Portland Street pilot bike lane

The city has repaved Portland Street and re-striped its wide expanse of pavement to give us a short stretch of bike lanes between Deering Oaks and Preble Street:

(an aside: have you ever noticed the terminating vista of the City Hall clocktower at the end of this street? Too bad the Libra Foundation's huge white elephant parking garage squats in front of it to block most of the view. Also too bad the public market that that garage was supposed to support failed after just a few years in business – probably unrelated to the massive, expensive garage it was hitched to, right?)

At a recent meeting, I heard that these bike lanes are being tested on an interim basis while the city gears up for a more complete reconstruction of Portland Street in the next couple of years. So, if you like what you see here, consider sending a message of thanks to your local city councilor and the city manager.

And also consider asking the city to go even further with traffic-calming on Portland Street. Removing some of the street's excessive pavement now could pay off with thousands of dollars' worth in annual maintenance savings in the years to come:

• Reducing the street width and adding trees at intersections with landscaped curb extensions
• Replacing a handful of parking spaces with stormwater treatment infrastructure (the 'pilot' layout increases on-street parking significantly with angled parking near Preble Street, so some spots could be removed in other locations and still maintain a net gain for automobiles)
• Narrowing the street and widening sidewalks between Brattle Street and High Street, where Portland Street had formerly ballooned to a four-lane roadway

Pavement polluters would pay for more sustainable infrastructure under proposed "stormwater charge"

During a 2-inch rainstorm, the parking lots and big-box rooftops of the "Pine Tree Shopping Center" and Quirk car dealership (pictured at right) dump about 1,500,000 gallons of oil-slicked runoff pollution into Portland's sewers, which proceed to overflow into the headwaters of the Fore River.

In a city that prizes its working waterfront and its locally-caught fish and lobster, this particular form of parking pollution is a big problem. The good news is that the city has committed to a $170 million upgrade of its infrastructure to handle this pollution. Even better: for the first time ever, parking lot owners, who are responsible for a substantial amount of the pollution, might actually foot a fair share of the bill.


Right now, sewers get paid for through our water bills; parking lot owners don't pay anything, even though their asphalt sends hundreds of millions of gallons of gasoline-slicked sewage into Casco Bay each year.

But for over a year now, the city's been holding public hearings on its proposed new "stormwater charge," which is its preferred way of paying for federally-mandated sewer upgrades for Clean Water Act compliance. The city's proposal would ask property-owners to pay fees in proportion to the amount of "impermeable surface" – rooftops and pavement – that they own.

This could be a significant step towards reducing the city's environmentally-destructive subsidies for motorists. Right now, parking lot owners are getting a free pass on the pollution they cause, but with the proposed stormwater charge, parking lot owners would be forced to pay to clean up Casco Bay.

In the short term, the fee will provide more funding for "green infrastructure" projects, such as traffic-calming sidewalk extensions that incorporate stormwater filtration gardens (like the one pictured at left, which was installed on Commercial Street earlier this year). And over the longer term, the new tax on pavement will help encourage more property owners to convert low-value parking lots to more productive, more urban uses – and encourage more motorists to leave the car at home.

The idea's got a lot of momentum behind it, but he city's also hearing a lot of opposition to this idea.  Anyone who wants to weigh in with a voice of support would help.

To learn more:
http://www.portlandmaine.gov/1331/Stormwater-Service-Charge

And to thank a city councilor for supporting this concept:
http://www.portlandmaine.gov/132/City-Council

Traffic engineers *still* want to widen Franklin Street

At left: Gorrill-Palmer Engineers' proposal for an 8-lane Franklin Street, blocking the Bayside Trail crossing between Marginal Way and Somerset Street.

This Wednesday, Oct. 1, will be the second public workshop for the Franklin Street redesign study. It starts at 5:30 p.m. in the main library's Rines Auditorium (on the basement level).

There's some good stuff being planned, but the team needs to be challenged – forcefully – on their proposal for the northernmost section near Marginal Way, pictured at left. 

 

Traffic engineers from Gorrill-Palmer – the same guys who proposed turning Franklin into a full-on freeway ten years ago – seem to have missed the long discussions about how this study's purpose was to make Franklin Street safer and friendlier to foot traffic. 

 

Instead, they've sketched out plans to widen Franklin from 6 lanes to 8 lanes north of Somerset Street. 

