Again, related to streetcar construction on Grand Avenue, the city has piles of streetcar track stacked along the south side of NE Lloyd Blvd. I ride down Lloyd going west towards downtown often on my way to work, but I hadn’t really noticed what had happened on the other side of the street (except that there were big stacks of track there), as I usually don’t ride back that way.
Basically what happened, since the streetcar track is all sitting in the bike lane and part of the right-hand traffic lane, they just painted off the right hand lane and made it a temporary bike lane (which incidentally is much wider than the actual bike lane), until the end of the pile of track, and then it goes back to the usual bike lane.
Now, while I don’t think painted bike lanes are that great of a solution in general for most cases, it’s nice that at least they did this for consistency, so that cyclists coming up Lloyd (which is uphill in this direction as well) aren’t suddenly thrust into moving traffic, which sometimes moves quite fast on this street. The only suggestion I would have is to maybe have placed some cones or bollards as well as the painted line, as it doesn’t seem terribly clear that cars aren’t supposed to drive there. I don’t know if that’s been a problem or not, but it did seem that the drivers going by while I was riding through stayed in the left lane.
As a side note, it’s interesting that closing this lane to motor vehicle traffic for some distance hasn’t created a traffic nightmare. I think a lot of our roads have a good bit of extra space that could easily be used for other things (cycle tracks!) without really effecting automobile traffic much, if at all. Here’s hoping :)
Anyway, it’s just nice again to see cyclists being taken into account when temporary road changes are made. It seems like they’ve done a good job of that in general on this project. Keep it up, Portland, we appreciate it!
