadway and Harrison Street, and focused primarily on how frequently bicyclists and motorists ran red lights.
The latter two intersections, on either side of the Smith Memorial Student Union, were of particular interest because they included the cycle track, a special bike lane along Broadway separated from motor vehicle traffic by a lane of parked cars. Additionally, the two cycle-track intersections are three-way, or T-shaped, intersections. If a bicyclist were to proceed straight through a red light, he would not risk being hit by a car.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the presence of the cycle track made cyclists much more likely to run red lights. The student group found that at all three intersections, approximately 58 percent of bicyclists rode through red lights. At Southwest 6th Avenue and Mill Street, about 39 percent of bicyclists ran red lights, while almost 70 percent of bicyclists along the cycle track ran red lights.
Despite the relatively small sample size (only 99 cyclists total were observed), the findings of this Sophomore Inquiry group matches up with similar research previously conducted by PSU faculty in the Center for Transportation Studies.
In a study completed in January 2011 for the City of Portland’s Bureau of Transportation, a team of PSU researchers in the CTS measured the success of the Southwest Broadway cycle track, which is an experimental design being used as a test project for future bike paths in Portland. The CTS team recorded bicyclists at Southwest Broadway and College Street, and Southwest Broadway and Montgomery Street, and found that 44 percent of cyclists along the cycle track ran red lights. In a survey of cyclists who used the cycle track, 27 percent didn’t believe they were even required to stop.
Part of the problem, according to CTS researchers, is that the traffic signals are located over the motor vehicle lanes and not the cycle track. That vague signal placement, coupled with the lack of danger from oncoming vehicles, makes those riding in the cycle tracks particularly prone to running red lights.
Although the CTS researchers’ finding of 44 percent of cyclists running red lights are not as extreme as the student group’s 70 percent, there still appears to be an undeniable problem when about half of bicyclists don’t obey traffic laws in an area full of pedestrians—many of whom disregard traffic signals themselves in a hurry to get across campus and make it to class on time.
The CTS study found that when pedestrians were nearby, almost 10 percent of the time there would be an “interaction” with the cyclist, where either the cyclist or the pedestrian would have to stop or change direction, or the cyclist came within three feet of a pedestrian in the street.
Any pedestrian who has jumped back on the curb to dodge a passing bicyclist, or any law-abiding bicyclist who has swerved to avoid a jaywalking pedestrian, can agree that there is a problem here. According to these recent studies, that probably includes most of us.