 

The proposal would make the intersection of Franklin and Marginal Way one of the most massive intersections in the greater Portland region – almost as big as the junction of Route 1 and Gorham Road at the center of sprawl-choked Scarborough.

The traffic engineers claim that extra lanes are needed to accommodate their forecast of 8% more cars by 2030. In other words, motorists will get more space to accellerate to freeway speeds, and pedestrians will get longer crosswalks and more opportunities to get maimed by motorists.

This section of Franklin would be the first section to be reconstructed (in 2016), so it's important to get it right – or at the very least, not make it any worse than it is today.

If you're coming to Wednesday's workshop, a good question to ask might be why we need 33% more lanes built in 2016 in order to accommodate science-fictional traffic that won't exist for another 15 years (if ever)?

Another good question to ask is whether the traffic engineers would be willing to film their children, or elderly parents, spend a weekday rush hour crossing this street on their own.

10 bike parking spots inside 1 former car parking spot

This is cool: Portland's first on-street bike parking corral, located in front of Crema coffee shop and Rosemont Market on Commercial Street (a location that had suffered for lack of bike racks ever since the building was renovated a few years ago). It's also conveniently close to the end of the Eastern Prom trail.

The city has funds and equipment for one more of these, but has yet to locate a spot for it. Any local businesses interested in trading attracting lots of cyclists in exchange for a single car parking spot should get in touch with Bruce Hyman, the city's bike and pedestrian planner in the city's planning office (874-8719).

After over 16 years, Portland gets a sidewalk to its bus and train station

Back in the late 1990s, Concord Trailways moved its bus terminal out of Bayside to more spacious quarters on the edge of the central city, on Thompson's Point. That gave the bus company lots of room to grow, from a handful of daily roundtrips to Boston to the near-hourly, round-the-clock service we enjoy today. But there was one problem: there were no sidewalks on any of the streets leading to the bus station.

The problem got worse about 10 years ago, when the Amtrak Downeaster started running to the same station. Car-free arrivals from Boston and other points south found themselves stranded at the edge of a huge parking lot and a tangle of hostile freeway ramps.

It didn't feel like arriving in Portland – it felt like arriving in the strip malls of Falmouth, Scarborough, or Freeport.

In truth, though. it's only a 30 minute walk from the Portland Transportation Center to Longfellow Square, in the middle of the city. Back in 2008, the Portland Bike and Pedestrian Advisory Committee designated this area one of the city's top priorities for bike and pedestrian infrastructure improvements – due largely to its significance as a destination for Portland's car-free travelers.

This summer, thanks to a grant from the federal Economic Development Administration, street improvements in the area have finally created a few passable walking and biking routes to the city's busiest transportation hub. I took a bike ride down there this weekend, and here are some shots of the area's newly completed streets.

This new crosswalk across Fore River Parkway connects to Frederic Street, a dead-end for cars that will now serve as a nice bike/ped shortcut to and from Congress Street (there had been an informal goat path through a fence here before, but the new one is accessible to bikes and wheelchairs).

The new Thompson's Point Road now boasts sidewalks. It was also widened, from 2 to 3 lanes, but the center lane will be a "reversible" lane to be used only when events are happening at a still-unbuilt Thompson's Point arena.

Sewall Street (below) also received some new sidewalks, and remains cut off from Thompson's Point for motorized traffic. Sewall is the first built link in a planned and funded "neighborhood byway" connection that will run on quiet neighborhood streets from Thompson's Point to Deering Center, 1.5 miles north of here. 

Part of the new neighborhood byway includes safer crossings of the three busy streets that lie between Thompson's Point and Deering Center – Congress, Brighton, and Woodford. Here's what the corner of Congress and Sewall looked like a few weeks ago:

...and here's the same scene from this past weekend. Sewall Street has been narrowed down and the crosswalks have been improved with ADA-accessible ramps.

Finally, Fore River Parkway has gained a new separated shared-use path that runs from Thompson's Point Road to Congress Street. I understand that the bike lane on Park Avenue, which currently peters out into a freeway on-ramp, will be extended to flow into this new bike path. 

Fore River Parkway still lacks a sidewalk on its western shoulder – building one there will require the roadway to sacrifice a lane for car traffic, so we'll still have one good battle to fight. Still, it's a good start.

Maine DOT goofs up, but publicity, bike/ped activism is making it right

Here's the good news: the Maine DOT is planning routine maintenance of the well-used Casco Bay Bridge sidewalk this summer, in a project starting next week. So kudos to them for keeping important infrastructure, used by hundreds of people every day, in good working condition.

