Bike Lanes in Portland

I've been busy working on a few projects so posting continues to be light. However I thought I might share a few images of the newest bike improvements going up in the bike heaven of Portland that I saw on my trip home this past week. I don't usually post much about transit and bikes here on this blog, as I prefer this to be a more philosophical blog about architecture, but I found these of interest.


A lot of folks are familiar now with Portlands "Bike Box" outlined to protect bikers in the street as can be seen here.


An interesting little element here is the tucking of a bike lane BEHIND a stop for the new street car lines. As someone who commutes by bike in Arlington, I'd love to see the bus stops do something like this, rather than the buses pulling over INTO the bike lane and forcing me to A. stop, or B. dart out into traffic.


This sort of ingenuity is great.



What is great however is that Portland has just in the past few weeks established a new "Cycle Track."


The Cycle track is simply a inversion of the standard bike lane in the street to a separated bike lane between the sidewalk and the parking lane of the street.


Notice that there is a little 2 foot space there between the parking and the bike lane to allow for a door to open.



Here we see how this helps to deal with the big trucks that invariably block a standard bike lane. Here you can see there's still room to get by!

All of this was done in the past few weeks with just some striping changes. No new concrete or asphalt was laid here. Its great that PDX has taken a little initiative where others haven't and tried something that works in Europe just fine. Wouldn't it be great if DC and Arlington would do the same?