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Wednesday, October 28, 2009
News / Bikes Bike Master Plan: Great! Now Where's the $$$?
Posted by Sarah Mirk on Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 10:00 AM
Here’s how the authors of the new Bicycle Master Plan imagine Portland in 2030: Portlanders make twenty-five percent of trips in the city by bike, riding along 600 new or improved miles of bikeways, many of them comfy bike boulevards. Gateway and the Lloyd District are transformed into “Bicycle Districts” and NE Going and will look like present-day SE Clinton. Portland east of I-205 will have more bike lanes than the entire city currently has.
Dozens of people turned out to the Planning Commission room downtown last night to express support for the first bike master plan for Portland since 1996. "I look at it as more than a bicycle plan. It’s a green transportation plan," sums up well-known bike consultant Mia Birk. The plan aims to make biking a pillar of the city and encourages linking land-use policy to biking as it has been linked to cars and mass transit.
But how is biking supposed to be a pillar of a city when it receives only a toothpick’s worth of funding? The plan’s ambitious goals shine a stark light on the percent of the Portland transportation budget spent on bike projects: a measly .7 percent.
Though the plan looks awesome, right now the funding is not in line to actually build the majority of the bikeways so painstakingly mapped out across Portland. “We could maybe squint our eyes and if some earmarks came through, we could maybe see $70 million,” project manager Eileen Vanderslice told the planning commission. The pricetag for just the first 123 miles of improved or new bikeways is $100 million. And those first projects are the relatively easy ones. The next round of projects include are major Springwater Corridor-esque routes like Sullivan’s Gulch and the North Portland Greenway, whose costs in the plan are described only as “substantial.” Vanderslice tentatively estimates the cost of the entire plan at $500 million. At our current level of bike funding, the plan would take about 330 years to finance. The city's going to have to really put its money where its mouth is to make these plans a reality by 2030.
Thoughts on how to fund our glorious bike future below the cut.
- Hooray!! In 2030, the sky rains money unto bicycles.
Though that’s a big chunk of change for bike spending in America, think about it in perspective. $600 $60 million is the cost of only one mile of urban freeway. Plus, there’s the economic benefits of bikes. According to a 2006 Alta Planning study, bikes create $65-100 million annually in business for Portland. Promoting bikes helps create a more socioeconomically equitable city, too. As Transportation Bureau bike guru Roger Geller pointed out while asking the Planning Commission to approve the plan, transportation is the second largest expense for American households, costing more than food and clothing. Since bikes are the cheapest mode of transportation, helping more Portlanders bike would help more Portlanders save money.
The world’s #1 bike cities have figured it out. Amsterdam and Copenhagen spend $40 and $25 per person annually on bike projects. Portland spends only $3. Not every planning goal can be achieved by just christening a part of town a “district”—some of this plan is going to take money. And achieving the goal of 25 percent of Portland trips by bike is going to mean getting the city’s transportation department and traffic engineers on board.
So will this become an all-too-typical Portland planning process, where stakeholders draft a bold and ambitious plan, only to see it fall flat? I hope not. Here’s a quick list of good funding ideas people brought up during the 90 minute public comment period last night—let’s hope the city is listening.
• Since biking creates a healthier population, get grants or sponsorship from people who fund health issues. Kaiser Permanente, for example, sponsors Sunday Parkways and Providence Hospitals sponsors the massive BridgePedal.
• Get more federal funding for alternative transportation projects.
• Pressure the state to increase the amount it spends on bike-ped projects statewide from its current 1% of the transportation budget.
• Make the amount of the city transportation budget spent on bikes match the percent of the population who ride bikes as their primary mode of transportation. That means upping the city bike budget to at least six percent.