Here's the bad news, though: our highway engineers in Augusta forgot that people actually rely on the sidewalk that they're repairing, and neglected to make any credible detour plans for the project.

As told in greater detail in yesterday's Portland Press Herald story, the state's transportation agency hadn't made any plans to create a temporary walkway as a detour on the main route between Portladn and South Portland for the 3-week period of construction. Instead, the construction plan apparently expected pedestrians, joggers, and wheelchair users to make their way across the bridge on the roadway's bike lanes – in close proximity to cars and trucks going 40 miles-per-hour.

When Portland's Bike and Pedestrian Advisory Committee learned of this plan at our regular monthly meeting earlier this week — just one week before construction began — we immediately reached out to the City of South Portland's bike and pedestrian advocates, the Bicycle Coalition of Maine, and Portland Trails. The next day, the Press Herald story linked above ran on the front page with a dramatic photo — attracting a lot more attention to the problem.

Today, though, we're hearing that the DOT is floating new plans to keep most of the bridge's sidewalk open, with a much shorter sidewalk detour on the "lift span" part of the drawbridge where the actual work is taking place.

The whole episode has been embarrassing for the Maine DOT — and rightfully so. Just last month the agency was just boasting that it had adopted a "complete streets" policy, but this gaffe makes it clear that its old, motorists-first mentality persists in the bureaucracy.

Still, thanks to rapid and coordinated responses from Portland and South Portland advocates, the upcoming bridge project won't be nearly as disruptive or dangerous as it might have been.

Photo at left by John Brooking. 
These signs, as seen on July 17, are meant to notify pedestrians of the proposed bridge closure — but they're located far away from the sidewalk in the roadway's median, and have been overlooked by most of the bridge's pedestrian users. 

The new Martin's Point Bridge — open to (nonmotorized) traffic

As of this evening the new Martin's Point Bridge sidewalk — a wide multi-use path designed to be shared by bikes and pedestrians — is open to non-motorized traffic between Portland and Falmouth. I took a ride out there this afternoon after work and it's pretty nice, even though it's still very much in the middle of a heavy construction site.

Some notes:

• Though it's a nice path to ride on, getting there from either side is still kind of a challenge — you'll need to thread your way through a lot of construction traffic and ride over some sandy, unpaved sections where the sidewalk hasn't been built yet.
• In addition to this path on the east side of the bridge, the finished product will also include a (narrower) sidewalk on the west side plus on-street bike lanes. Like the approaches, though, all that stuff is also under construction.  
• The project is also building out a sidewalk connection from the bridge to the Martin's Point Healthcare campus, and last summer, the town of Falmouth constructed a sidewalk and installed some additional traffic calming along Route 1 between the bridge and Route 88. That means it's now possible for the first time in decades — maybe ever? — to walk on sidewalks from Falmouth's town center to downtown Portland.  
• Whereas the old bridge featured a fairly steep incline where it hit land in Portland, the new one rises gradually along its entire length, which is nice.
• The old bridge had four lanes for cars and an unlit, dingy sidewalk for everyone else. This new bridge is just as wide, but with only two lanes for cars there's much more room for non-motorized transportation — and officials expect maintenance costs to be significantly lower as well. 

Bike lanes and a side path could be built this summer on West Commercial Street

The proposed expansion of the International Marine Terminal's cargo facilities on West Commercial Street (under the Casco Bay Bridge) might bring a big influx of state transportation funds to Portland this summer — and with those funds could come new bike and pedestrian routes along West Commercial Street.

In order to accommodate more activity and a new freight rail line in the area, the state is planning to rebuild sections of West Commercial Street between Veterans Bridge and the Casco Bay Bridge. This is a significant bike route, and there are already city-adopted plans to extend the Veterans Bridge off-street path eastward towards downtown. The International Marine Terminal project might turn those plans into a construction project as soon as this summer.

Right now, Commercial Street is a bumpy road with no sidewalks between Bernie's Clam Shack (near the Western Prom, where an asphalt path leads to Veterans Bridge) and the Star Match building on the eastern end near Beach Street. That asphalt sidewalk near Bernie's was designed to be an off-street shared-use path, and this project could extend that pathway all the way to Harbor View Park, under the Casco Bay Bridge. The rebuilt Commercial Street might also include new on-street bike lanes, plus an improved, traffic-calmed intersection at Beach Street.

