Category Archives: Land Use & Transportation
PBOT tackles traffic death risks
By Garlynn Woodsong | CNA Board Member, SW1 CNA LUTC Chair
“On Tuesday, June 25, just before 6 p.m., police officers responded to a rollover crash near northeast Lombard Street and northeast 42nd Avenue,” reported the Willamette Week last June. “The unidentified driver was pronounced dead at the scene. The death is the 28th traffic-related fatality so far this year.”
“Smith was driving a blue 2000 Ford Crown Victoria eastbound on northeast Lombard Street, just west of 42nd Avenue, when it appears he struck the rear tire and wheel of a bicyclist, the affidavit said,” reported The Oregonian in December 2015. “Smith said he had veered to the right to avoid another vehicle that had swerved toward him, the affidavit said.”
“A busy road in northeast Portland has reopened now after a man was hit and killed by a taxi cab this morning,” KXL Radio reported in April. “Police got the call just before 1 a.m. to the intersection of northeast 64th and Columbia Boulevard, saying a pedestrian was hit. Crews tried to save him, but he died at the scene. Police say the victim was a delivery driver, who just pulled his truck out into the road, hopped out to close a gate and was hit by the taxi cab.”
Between 2008 and 2017, there were 23 fatalities and 85 severe injuries on Columbia Boulevard and Lombard Street between I-5 and I-205.
We’re tired of hearing of deaths on North Portland Highway / Lombard Street, and on Columbia Boulevard.
People are dying needlessly on Lombard, both on bicycles and within automobiles, because the Oregon Department of Transportation does not maintain the bicycle facilities there to any acceptable standard of safety. And both high-speed streets have local street and driveway intersections that offer many opportunities for car-on-car crashes as well.
The Concordia Neighborhood Association has been concerned with the Columbia / Lombard Corridor for many years now. We are unable to safely walk from our neighborhood to the Columbia River, even though we can see it from some of our houses, and its distance would certainly be within a pleasant walking distance of our neighborhood – if only safe facilities existing to connect us with it.
Emissions – not only from the roadway facilities themselves, but also from the industrial land uses nearby – drift into our neighborhood and foul our air when the wind blows from a generally northerly direction, as well as when it doesn’t blow much at all.
It is in this context that the Portland Bureau of Transportation has kicked off the Columbia / Lombard Mobility Corridor planning process, which focuses on the corridor between I-5 to I-205, with a buffer area to include parallel routes.
The process is expected to last through next July, resulting in a plan to guide a strategy for making implementation investments.
Stay tuned to this page in CNews. Better yet, attend the LUTC meetings the third Wednesday each month at 7 p.m. in the McMenamins Kennedy School Community room.
Garlynn Woodsong lives on 29th Avenue, serves on the CNA board and is an avid bicyclist. He also is a dad who is passionate about the city his son will inherit. He is the planning + development partner with Cascadia Partners LLC, a local urban planning firm. Contact him at LandUse@ConcordiaPDX.org.
Draft CNA LUTC Agenda for September, 2019
Cully Community Garden Displacement: August CNA LUTC Agenda
Bond could fund Coast to the Gorge Trail
By Garlynn Woodsong | CNA Board Member, SW1 CNA LUTC Chair
For years, neighbors in Concordia have joined with folks in other northeast Portland neighborhoods to advocate for the construction of more regional bicycle and pedestrian trail connections.
One trail in particular has captured the imagination of many: a trail connecting downtown Portland, through northeast Portland east to the Rocky Butte area and beyond, ultimately to the Columbia River Gorge to connect up with the historic highway state trail there.
This was called the Sullivan’s Gulch Trail Project when Portland City Council voted in 2012 in favor of it. It has since evolved to become known as the Rose Quarter to the Gorge Trail Project, and now the Coast to the Gorge Trail.
Indeed, Metro has previously discussed a concept known as the Infinity Loop for multi-day excursions. It would involve multiple trails heading out of Portland in all directions, connecting with one another at their ends to loop back and return to Portland without needing to retrace steps.
All of these visions for greater bicycle and pedestrian network connectivity could soon take one step closer to reality.
In June the Metro Council voted to send a ballot measure to voters to renew the parks and nature bond. If voters approve the bond measure in November, it would maintain the current tax rate of 19.cents per $1,000 of assessed value (about $4 a month for a home assessed at $250,000).
Among many other worthy funding categories – such as the purchase and restoration of new land from willing sellers to improve water, fish and wildlife habitat – the bond would include $40 million in funding for walking and biking trails. Metro would secure rights to build new trails and construct missing trail sections to complete projects identified in Metro’s regional plan for a network of walking and biking paths.
