Three years from now, Division Street is going to look a lot different.

City council approved a $7 million plan this morning to rebuild Division Street from 10th Ave to 39th Ave as a more pedestrian-friendly, sustainable, generally less crappy thoroughfare. About 15,000 cars travel along the stretch every day and Division needs to be repaved anyway, so the city will take the chance next year while it's being repaved to do what Portland does best: lay down the "green streets."

The city has been working for the last year on the plan (download the pdf here) and came up with a final "Division Streetscape and Street Reconstruction Project" which will make cut most of Division's busiest inner-SE stretch down from two lanes of traffic to one lane in each direction.

Right now, Division is four lanes wide, but the outer lanes are parking except during rush hour. The city traffic planners found that to be inefficient: people were not actually parking in the parking lanes very often because they weren't sure about the no parking times or didn't want to risk leaving their car there too long. So under the new plan, the outer lanes will be all-the-time parking lanes and the traffic will narrow to one lane, except at the street's busiest intersections (at 11th, 12th and Seven Corners) where parking will be removed to make two free-flowing traffic lanes in each direction.

The plan also adds four crosswalks and green bike boxes to SE 21st and SE Ladd where they hit Division.

Neighbors testifying before council this morning had mostly positive things to say about the plan, though some worried that narrowing the lane would divert traffic onto neighborhood streets. The project doesn't add bike lanes or much bike infrastructure to Division (except for the two bike boxes and some bike corrals) but that makes sense because bike boulevards Lincoln and Clinton Streets run parallel to Division... and the whole point of bike boulevards is to get bikes onto low-traffic streets so they don't have to elbow for space with 15,000 cars.