Although the project is fast-tracked and could begin construction this summer, the actual plans are still up in the air. Bike/ped advocates are encouraged to weigh in at a public meeting this Wednesday, at 6 p.m. in City Hall's State of Maine room (that's upstairs, in the western wing of the building).

New bike paths, traffic calming in the East End

The city is finally building long-planned access improvements from the East End to Tukey's Bridge (in order to fix some of the problems I blogged about six years ago). I was walking in the area this afternoon and, even under construction, they're already doing a great job of slowing down traffic that comes into town off of the freeway:

The project is tightening up the wide intersection of the Eastern Prom Road with Washington Avenue (at left) and adding a landscaped median where pedestrians can wait. Cars are already driving through the area much more slowly than they used to.

This view, looking north on Washington towards the bridge, shows how much wider the new bike/ped path (the dirt area) will be compared with the current sidewalk (still visible in the foreground), and how much shorter the crossing distance is on the new crossing of Washington:

 The path shown above extends all the way to the Tukey's Bridge ramp, where another new bike path will connect down the hill to the left to join up with Anderson Street and the Bayside Trail.

Kudos to the city's bike/ped committee, PACTS, and the City of Portland for making this happen!

Tonight: final public meeting for Libbytown freeway ramp removals

Tonight at the Clarion Hotel near the Portland Transportation Center (on bus line 5) from 6:30 to 8:30 pm will be the final public meeting of the "Libbytown Circulation Study," which I'd written about previously here.

This will be the final meeting before the consultants present their recommendations to the City Council for endorsement. Word has it that they'll propose removing most of the connecting on- and off-ramps to Park and Congress Streets (shown in red below), except for the northbound on-ramp from Park Ave. This would open up acres of land for transit-oriented redevelopment.

Other positive elements of the plan would add sidewalks on both sides of Fore River Parkway to the bus station, shrinking the intersection of Fore River Pkwy. and Congress Street, new traffic calming, improved sidewalks, and landscaping elements on Congress and Park, and new, high-comfort bikeways that would connect the bus and train station to Deering Oaks Park and the Bayside Trail.

The public will have additional opportunities to weigh in on the plan when it goes to City Hall, but if you've got a free evening, consider coming down to Libbytown tonight to see what's in the works and express your support for a significant pruning of freeway infrastructure.

Coming Soon: A Connected Somerset Street

View Larger Map

This dead-end section of Somerset Street, next to the Portland Flea for All, is one of many minor nuisances to walking and cycling in the growing Bayside neighborhood. This particular one is located at the western end of the new Bayside Trail, and is one of the reasons that particular pathway is currently so little-used. The street seems to have been disconnected as part of the urban-renewal-era effort to turn Preble and Elm Streets into high-speed, one-way auto expressways.

Thankfully, that's about to change. The city has just put out a request for bids to re-connect Somerset Street across Preble and Elm, and to study possible routes to extend Somerset Street as a bike and pedestrian route all the way to Forest Avenue and Deering Oaks Park. Part of the study component of this project is expected to look into the possibility of making Preble and Elm back into two-way streets, and opening up new redevelopment opportunities on adjacent blocks — possibly something like this.

New Veterans' Memorial Bridge Opening Tomorrow

The new Veterans Bridge (first speculated about here back in 2008, then discussed again back in 2010, when a design and construction team was first selected) is finally opening tomorrow, on June 28th, 2012, with a fantastic new bicycle and pedestrian pathway that extends all the way from the West End to South Portland's Ligonia neighborhood.

You have a few more hours to enjoy the new bridge without any traffic. It will be open to pedestrians and bicyclists only until the end of a grand opening ceremony, which runs until 11:30 am tomorrow. After that, cars will roam free on the main lanes, but bikes and pedestrians will still be able to enjoy a nice wide path on the southern edge of the bridge all to themselves.

Corey of Portland Maine Daily Photo took some nice shots of the new, empty bridge late last week; you can take a look here.

Calming Outer Congress

Outer Congress Street, between Stevens Avenue and the Stroudwater neighborhood, is a choke point in the city's bicycle and pedestrian network. Aside from long detours through Westbrook or South Portland, it's the only non-freeway connection between Portland and the Jetport area, a district with thousands of jobs and some of the region's biggest employers. It's also a gateway to one of the city's most scenic parks, the Fore River Sanctuary.

