Cutting corners just business as usual
Portland Bureau of Transportation deems pilot project ready to be put in stone
The temporary paint and posts guiding traffic at Northwest 25th and Westover streets the past few years have worked so well that the Portland Bureau of Transportation has decided to replace them with permanent concrete curbs.
Northwest neighborhood activists, on the other hand, take the repeated leveling of plastic posts as evidence that the turning radius is too tight.
“The temporary installation’s traffic posts have been repeatedly driven over and knocked out, and the stop lines are confusing,” said Steve Pinger, co-chair of the Northwest District Association Planning Committee.
“The proposed permanent layout seems problematic and potentially confusing, and why set up another situation where the curbs end up getting jumped by delivery vans, school buses and anything with a trailer?”
Pinger called this a redux of the Northwest 24th Avenue “slow streets” barriers that were damaged and moved so often that PBOT eventually removed them.
Project manager Ashley Lopez resisted the criticism for a while, advising Pinger that “the project has not received any indication that the paint and post curb extensions have created an unacceptable constraint for larger vehicle turning movements at this intersection.”
Senior PBOT Planner Zef Wagner, however, admitted there were issues that necessitated later design adjustments.
Tweaking the configuration does not satisfy Roger Vrilakas, a longtime committee member who lives half a block from what he calls a “relatively low-speed and accident-free intersection.”
“The work solved no problem, as none existed,” Vrilakas said.
“PBOT intends to make a temporary mistake permanent at a cost of $600,000, which is 1.56 percent of PBOT’s claimed budget deficit … a perfect example of what has gone wrong with our city: bureaus operating without oversight, without clearly defining problems or measuring results.”
Wagner defended the cost as “not unusual” for such a project, which includes ADA ramps at each corner.