The Coast to the Gorge Trail would fall entirely on trail sections identified in Metro’s regional trail plan, so this funding could be applied to begin acquiring rights of way and engaging in trail planning if the bond passes.
Voters approved Metro parks and nature bond measures in 1995 and 2006, and local-option levies in 2013 and 2016, to protect and care for land, improve water quality and increase access to nature for people close to home.
As with those measures, all spending of a potential 2019 bond would be monitored by a community oversight committee and subject to annual audits.
Garlynn Woodsong lives on 29th Avenue, serves on the CNA board and is an avid bicyclist. He also is a dad who is passionate about the city his son will inherit. He is the planning + development partner with Cascadia Partners LLC, a local urban planning firm. Contact him at LandUse@ConcordiaPDX.org.
Agenda for July, 2019 CNA LUTC meeting
LUTC Update – Oil rolls on tracks bordering Concordia
By Garlynn Woodsong | CNA Board Member, SW1, CNA LUTC Chair
In the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota, among other locations, new engineering innovations have allowed the use of shale fracking for greater oil and natural gas extraction efficiencies.
All that oil has to find its way to an ocean to get to market, so it’s coming by rail to the oil-to-ship facilities right here in Portland and nearby Columbia River ports.
The exact contents of any given rail car or train is considered classified information for national security reasons, or something along those lines. However, we do know if the more than a dozen oil-by-rail projects currently planned are permitted, they could add a capacity of 858,800 barrels per day – more than the Keystone XL pipeline!
All of this crude oil would move in rail cars on the tracks that run just north of Concordia neighborhood.
There is one, in particular, that is real, that is happening now, and it’s within city limits.
Zenith Energy is performing work, under permits issued in 2014, to expand its capability to transfer oil from trains to boats by expanding its rail car unloading station’s capacity to unload from 12 to 42 cars at once.
According to The Oregonian, federal export data show that Zenith Energy singlehandedly established Oregon’s crude oil export market over the span of the past year. Now it wants to bring Canadian oil through Portland.
This oil train expansion in northwest Portland is an example of how our existing fossil fuel infrastructure can be ramped up without much oversight. It will move higher and higher volumes of volatile petrochemicals on tracks that are within a blast-radius distance of our homes.
Oil won’t be the only fossil fuel on the tracks if other proposed projects are completed. As much as 100 million tons of coal have been proposed to pass through at least six new terminals for export annually.
Even without explosions, pressurized train cars full of mixed petrochemicals are prone to leaking, as they roll mostly unsupervised down the tracks. These leaks can emit noxious liquid, gases and fumes that can travel into adjacent neighborhoods.
Qualitatively, it’s a sure thing that they’re not good for your health. Citizen input could be helpful to city officials deliberating about how far the city should go to regulate the petrochemical export industry within its borders.
Write to your city commissioners if you’re concerned about this issue. Address your letters to 1221 S.W. 4th Ave, Portland, OR 97204. For email addresses, visit PortlandOregon.gov/article/224450.
Let us know – at LandUse@ConcordiaPDX.org – if you’re interested in helping CNA to act on this and related issues.
Garlynn Woodsong lives on 29th Avenue, serves on the CNA board and is an avid bicyclist. He also is a dad who is passionate about the city his son will inherit. He is the planning + development partner with Cascadia Partners LLC, a local urban planning firm. Contact him at LandUse@ConcordiaPDX.org.
CNA LUTC: April, 2019 Meeting Draft Agenda
Bikeways diversion plan awaits city action
By Garlynn Woodsong | Chair, CNA LUTC
A few years ago, the city of Portland solicited feedback from the Concordia Neighborhood Association (CNA) about the 20s Bikeway project.
One of our responses was to request diverters at major streets in our neighborhood – such as Prescott and Killingsworth – to prevent cut-through car traffic from turning onto the narrow one-lane streets on which the 20s Bikeway is routed. That practice can stress out potential bicyclists on the route who may be interested in bicycling more, but are concerned for their safety.
But we were told the city would only install diverters on streets with higher than a certain amount of automobile traffic.
They then informed us they had changed their policies, and now they only installed diverters on streets with sufficiently high traffic volumes. They measured the traffic volumes in Concordia, and the single-lane streets of the 20s Bikeway project didn’t have enough cars to meet their new standard (for two-lane streets), so therefore they didn’t feel diverters were necessary.