Unfortunately, it's been designed to be a dangerous speedway for cars. Large sections of the street don't even have a sidewalk, leaving bus riders to wait in the ditch. The natural surroundings give drivers the impression that they're in the countryside, not in a city, so that many of them hit speeds of 40 to 50 miles an hour along this relatively short stretch:

Image: via Bing Maps

When I first moved here in 2006, Stroudwater neighborhood residents had prevailed on the city to do a traffic study of outer Congress Street. Unfortunately, the hired engineers took it for granted that moving cars would continue to be the most important role for this public space. They also predicted, wrongly, that traffic would increase considerably. The study recommended only minor changes, and  the public that paid for it had little appetite to implement its recommendations.

This year, the Maine DOT is repaving the section of Congress from roughly Stevens Avenue to Johnson Road near UNUM. This presents an opportunity to make some more meaningful improvements, and city staff have revisited the old study to examine where it went wrong, and how its recommendations might be revised to make more meaningful changes for everyone's safety.

It's a good start. But to make more permanent changes, like landscaped medians designed to slow down traffic and give pedestrians a safer place to cross the road, the city will need to spend some of its own money.  The capital budget under discussion includes $175,000 line-item to install more traffic calming, better sidewalks and crosswalks, along outer Congress Street. Please write to your city councilors to ask them to support this expenditure (and if you do, please leave a comment with their response —we're trying to keep track of who's on board with this).

Here's an outline of some of the changes being proposed for the short term. You can take a look at maps at the city's website.

• Large sections of Congress Street will be constricted to one inbound lane with a left turn lane and two outbound lanes. This basically formalizes the status quo, where the inbound left lane is usually filled with cars waiting to turn left anyhow...
• ... but it also opens up the opportunity to create new median islands and crosswalks with pedestrian refuges, especially at intersections like Westbrook Street and Frost Street, or close sidewalk gaps, like the one between Stroudwater and Frost Street. It's also bound to help calm down inbound traffic.
• Near the railroad tracks (from near Frost Street to the Italian Heritage Center driveway), the road will narrow to one lane in each direction, with space in the middle for future left-turn lanes and/or landscaped median refuges. Pending the city's budget, this area could be the future location for a nice crosswalk to connect the Portland Trails network across Congress Street; the extra space could also be put to use to widen the sidewalks or provide better bus stops. 
• "Bikes May Use Full Lane — Change Lanes to Pass" signs (pictured) would be installed at several locations between Johnson Road and Stevens Avenue, giving motorists notice that they should expect bikes in the roadway and giving cyclists an opportunity to question the literacy of the sad, road-ragey motorists who honk at them.
• Inbound cyclists would also gain a climbing bike lane between the Fore River Bridge and Westland. This section has a blind curve, where slow-moving cyclists climbing uphill in the right lane are out of sight of speeding motorists coming up from behind. Even experienced cyclists doing everything right are one texting-and-driving teenager away from a disaster (it's a little better on the other side of the street, heading out of town, and there won't be new bike lanes on that side of the road). Like a truck climbing lane, this bike lane will give slower vehicles a little extra room; hopefully it will be combined with more permanent traffic calming so that the cars move a little slower as well.

Exit 7 Connection Finally Coming (Albeit Overpriced and Late)

After a long, drawn-out process of "analysis" (read: inflating costs far beyond necessary) the Maine DOT is finally preparing to install a basic sidewalk on Franklin Street under Exit 7 to connect the Back Cove Trail to Marginal Way, after failing to do so last summer when construction crews were rebuilding the intersection anyhow.

It's going to cost taxpayers $200,000. Now, I'm pretty sure a single Eagle Scout could have done it for less, but at least it's getting done.

If you have any interest, Augusta's bureaucrats are hosting a public meeting about the project tomorrow at City Hall:

Public Meeting to Discuss Much Anticipated Trail Connector

City and state officials invite public to view plans for Bayside-Back Cove connection

Tomorrow, the City of Portland, Maine Department of Transportation and Portland Area Comprehensive Transportation System (PACTS) will host a public meeting to discuss plans to construct a trail connector from the Franklin Street-Marginal Way intersection to the Back Cove Trail. The connector will help fully realize the vision for the Bayside Trail as a key link connecting the city's most used trails and parks: the Back Cove Trail, the Eastern Promenade and Eastern Prom Trail, East End Beach, and Deering Oaks. The connector will also provide easy and safe access for cyclists and pedestrians looking to travel from Portland’s downtown to communities off-peninsula.

