Documenting Efforts on NE 12th Avenue: 4 to 3-lane Conversion

I got an email from another colleague regarding the experience converting a 4-lane to 3-lane conversion on NE 12th Avenue. I could spend a lot of time to describe it or I could summarize blog posts that BikePortland.org had on the subject in chronological order with better reporting than I could accomplish at home in the evenings after work.

Pushback on the Plans - are signals enough? - April 28th: This was the time I got involved. There was some earlier work on the concepts, but I hadn't done a whole lot of new information.

Implementation Notice - June 2nd: PBOT implemented the signal changes with some striping modifications before the school year ended.

Moving Forward with Concerns - June 16th: A second meeting was held to discuss initial results.

Consensus with the Stakeholders! - September 29 : We studied the after when school was back in session to do a reasonable comparison.

Implementation pictorial: The completed project, we still have a few things to modify and we committed to evaluate the after before the end of the year. We haven't had any complaints that we were not able to address.

Transportation Research Board Paper Acceptance

Sirisha Kothuri, one of the City of Portland's interns over the summer wrote up a paper describing our work to use existing signal controllers to measure delay at traffic signalized intersections. While we were at it we figured out we could collect bicycle counts as well at select locations. Well, I am proud to announce that the paper: "Preliminary Development of Methods to Automatically Gather Bicycle Counts and Pedestrian Delay at Signalized Intersections" was accepted for the 2012 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting. The authors include Sirisha Kothuri, Titus Reyonlds, Christopher Monsere, and Peter Koonce.

I am sure it will be posted at some point and I will update the post when I find it.

Roads Going High Tech... and Bicycle Lanes Too

Today's blog from the Secretary of Transportation describes roads going high tech. At yesterdays, TransPort meeting (the Intelligent Transportation Systems Subcomittee of Metro's TPAC) we learned about how the Oregon DOT is going to implement some queue warning signs and additional technology to highlight where highway traffic is stopped and to reduce the speed limit accordingly. It's an exciting development for improving safety and improving our highways (specifically Highway 217 and ) as we seek to do more with our existing infrastructure. This specifically should reduce the potential of wasting capacity that can be restored if motorists are aware of the change. One can debate the extent of the improvements, but putting information in the hands of engineers can yield societal benefits. 

Not to be outdone, we're working to pull together information on bike lanes in a similar fashion. The link below shares where the map is and the progress on where we're counting and monitoring use of the system.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=201784094409028558690.0004a3e54739207228bb4

UPDATED: I recieved a comment about how we're detecting bikes and that's found here: http://koonceportland.blogspot.com/2011/09/automated-bicycle-counting.html

Bicycle Counting Station

Adjacent to City Hall on H.C. Andersens Boulevard is the bicycle counting station that identifies the number of cyclists that have used the cycletrack today and the number that have used it this year. The numbers speak for themselves. I know what it would take to create one of these things and it is very similar to what we've done with the parking garages downtown.


The problem is that I haven't found an adequate place to put one. Many of our facilities could be subject to vandalism (Springwater corridor) and there is always the problem of getting power to the device.

In the time that we were there, the cyclist count went from 6,399 to 6,403 and that was only 39 seconds. More coverage about this can be found at this posting on the Copenhagenize blog.