Portland Bike/Ped Advisory Committee meets tonight

The city's bike and pedestrian advisory committee meets on the second Monday of each month at 5:30 p.m. in City Hall room 209 (that's upstairs, just to your left as you get to the top of the grand staircase at the front entrance).

I'm being taken out of town on a business trip, so tonight's meeting will be chaired by Jen Claster. Among the topics of discussion this month:

• Implementing the city's new "complete streets" policy
• How to get better, sheltered bike racks at the Portland Transportation Center
• The Libbytown study (you can find more background material, including concept sketches, on the city's website).

Another choice for Congress Square

As many readers of this blog undoubtedly already know, the task of improving the mediocre public space at Congress Square has had the attention of a city-appointed advisory committee for some time now, and the new owners of the Eastland Park Hotel have pitched a proposal to buy most of the park's real estate from the city and turn it into a ballroom for conventions and events.


Unfortunately, the Eastland Hotel's proposal has galvanized the debate. On the one hand are out-of-town hedge fund managers who want to convert public space to private use. On the other hand are suburbanite activists who are treating this half-acre of downtown Portland like it's Yosemite Valley. The goal of creating a higher-quality public space that benefits the entire neighborhood has been mostly lost in the shuffle.

So thanks to Clifford Tremblay, an architect who recently moved to Portland, for trying to change the conversation. Clifford pitched these ideas for Congress Square at a Portland Society of Architects "Drink 'n Crit" earlier this winter (I was on the design jury while he presented this concept and I'll try to paraphrase his pitch here).

Courtesy of Clifford Tremblay

Clifford's proposal consists of two fundamental elements: activating the center of Congress Square by inviting through-traffic, and activating the edges of Congress Square with new uses and friendlier edges.

As for the first challenge — getting more people into the center of Congress Square Park —  Clifford proposes a new diagonal orientation for the park, to encourage cut-through foot traffic from Congress to High Street (see site plan above). The center of the park would become a secondary pedestrian-oriented street, defined by a row of trees and a water feature. Clifford makes the point, echoing a number of other architects and members of the citizens' advisory committee, that the current park's sunken design, with several steps leading down into the park from Congress and High, should be eliminated. Clifford would level the park with Congress Street, and relocate a more modest set of stairs leading up to the park to the western edge of the site.

Courtesy of Clifford Tremblay

The second crucial aspect of Clifford's proposal — and again, it's an idea that's been echoed by several architects, business owners, and neighborhood activists — is that the edges of Congress Square need to be more porous in order to invite more public use and public ownership. The sketch above shows a view of Clifford's proposal from Congress Street, with the Eastland hotel in the background. Note the active sidewalk dining on the eastern side of the park (this building, the former "The Kitchen" restaurant, is supposedly under contract to become a new haute-cuisine restaurant). The northern corner of the park, currently a no-man's land of bleak shrubs, is here transformed into a more inviting — yet still relatively secluded and quiet — spot for tables and a performance stage.

At the rear of the site, Clifford has optimistically suggested new windows and awnings to the Eastland Park Hotel's facade (currently a blank wall painted with a mural). Last of all, note the previously-mentioned lack of stairs between the sidewalk and the park. Sure, it's just a Sketchup drawing, but it looks a lot more inviting, doesn't it?

The primary strength of the ballroom proposal from the Eastland is that it provides an economic development boost to this part of the city. Still, what they're pitching isn't nearly good enough to overcome the opposition's strident concerns over the loss of open space. I don't particularly agree with those concerns, but from a purely pragmatic perspective, the owners of the Eastland need to do a whole lot better in terms of their own designs (a preliminary and pathetic example of which is pictured at left) if they really want to convince the public to surrender the less-than-perfect status quo.

This is valuable real estate in the heart of the Arts District. What if the City built — and collected rent on — a row of small artists's studios built to screen the Eastland Hotel's blank walls? What if the City leased park space to the new restaurant on the Congress Street side? These new uses could generate new rental revenue to support park renovations, while adding to the park's vibrancy as a public space, and improving property values in the surrounding neighborhoods. The Eastland Hotel's current proposal frankly can't compete with these possibilities.
 
This is still public space, and Portlanders absolutely should demand a higher standard of design. Thanks to Clifford Tremblay for changing the conversation in the right direction.


 

Bayside update

The Federated Companies' proposal for the old scrap yard in Bayside continues to be refined. They're currently seeking a zoning amendment that would allow their project to proceed, and they've been tempting planners with some of these tantalizing sketches (from the most recent Planning Board workshop, held this afternoon):

The image above takes some liberties; the green space depicted to the left is actually a paved parking lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Below: a view of a proposed new plaza along the Bayside Trail, looking from the rear of Planet Dog store southwards towards downtown. The building on the right is a large parking garage with a large first-floor retail space, on the left is a residential apartment tower with more ground-floor retail.