“Linking these popular trails with a safe and accessible connector is going to have a tremendously positive impact both on the Bayside neighborhood but also for those who commute to the downtown by bike or foot,” stated Director of Public Services Michael Bobinsky. “The success of this project is directly related to the willingness of all parties, from MDOT to the city and PACTS to the public, to collaborate and work towards a common goal – make the city accessible to all modes of transportation.”

The public is encouraged to attend the meeting to learn firsthand of the preliminary plans for the proposed ten foot wide, asphalt and stone dust bike/pedestrian trail, ask questions, and provide feedback to the design. The $195,000 trail connector, funded by the Maine Department of Transportation with a 20% local match provided by the City of Portland, is expected to be constructed this fall. Plans for the trail connector will also be available for review at Portland Public Services, 55 Portland Street.

When: Wednesday, August 3, 2011, 6:00 PM

Where: Merrill Auditorium Rehearsal Hall, Myrtle Street, Portland

Introducing the Hubway

Here's one more reason to leave your car behind on trips to Boston: the city is getting ready to launch its Hubway bike-sharing system this summer, with 600 bikes available for cheap hourly rates all across the city.

Both North and South Stations (the arrival points for the Downeaster and Concord Coach, respectively) will have on-site stations where travellers can pick up a bike. You'll need to buy a membership, and , but if you return your bike to another station within 30 minutes, the ride is free.

Before you go, download the Spotcycle app to find stations and available bikes with your phone.

Also: a group of folks is looking into doing something similar, on a smaller scale, here in the city of Portland.

Important vote Monday to determine the fate of "Fee In Lieu of Parking"

Next Monday's City Council meeting - at 7 pm on the 21st, in the Council chambers on the 2nd floor of City Hall - will decide the outcome of the Peninsula Transit Study's proposed "Fee In Lieu of Parking" concept.

Generally speaking, this ordinance would give developers of new buildings on the Portland peninsula an alternative to opt out of the city's parking requirements by paying into a new "Sustainable Transportation Fund" instead. This fee would be $10,000 per space. So, for instance, a new office building that would otherwise require 20 off-street parking spaces could instead pay $200,000 into the Sustainable Transportation Fund; or, alternatively, build only 10 parking spaces and pay $100,000 into the Fund. The incentive to do so comes from the fact that $10,000 per space is substantially less than the amount of money it would take to build a parking garage, and in many cases, it will also be more valuable for a developer to use their real estate for purposes other than parking.

The net result of this should be that Portland will reduce the costs of development while also diverting private developers' investments away from car parking, and towards sustainable transportation. Or, even more simply: fewer parking lots, more jobs and housing, better transit, and safer streets.

The net result of this should be that Portland will reduce the costs of development while also diverting private developers' investments away from car parking, and towards sustainable transportation. Or, even more simply: fewer parking lots, and more buildings, better transit, and safer streets. These funds could be used for sidewalks, transit facilities, trails - all the good stuff we want more of. The ordinance currently states that the funds could also be used for shared parking garages, and that's something we might want to press the Council to amend. But it's not a dealbreaker - the use of the Fund will be determined annually in public hearings, and as long as we continue to hold elected officials accountable, we can make sure that the money is spent wisely on sustainable transportation.

To give you a rough idea of how powerful this might be: the City has proposed a new 400-car garage for the empty lots along Somerset Street in Bayside, which could cost well over $8 million. But suppose a developer comes along who wants to build on the empty lots down there without paying that much for parking, and having most employees come in on on the new trail or by transit instead.

Instead of giving over an entire city block to a huge garage, they might choose to build a much smaller 100-car garage on a smaller footprint for about $2 million, build more office space where the parking would have gone, and then pay $3 million (that's 300 times $10,000) into the Sustainable Transportation Fund in lieu of parking.

$3 million is a lot of money. It would be enough to buy 4 new buses for METRO and potentially establish a new bus route to deliver employees into Bayside, for instance. Or to build (with matching funds from the state and federal governments) a substantial part of the new Franklin Street. Or pay for a year's worth of commuter rail services between Portland, Brunswick, and Biddeford. It's serious money for the kinds of projects we'd like to see happen here.

