Why is Portland wasting affordable housing funds on empty parking lots?

Last night the city of Portland declared a parking ban in advance of a snowstorm, which means that everyone had to move their cars into off-street parking lots.

And here's what the 22-space parking lot at Avesta Housing's Bayside East building (a low-income housing complex for seniors) looked like:

There were two more cars parked in the handicap spaces outside of the shot, but still, this is what I'm talking about when I kvetch about the wastefulness of Portland's and MaineHousing's parking requirements.

This parking lot was paid for in part from Maine's Low Income Housing Tax Credits, which are a) extremely limited and b) intended to subsidize affordable housing, not to subsidize our most unaffordable form of transportation.

Building this parking lot forced Avesta to set aside more than half of its 1/3rd acre parcel (adding ~$150,000 in land costs to the project) for pavement instead of for housing. What is today a 20-unit apartment building could have housed *twice* as many low-income households if the city and MaineHousing had not forced them to waste this real estate.

And, on an ongoing basis, this parking lot also forces Avesta Housing, a nonprofit agency, to spend thousands of dollars every year plowing, sanding, patching potholes and paying stormwater fees for an ugly field of asphalt that, as it turns out, their tenants don't want even when it's being given away for free!

Over the years, Portland's affordable housing developers have pissed away millions of dollars' worth of our state's limited low-income housing funds to build parking lots and garages like this one. Imagine how great our bus system could be if that money had been spent on METRO improvements instead.

Maine has over 30,000 renter households that don't own any cars, and Portland is one of the few places in the entire state where those families can live well without an automobile.

It's plainly wrong to mandate that a parking lot is the best way to solve low-income renters' mobility needs. Given the extortionist terms of subprime auto loans and the high costs of car maintenance, expecting low-income tenants to bring their own cars instead of helping them pay for transit passes is borderline sadistic. These families need apartments and better transit service much more than they need free parking, and Portland, as a city, needs planning laws and low-income housing financing rules that recognize this fact.

Ocean Street in South Portland gets a bike lane

A paving project on South Portland's Ocean Street, also known as Route 77, has added a new bike lane that stretches between Broadway to the Cape Elizabeth town line.

This new bike lane fills in a gap between the Casco Bay Bridge bike lane and Cape Elizabeth, where an existing paved shoulder on Route 77 extends all the way through Cape Elizabeth to Crescent Beach State Park. Now, cyclists can enjoy an almost-uninterrupted bike lane between Portland and the beach (there's still a short one-block gap with no bike facilities between the Greenbelt pathway and Mahoney Middle School):

Thanks, South Portland!

"Dirigo Plaza" should include a crucial Mountain Division Trail link

The Portland and Westbrook planning boards are meeting together tonight to discuss the plans for "Dirigo Plaza," a huge shopping center complex with a Walmart that's being proposed on a former quarry just over the Westbrook city line.

Image courtesy of the Portland Press Herald

It's Westbrook's jurisdiction, but Portland has a say in this project as far as traffic impacts are concerned, since it's expected to generate considerable automobile congestion on Brighton Ave. and Riverside St.

To their considerable credit, staff at Portland's City Hall are demanding bike/ped improvements nearby – including new sidewalks and the closure of several right-turn slip lanes along Brighton Avenue.

But the site of the shopping center also straddles the Mountain Division rail line, which has long been planned as a rail-with-trail pathway to downtown Westbrook and beyond to South Windham:

A trail connection could substitute a non-trivial amount of auto traffic off of the surrounding streets with bike and pedestrian traffic on the trail network, so it's a legitimate and relatively low-cost mitigation strategy. Unfortunately, it's not in the developer's plans – so far.

The planning board hearing is tonight, so if anyone else would like to see this trail link happen, please chime in now!

Send comments to the Portland planning board, care of city planner Rick Knowland (rwk@portlandmaine.gov) asking them to reserve a trail right-of-way through the "Dirigo Plaza" site as part of the project's traffic plan.

Tonight: public meeting for new bike lanes on Washington Ave. and bike lane upgrades for Forest Ave.