Here are a few of the hoops they'll still need to jump through. Approval for the project is still months away, at least:

1. Planning Board approval for zoning amendments (hopefully in a public hearing at the next Planning Board meeting, mid-March)
2. City Council approval of zoning amendments (end of March/early April)
3. Agreements with the City of Portland regarding the redesign and reconstruction of Somerset Street and title agreements for the Bayside Trail encroachment (unknown timeline)
4. Planning board workshops for subdivision and site plan
5. Planning board public hearing and approval of subdivision and site plan
6. Execution of Purchase and Sale agreement, transferring land ownership from City of Portland to Federated Companies
7. Financing and building permits

Reviewing the city's planning memos, I'm encouraged to see that city staff share the concerns that the developers might be building too large of a parking garage.

The proposed Phase 1 would set aside 221 parking spaces for a 196-unit apartment building (plus 191 spaces for retail uses, plus 200 spaces for city-mandated 'public' parking, plus 68 spaces for existing businesses like Trader Joes and Whole Foods). This is far in excess of the other successful market-rate apartment and condo developments currently being built (the Bay House and the proposed West End Place, both of which only have 0.8 spaces per apartment).

The last project to propose parking at a 1-to-1 ratio, the Newbury Street Lofts, proved to be an aesthetic disaster and financially unworkable. Buyers and renters are generally unwilling to pay the rents necessary to finance this level of parking in Portland, a city where substantial market demand is coming from households looking to get rid of their cars in one of the only New England cities where it's possible to do so. I'd hate to see a similar fate befall this project due to unreasonable parking expenses.

That said, my concerns are somewhat allayed by the possibility of reducing the parking planned for Phase II, when two more apartment buildings are planned. It still strikes me as a bad financial decision to build dubious infrastructure up front, but ultimately it's up to Federated to assess those risks and deal with their consequences. 

The other sticking point is that Federated is proposing to encroach on the right of way of the Bayside Trail for a short stretch east of Chestnut Street, while also adding to the public right of way with wider sidewalks on Somerset Street on the other side. While this is of some concern to everyone, it seems like the city is ready to demand strong urban design and architecture along the trail side to compensate, and I think it'll be worth it.

I also hold out hope that the developers might strike a deal with the owner of the abutting Planet Fitness parking lot — converting just a few of the trail-abutting parking spaces to compact or parallel parking could restore the Bayside Trail to comfortable width in the pinch-point. But since the owner of the parking lot is Peter Quesada, the same embittered crank who refuses to remove the fence between the trail and Trader Joe's, we probably shouldn't hope for much.

Freeway deconstruction: now in progress

To anyone who doubts whether Portland will ever be rid of Interstate 295 through downtown and along our Back Cove waterfront: we've already started to dismantle freeway infrastructure from the 1950s. And so far, drivers have hardly noticed the difference.

In the 1950s, before Interstate 295 existed, the original Veterans Memorial Bridge was built with a freeway-like on- and off-ramps on either side of the Fore River to carry high-speed Route 1 traffic. Here's a road map of the area from 1957, when the Route 1 expressway was brand-new:

Here's a view of the grade-separated off-ramp on the South Portland approach that existed until early last year:

And here's what it looks like now. Fewer lanes, a cheap stop-sign controlled intersection, and a nice wide new path for bikes and pedestrians:

Has South Portland become choked with traffic since losing one of its oldest freeway spurs? No, it hasn't been.

The biggest impact to losing a freeway spur has been that thousands of residents of South Portland's neighborhoods now have safe and convenient access to the West End of Portland by foot or by bike.

And this is only the beginning.

The loyal opposition

Today's Press Herald has a story from my colleague Tom Bell about Westbrook resident Brian Peterson, who is very worked up about the city's efforts to update its unsustainably expensive, 1970s-era highway infrastructure for the 21st century. 

Peterson is grumpy about recent efforts to convert State and High Streets back into regular 2-way city streets, as they were before the mid-1970s.

I certainly don't agree with much of what Peterson says. But I think it's an excellent article that, in spite of its subject, ends up strongly supporting safer, smaller streets.

Because outside of Peterson's, all of the quotes — and all of the fact-based evidence presented in the story — supports the two-way conversion of State and High, and continued "road diets" elsewhere in the city. For instance, City Councilor Dave Marshall:

"Since the Fore River Parkway was completed in 2005, connecting Exit 5 of Interstate 295 with West Commercial Street, traffic volumes on High and State streets have declined, with traffic at some intersections dropping as much as 20 percent, said City Councilor David Marshall, who chairs the council's Transportation, Sustainability and Energy Committee." 