So, at the end of the day, this hypothetical Bayside situation would yield:

• more land in Bayside dedicated to functional living and workspace, instead of parking;
• 300 fewer cars coming into the peninsula every day;
• $3 million for safer streets and/or new transit infrastructure;
• 300 more transit riders/walkers/cyclists;
• the developer saves $3 million by building a smaller garage and has more space to rent out as well;
• lower rents for the developer's tenants - i.e., Portland businesses and households.

We should get a big turnout on Monday night from the city's bike/ped community, from transit supporters, from Portland Trails, from environmentalists, business people, affordable housing activists - EVERYONE - to show the City Council that their voters support this idea. I'd like to recruit at least ten people from the Bike/Ped Committee alone. The good news is that this vote is near the beginning of the evening's agenda, which means that it won't be a late night - we might even be out of there by 8 PM. And maybe celebrate with a frosty pint afterwards.

Please comment below if you think you can be there, so I can have a rough idea of turnout. If you can't be there, please consider writing to our Councilors to let them know you support the idea. Here's their contact information.

You can read the Council's evening agenda and its associated backup material here. The proposed Fee in Lieu ordinance packet begins on page 70 of that PDF.

Thanks, everyone!

This, Please

This is the kind of infrastructure we could use more of, instead of wasting millions on unnecessary highway widenings. Washed-up highway builders, take note: this is what talented engineers do these days:

Nominate Portland as a host city for this experiment here. We especially need support from Joe Gray, the city manager, and the members of the City Council.

You can read more about Google's high-speed broadband project here.

TIGER grant announcements this week

The stimulus bill passed last year included a $1.5 billion line-item for a merit-based grants program known as TIGER (Transportation Investments Generating Economic Recovery). This money has been held separate from traditional federal spending programs in order to fund projects that would have a particularly strong impact on economic development and community vitality, by criteria to be determined by transportation secretary Ray Lahood. This week, reports Streetsblog, those grants - the last major infrastructure funding announcement from the stimulus bill - will be announced.

First, rein in your expectations. $1.5 billion divided among 50 states evenly would net $30 for Maine. That's not exactly chump change, but there's not much our spendthrift transportation bureaucracy can do with that kind of sum - $30 million wouldn't even pay for the Maine Turnpike Authority's proposed new tollbooth in York. More likely, the $1.5 billion would be divvied up in a way that more closely matches states' populations, which means that Maine will get even less.

It might be different if Maine had proposed a radical, game-changing transportation plan for funding. It didn't. The state's TIGER grant applications read like a series of hail-Mary passes for projects with little to no real economic justification. They include:

• The "Caribou Connector," a 4.3 mile road through potato fields designed to bypass "congestion" in a farming community of 8,000 souls;
• The Eastport Gateway Rail project, a crutch for the moribund Port of Eastport near the Canadian border;
• The Northern Tier Rail Preservation Project, an effort to save an east-to-west rail line through the North Woods that was recently abandoned by its for-profit owners due to lack of traffic;
• The Mountain Division Rail Project, requesting $28.5 million to rebuild a rail line to sleepy foothill towns like Baldwin, Brownfield, and Fryeburg.
  

Pictured above: the Mountain Division Line, a $30 million railroad between Portland and Nowhere.

There are good reasons why no one wants to pay for these projects: all of them demand tens of millions of dollars for parts of the state where there are very few people and even less economic activity. I grew up in Steep Falls, right next to the Mountain Division line; if there were a train there, I'd ride it on a monthly basis. But I am one of perhaps 30 people in the entire state who would do so. Why is the Maine DOT even talking about building a train line to Steep Falls before we invest in rails to actual cities like Lewiston or Bangor? Why is this a higher priority than improving travel speeds and reliability on the Downeaster line between Portland and Boston?

Rounding out the list of Maine's TIGER applications are two projects that do a slightly better job of passing the sniff-test: a plan to revitalize three of Maine's ports with various capital projects, and a plan to rebuild the bridge between downtown Portsmouth, NH and Kittery, ME. Unfortunately, the former is tainted by its inclusion of a cruise ship "mega-berth" of questionable provenance, and the latter ought to have been paid for under the Maine DOT's regular maintenance schedule - it seems like a long-shot that Secretary Lahood will want to foot the bill for Augusta's negligence.

In total, Lahood has received $57 billion in requests. That means that 93% of funding hopefuls will go home empty-handed this week. To be sure, other states are also proposing potato-field bypasses and backwoods railways.

But other states are also proposing meaningful projects that will serve millions of people - and Maine missed that opportunity.

