A Southwest Portland road is re-imagined to be more pedestrian-friendly in the citys Southwest in Motion plan.
A Southwest Portland road is re-imagined to be more pedestrian-friendly in the city's Southwest in Motion plan. portland bureau of transportation (pbot)

With its hilly roads, lack of sidewalks, and dearth of protected bike lanes, Southwest Portland isn’t an easy place to commute in without a car. A new Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) plan adopted Thursday by the Portland City Council aims to help fix that problem.

The Southwest in Motion (SWIM) plan is a collection of projects meant to make walking, biking, and taking public transportation easier in the quadrant. Only 25 percent of Southwest Portland roads have sidewalks, meaning there are about 210 miles there without sidewalks.

“Currently, if you don’t have a car in Southwest Portland, you’re house-bound,” said Katherine Christensen, a Southwest Portland resident, while testifying at Thursday’s council meeting.

SWIM’s list of projects were created with the goal of creating a “realistic active transportation network”—meaning that while not every road in Southwest will get a sidewalk, there will at least be enough pedestrian and bike friendly roads that people can still get around without driving. While PBOT doesn’t currently have funding to achieve all of SWIM’s projects, the council’s adoption of the plan ensures that the projects will be prioritized as funding becomes available.

PBOT_2.png
pbot

The projects detailed in the SWIM plan fall into five categories: sidewalk and crossing infills, protected bike lanes, “safe shoulders” to make walking easier on roads without sidewalks, neighborhood greenways, and a new concept PBOT is experimenting with called a “pedestrian shared street.”

A shared street, PBOT transportation planner Nick Falbo explained at Thursday’s council meeting, is “a street designed to be so calm, and so quiet, that cars are guests.”

A PBOT concept for a pedestrian shared street.
A PBOT concept for a pedestrian shared street. pbot

Many roads in Southwest Portland’s residential pockets already don’t see much car traffic, so lowering speed limits, narrowing the driving lanes, and opening up the walking and biking spaces is an easy solution to encourage more people to walk and bike—and considerably less expensive than adding sidewalks to all those streets.

“These are new ideas,” Falbo said, “to be used in geographically and financially constrained areas.”

SWIM’s projects are intended to help achieve the city’s ambitious goal of making 70 percent of all Portland commute trips car-less by 2035, as shown in the chart below. PBOT is hopeful that a planned new Southwest Corridor MAX line will entice more people to see transit as a viable commute option.

PBOT_3.png
pbot

About a dozen public commenters at Thursday’s meeting, all of them Southwest Portland residents, expressed appreciation for SWIM—but several also said they’d like to see PBOT go even further with its plans for the quadrant. David Stein, a member of PBOT’s bicycle advisory committee, pointed out that the plastic wands PBOT uses to create protected bike lanes are flimsy and easily fall down, meaning they don’t provide adequate protection for cyclists.

“There’s a lot in here that certainly is not perfect,” Stein told the council. “But it provides a good framework and policies… There’s a lot of potential in Southwest, and I just encourage you very much to get this funded.”

All three city commissioners present at Thursday’s meeting voted to adopt SWIM (Commissioners Nick Fish and Jo Ann Hardesty were absent).

“Yes, we are not doing everything that needs to be done,” Commissioner Chloe Eudaly, who oversees PBOT, said before casting her vote. “But we are going to deliver short-term improvements to your neighborhood.”