"By moving traffic to the Fore River Parkway, motorists no longer have to drive though the two densest urban neighborhoods in the state," Marshall said.

Peterson's arguments, on the other hand, are as follows (these are his quotes from the story):

• "It's crazy."
• "It will shut the city down."
• "Portland constantly is being voted one of the most walkable cities in America. How walkable does it have to be?"
• And finally, a 40-year-old Portland Press Herald article, from 1973, in which a state traffic engineer said that converting the streets to one-way streets will relieve "major safety and capacity problems across the Portland peninsula in the north-south direction" (modern computer models would refute this, but if all you're working with is a slide rule, conventional wisdom, and a paycheck from highway lobbyists, it probably made sense at the time). 

Compared to the reasonable points of Marshall and others, Peterson's "it's crazy" argument doesn't sound very sophisticated. He has a very long-winded website, if you've got three days to spare and want to read a lot more of the same.

But I've never seen this guy show up at any public meetings, and it's hard to see how he expects to be convincing to anyone who doesn't already agree with him.

I do wish that Bell had asked him whether he'd be willing to pay more to maintain wide roads, since the current fiscal climate, coupled with declining traffic in general, is what's really driving the trend of road diets. I wonder this guy would be willing to pay an extra $1 or $2 a gallon at the pump in order to help pay for the upkeep of his crumbling 1970s-era highway paradises?

Is this your bike?

Someone left this bike, sans rear wheel, on the sidewalk outside our house in East Bayside a few weeks ago. I corralled it in the backyard for safekeeping before more parts got stripped off it. Anyone recognize it? Leave a comment if you do.

City Hall likes bikesharing

I just returned to Portland after a long weekend in Quebec, where, as you may be aware, the pioneering "Bixi" bike-sharing program debuted in Montreal 2009 and has since licensed the technology to several other cities, including Boston.

So I missed last Friday's news that Portland's new planning director, Jeff Levine, had of his own initiative landed an Environmental Protection Agency grant to investigate the feasibility of starting a bikeshare system here in Portland.

From the city's press release:

Bikeshare is a program in which bicycles are made available for shared use. The program is designed to provide free or affordable access to bicycles for short-distance trips in an urban area as an alternative to motorized public transit or private vehicles. Bikeshare programs help reduce congestion, noise and air pollution and support sustainable growth that encourages local economic development while safeguarding health and the environment. As a part of the technical assistance provided, EPA staff and national experts will hold a one to two-day workshop in the city focusing on the Planning for Bikeshare tool, which will explore the potential of establishing a bikeshare program in the community.

According to Tom Bell's report in the Press Herald, the grant will bring in business planners from Alta Bicycle Share, the company that manages most of the nation's largest bikesharing systems, including Boston's "Hubway", using technology licensed from Montreal.

This is only a feasibility study, which means that an actual bikeshare program is probably years away still.

Nevertheless, Portland seems to have the kinds of characteristics that should lend itself to bikesharing: tourists, mostly safe streets downtown, and a bike-friendly density of population, jobs, and services. While bikesharing's North American debuts happened in big cities like Montreal, Washington, DC, and Minneapolis, it's increasingly spreading to and succeeding in smaller cities like Boulder, CO and Spartanburg, SC. Even tiny Pullman, Washington (population 29,799) has 120 shared bikes in its Washington State University-managed "Greenbike" system.

Portland also may benefit from its relative proximity to Hubway in Boston. Rather than roll out its own system from scratch, the city might want to approach it as a self-contained expansion of the Hubway system, to create a northern outpost of the same network with unique local sponsors.

Doing so would give Portland's network a pre-existing base of customers, who would be able to use their same membership card to hop on a bike and ride downtown as soon as they arrive at the bus station, and it would give Portland-based riders the chance to use the same system when they travel to Boston.

Expanding Hubway to Portland might also allow Portland to save on startup expenses by building on existing technology and expertise. Some of that expertise might come from city planner Jeff Levine, the very same fellow who applied for the grant. Jeff was working in the Brookline, MA City Hall when that city welcomed its own expansion of Hubway stations.

If we could convince intermediate cities like Biddeford/Saco and Portsmouth to sponsor their own small networks, Hubway might even become the nation's first intercity bikesharing network to allow for weekend bike tours (it's a 130 mile ride, give or take, with Portsmouth conveniently located near the halfway point).

So, even though I was a few days late on this story, I'll be keeping a close eye on it and will report on this blog when the actual planning study gets underway.

In the meantime, I plan to write a short note to Jeff Levine and his boss, city manager Mark Rees (mrees [at] portlandmaine.gov), to congratulate them on the grant and to thank them for taking this initiative.