Veterans' Bridge Replacement Details

Here are some detailed plans of the new Veteran's Bridge, following up on my post from last week. I'll post more detailed thoughts later, but here's my quick take.

Things to like:

• Valley Street near Barber Foods will get smaller, with only five turn lanes, as opposed to six. The extra space will go towards a wider, safer sidewalk on the west side of the street;
• The Commercial St. crosswalk at Valley Street will get a new median to provide a refuge for crossing pedestrians;
• Sidewalks on both sides of the new bridge over the railroad tracks, between Valley Street and the waterfront.

Things we should work on:

• No sidewalk or crosswalk connection between the Fore River waterfront trail (which runs north from the bridge, towards Mercy Hospital) and the new bridge sidewalk (which is on the southern, opposite side of the bridge).
• Likewise, no crosswalk between Barber Foods and the opposite side of Commercial Street. With so many pedestrians headed to work at Barber and other workplaces on St. John Street, this will be a probable jaywalking problem area unless a safe crossing gets built.
  
• Still no word on where the sidewalk will go on the other (South Portland) side of the bridge. Another sidewalk to nowhere?

For the curious, a binder with engineering documents from the proposal is available at PACTS offices on the 4th floor of the AAA building on Marginal Way and Preble Street.

The New Veterans Bridge

A design/build team of Reed and Reed construction, a local Maine company, and T.Y. Lin International, a global civil engineering firm, has been tentatively selected to replace the Veterans Memorial Bridge between the West End of Portland and the Maine Mall area of South Portland.

The details are still scanty, but the new bridge is almost certain to be a huge improvement for bike riders and pedestrians who would like to make the three-mile trip between the Mall area and downtown Portland. It will create a pleasant and safe new crossing point between the two cities. But the new bridge, in a new alignment, also has the potential to dramatically simplify and calm traffic at the southwestern gateway to the Portland peninsula.

Here's what the area looks like now:


Those green dotted lines are the existing sidewalks in the area, and white dotted lines indicate crosswalks. There's a sidewalk on the bridge, but it dead-ends on a freeway offramp on the South Portland side. There's also the Fore River waterfront trail, which is little-used right now - its northern end leads to a freeway off-ramp and its southern end leads into the nightmarish intersection of the bridge with Valley and Commercial Streets.

This junction is a half-acre field of pavement, so vast that it's hard to see the other side. There are a full twenty lanes coming into and out of it, and it's a huge source of confusion for everyone who gets sucked into it. The truck in this Google Street View provides a good, unintentional commentary on how safe this place is:


View Larger Map

Fortunately, the word from reliable sources indicates that the new bridge design from T.Y. Lin would dramatically simplify and shrink this intersection by bypassing it entirely. Again, details are scanty, but here's a rough sketch of their proposal:


Instead of replacing the bridge in its current location, which leads into the Tombstone junction clusterfuck, T. Y. Lin is proposing to lead the new bridge into a new T-junction with Fore River Parkway, near the new Mercy Hospital campus. A new, 12' wide bicycle and pedestrian trail on the bridge would link to existing sidewalks and a little-used dead-end spur of the Fore River Trail south of Mercy Hospital. The word is that the bridge itself will also include bumped-out viewing platforms along its length, which would commemorate veterans, and that its length would be illuminated with human-scaled streetlamps (as opposed to freeway floodlights).

The realignment will save a lot of money, since the new bridge would be slightly shorter and allow the builders to work while the old bridge remains in service. But once the new bridge is open, there will also be an opportunity to reduce lanes and calm traffic at the junction of Commercial and Valley Streets, which will go from an awkward four-way intersection to a three-way T-junction. The five lanes leading to and from the old bridge will disappear, and turn into a park. But three additional turn lanes leading from Valley, Commercial, and Fore River Parkway would also become obsolete, making room for median pedestrian refuges, or larger sidewalks.

One of those lanes - the long, right-turn slip lane from Fore River Parkway to the old bridge - could be retrofitted as a new sidewalk on the south side of the railroad overpass. This conversion would significantly reduce the city's long-term maintenance costs on this smaller bridge, and create continuous sidewalks on both sides of the Fore River Parkway between Valley Street and the new Mercy Hospital campus.

More detailed bridge designs should be available soon, and some elements are still open to tweaking. A public hearing on the proposed design will probably happen in February or early March, so that final designs can be completed for construction in the spring. Stay tuned.