Commissioner Irma Valdez spoke strongly in favor of licensing and registering bike riders, in part to bear a portion of the costs of infrastructure but also to try and create a safer environment since bikes would be regulated somehow. But Geller and Vanderslice pretty much shot that idea down, noting that model cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen don't license cyclists, but agreed that promoting safety and bike education is important. The pair pointed to Portland's Safe Routes to School elementary school education programs as something to expand rather than introducing bike licenses.
You can download the plan and page through it yourself. Public comment period is open till November 8th, when the Planning Commission will make revisions and decide whether to advance the plan to city council. The commission has currently received 67 comments about the new bicycle master plan, only 11 of which were firmly against the plan.
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Agreed! Building bike infrastructure is the best bang-for-buck we can get. It should be an obvious go-to with the economy the way it is.
Other than bike lanes what kind of infatructure would we see if we had a sizeable budget?
"I look at it as more than a bicycle plan. It’s a green transportation plan," sums up well-known bike consultant Mia Birk."
God, this town has become so predictable, so homogenous, and so f**king BOOOOORING! Do you guys get it? You're not punks. You're not interesting. You're all the exact same f**king person, and you're BORING!!!
"Gateway and the Lloyd District are transformed into “Bicycle Districts”"
Will some adult somewhere please stand up and save us from the naive, Euro-trash-worshiping nonsense? My god, what is wrong with everyone? Is there any one left in this town who is older than 25? Is there any one left who didn't move here in the last five years?
I can't believe how fast this unassuming, blue-collar town has been ruined. I could have caught it on timelapse.
I remember an old report from Sam Adams as the head of the city Transportation Department - the quote in my head was "At current levels of funding, city curbs are due to be replaced once every one thousand six hundred years, which is considered to be inadequate."
How healthy is our overall transportation budget? If bikes are a small part of that, doesn't that make the problem of bike project funding much smaller than the overrall budget problem?
Blabby blabby blab blab blah blah Blabby. So predictable, indeed.
Sorry this post disappeared from the site for a little while this morning. We're having whack internet issues, but apparently the tech guys have "isolated the problem."
Marq - Do you mean what kinds of bike infrastructure or transportation infrastructure overall?
You want bike infrastructure, you, as a biker, should have to pay. That simple. I don't have my finger on the pulse of the cycling community, but I can't imagine those who bike as their primary mode would be too averse to that. Who gives a shit if Amsterdam or Copenhagen doesn't? Those cities also have tax rates that make Oregon's look like a Grover Norquist fantasy. If 6% of Portlanders bike as primary mode, a $50 a year registration fee would yield 1.7 mil in tax a year, not counting expense. Not a huge chunk of change, but every bit helps right?
Not entirely sure about Copenhagen, but Amsterdam is about a third smaller, land wise, than Portland. What works there won't necessarily work here.
As for "pressure(ing) the state to increase the amount it spends on bike-ped projects statewide from its current 1% of the transportation budget," good luck with that. Allocating more of that $$$ might fly in Portland, but it sure as hell won't anywhere else in the state.
Go fuck yourself Blabby.
Prediction: We will never reach 30% of trips by bike. Ever. Carry on!
Blabby, what exactly is your specific issue with the plan?
Anything besides a vague association between bikes and the loss of your mythical blue collar utopia?
Sarah, do you have a link to or know off the top of your head what the city's definition of "multiple facility type" is? I'm asking about NE Mason, which is a Tier 1 Bicyle Boulevard priority but listed as a "Multiple Facility Type" on page 47 (Section 1065). Didn't see what that actually means in the glossary.
It wasn't a "mythical blue collar utopia", it was an actual blue collar reality.
It featured actual debate from across an actual political spectrum. It featured people who actually were born in Oregon, and knew something about it. It featured people who understood a bit about economics and how the world actually works.
It featured people who were actually different, not different because their skinny jeans were different colors, or they choose different "signiture hats" to wear all winter.
My issue with the plan is that it calls for making driving and parking more miserable to appease a special interest group that represents 10% of the population at most, and probably more like 5%.