I’ve told this story to folks around the city. In doing so, I’ve found a coalition of folks who also want to see physical diversions installed to protect our investment in the bicycle greenway system and keep it safe for bicyclists of all ages and abilities.
Together we developed a communitybased policy proposal called “Diversion on Bikeways as Urban Form.” The basic concept is that the urban form of bicycle greenways should include diverters to ensure that they are local-access-only for motor vehicles, while allowing bicycles to continue as through traffic.
The idea is the same as the existing urban form standard for sidewalks that includes wheelchair ramps where sidewalks meet street intersections, and for driveways that includes ramps and aprons where driveways meet streets.
This policy proposal is endorsed by CNA, the Northeast Coalition of Neighborhoods, SE Uplift and BikeLoudPDX.
Those groups presented this policy proposal to Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) staff in December. We were told PBOT will take no further action until it fills its new greenways coordinator position.
Once this policy is adopted officially, it includes a strategy to deploy temporary installations initially to test each diverter location. It advises using kiosks to allow neighbors to provide feedback to PBOT, so temporary installations can be moved or adjusted, retested and perhaps moved and tested again, before being made permanent.
This sort of iterative public feedback loop is proposed as a more effective version of public engagement.
Traditionally, public engagement involves discussions in meeting rooms far from actual installation sites. Feedback thus received comes from people who haven’t yet interacted with the physical diversions in question as a part of their daily travels.
We look forward to working with the city to test this new policy to help encourage more bicycling in Portland – in a way that is respectful of and responsive to the concerns of neighbors and roadway users.
Garlynn Woodsong lives on 29th Avenue, serves on the CNA board and is an avid bicyclist. He also is a dad who is passionate about the city his son will inherit. He is the planning + development partner with Cascadia Partners LLC, a local urban planning firm. Contact him at LandUse@ ConcordiaPDX.org.
What’s up with the city’s residential infill?
By Garlynn Woodsong | Chair, CNA LUTC
If it seems like the Portland Residential Infill Project has been dragging on for years, that’s because it’s true. The project began in autumn 2015. It will be four years later – autumn 2019 – before the project is likely to be adopted, at the very soonest.
So, what’s going on with it? Ever since last summer, the Portland Planning and Sustainability Commission (PSC) has been reviewing the staff proposal from April. Public comment was taken until mid-summer. Since then, PSC members have been voting on changes to recommend.
The most recent action was Dec. 11, when the PSC received a staff briefing on an updated economic analysis of the project. It reflects the PSC’s tentative amendments to the proposed draft from September, when it directed staff to revise the proposal to incrementally increase floor area limits for additional units.
This change would allow more housing options and expand the area within which those options would be allowed to all R2.5, R5 and R7 zones, with some exceptions for natural resources and hazards.
Key findings from the economic analysis include:
- The PSC’s revisions would significantly increase housing production in the R2.5, R5 and R7 zones across the next 20 years. An additional 24,000 housing units would be produced, accompanied by only a modest increase in demolitions – 117, which is fewer than six a year citywide.
- The incremental increase in floor area ratio (FAR) allowances for additional units provides a bigger incentive to build housing types other than singlefamily residences. FAR is the ratio between the floor area of the building and the area of the parcel that it sits on.
- The new missing middle housing types – duplexes, triplexes, fourplexes and additional auxiliary dwelling units (ADUs) – have smaller unit sizes, which are an average of 56 percent less expensive than new single-family houses.
These reduced housing costs help to provide housing choices for people across a broader range of the income spectrum in more areas of the city.
The PSC is scheduled to receive a briefing on staff’s revised proposal, which should reflect the changes requested to date by the PSC. The PSC is scheduled to vote on recommendations to the city council in March.
City council is anticipated to begin public hearings on the project this summer. No council vote on the project is yet scheduled, but my guess is such a vote will not occur until the school year begins in the autumn, at the very earliest.
From the perspective of the Concordia Neighborhood Association – which has requested that the Portland Residential Infill Project include allowing fourplexes to maximize the potential for reduced housing costs in our neighborhood – the positive news is that the PSC agrees and has requested that fourplexes be added.
The additional good news is the economic analysis confirms that adding fourplexes – and scaling the allowable FAR with the number of units – will result in more, lower-priced units than either the status quo or staff’s original proposal.
Garlynn Woodsong lives on 29th Avenue, serves on the CNA board and is an avid bicyclist. He also is a dad who is passionate about the city his son will inherit. He is the planning + development partner with Cascadia Partners LLC, a local urban planning firm. Contact him at LandUse@ ConcordiaPDX.org.