My broader problem is with groupthink and the politically correct beating down of any actual interesting heterogeneity or discussion in this town.
I mean, most of you are kids who recently moved here. Don't you bore the shit out of each other? You're all exactly the same.
@Blabby: Your straw-man arguments are wonderful. Where did you purchase them? I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Hi Graham, how have you been? I know no one gives a shit about what I say here. But I get pissed and say it anyway.
If they're strawmen, I still see them filling the sidewalks every day.
Sarah, where did you get the figure of $600 million for 1 mile of urban freeway? That sounds like way too much money to me. Also, unless you drive a car along with riding your bikes, you are getting a free ride, so I think you should have to have a bicycle license plate to help pay your share.
@Blabby: I've been well. Thank you for asking. I imagine your great-grandfather writing angry letters to The Oregonian in 1908 angrily denouncing all these transplants moving to his dearly beloved Porltand. The problems we're having now don't compare at all to what happened to Portland in the wake of the Worlds Fair.
@ujfoyt: Bicycle licensing programs have been attempted in other areas. They are a universal failure as as a revenue generating plan; they rarely even cover the costs of running the program. Practicly, they are used to harass cyclists. The best way to pay for the cycling plan are bond measures and property taxes.
http://clkrep.lacity.org/onlinedocs/2008/0…
http://www.seattlepi.com/transportation/34…
I support the Bike Plan, and am confident it will be implemented like the 1996 plan was. The City traffic engineers were at the forefront then and they still are. I gotta say though, I think Blabby is right on the mark. At recent social gathering, a recent New York transplant said to me "I bet you never saw a person with dreadlocks in Portland ten years ago". I wish I had thought to reply "Well yes, we had dreadlocks and microbrew and bikes and strip clubs, but we were sorely lacking in smug transplants from the east coast who think the whole town started three years ago when they happened to move here." My issue with the local bike culture is that it seems to be composed almost exclusively of people who took the bumpersticker mantra of "Think Globally, Act Locally" and twisted it into "Think Globally, Abandon your s*%thole hometown, move somewhere where they actually did act locally 10, 20, 30 or 40 years ago to try and build a better community, and then act like you are smarter and more creative than all the local rubes you are replacing."
"I bet you never saw a person with dreadlocks in Portland ten years ago"
Ha ha ha ha. Crabby how would we even tie our shoes without these folks from the Big City to show us how? I'm glad they brought us indoor plumbing as well.
God. I don't know where I'm eventually going to move to get away from these f**ksticks, but the day is coming. The entire city will consist of people who moved here in the last ten years, patting each other on the back for progressive.
To paraphrase Blabby: "Things were much better in the past, because everyone was diverse and agreed with me on everything. The diversity disappeared as soon as people moved here who aren't the same as me."
Perfect paraphrase, Stu... except it needs more use of the word "actually" to really capture his post.
I think that the bicycle plan is an excellent idea, but as the article states, where will all of this funding come from?
Additionally, I have no problem with people moving here, and do my best to tolerate the fashion choices people make in an effort to be a decent, non-judgemental person. It does seem strange for moving to a particular trendy locale to BE a fashion decision, however... my friend makes the point, and I tend to agree, that you can't base an economy on espresso sales and canvassing work. Moving to a city in a state that already ranks second in the nation for unemployment figures without a job and expecting to find one seems dicey and perhaps unwise, no matter how hip one will feel upon arrival.
Finally, another issue that seems salient to the topic as mentioned by previous commentors is that moving to a city with a prominent environmental movement for solidarity is much different than nurturing such passions in oneself while working to encourage or start this kind of movement to improve life where one begins. Neither is good or bad in itself, but if the goal is change for the better for the entire world, moving to Portland won't change anyone's mind or behavior at home. However, it might be a good incubator for developing good ecological habits to guide one's eventual journey outward with a mission for change and improvement.
Love well and live well, and don't let the bastards grind you down.
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