Back in 2009, the city installed new bike lanes on Forest Avenue from Woodford's Corner to Morrill's Corner. At the time, they were a pretty big deal, filling in a major gap in the city's bike route network.

Unfortunately, the Forest Avenue bike lanes have never seen a lot of bike traffic. They squeeze awkwardly between a smattering of parked cars and the heavy, high-speed car traffic of Forest Avenue. This stretch of Forest is a recognized "high crash location" for motor vehicles and bikes alike. What little bike traffic there is is just as likely to be on the sidewalks – and I can hardly blame those riders from wanting to avoid the chaos on the asphalt.

Tonight, though, the city is holding a public meeting to upgrade Forest Avenue with buffered bike lanes and a center lane for turning vehicles both north and south of Baxter Woods Park (in front of Baxter Woods, the existing configuration will remain). The proposal would remove two lanes of on-street parking spaces, but those spaces are almost never used, so it shouldn't be very controversial. Still, a strong show of support from advocates will be a big help.

The city is also proposing a project to replace little-used on-street parking with new buffered bike lanes on Washington Avenue from Ocean Ave. (where there's an existing bike lane) to Presumpscot Street, a few blocks short of the Tukey's Bridge bike path:

You can find out more about that project here.

Here are the details about tonight's public meeting:


Where: Ocean Ave Elementary School Library
When: Tuesday 4/12 from 6:00- 8:00pm
Agenda:
- Forest Ave will be discussed from 6:00-7:00 pm
- Washington Ave will follow from 7:00-8:00 pm

If you can't make it in person, email comments to Kristine Keeney (the city's bike/pedestrian coordinator) and Councilor Justin Costa (who represents East Deering).

The new dingbats of Munjoy Hill

Munjoy Hill is one of New England's most walkable neighborhoods, with hundreds of car-free households. So why are the new buildings going up in the neighborhood all designed to give pride of place to storage for internal combustion engines in the places where the front porches ought to be?

Take a look at some of the most recent new buildings that have gone up on the hill in the past couple of years. Virtually all of them are stacked on top of ground-level parking facing the sidewalk:

Cumberland Avenue; architects: Kaplan-Thompson

Some building designs make some attempt to screen the parking behind an entrance:

Lafayette Street; Bild Architecture for Random Orbit, LLC (developers).

But others, like this new McMansion on Quebec Street, don't make any pretense whatsoever of trying to hide the parking: 

Quebec Street; architects: Kaplan-Thompson, again

Who needs a neighborly front porch when you can just show off your minivan's bumper stickers?

Real talk, though: if you're an architect who thinks that your design ought to be veiled behind your client's Honda Odyssey, you've got a self-esteem problem.

A classic southern California dingbat.
CC BY-SA 3.0 licensed photo by Barmysot via Wikipedia

This style of architecture gained prominence in mid-century California, when fossil-fueled sprawl gave rise to thousands of drive-under apartment buildings (one of which is pictured at right). It's indicative of how much respect people afford this style of architecture that they're popularly referred to as "dingbat" buildings.

To my mind, the biggest problem with dingbats isn't that they're ugly – though plenty of people agree that they are.

The bigger issue is that they sacrifice elements of pedestrian-friendly, civic architecture – front porches, stoops, ground-level windows – in favor of dingy carports where bumpers inconsiderately crowd into sidewalks.

Dingbats make walking for everyone else more difficult in an effort to make it more convenient for driving for the residents living upstairs: why walk three blocks to the corner store when your car is literally parked on the stoop?

Architecture reflects its builders' values: where the older buildings of Munjoy Hill prioritize the social, quasi-public spaces of stoops and front porches, these newer buildings prioritize getting into your car before you have the unpleasant experience of making eye contact with a neighbor.

The newly-revised R6 zone, which governs Munjoy Hill and most of in-town Portland's other residential areas, has driveway requirements that are intended to prevent egregious dingbat structures dominated by ground-floor parking garages.

According to Census data, 16% of households in the surrounding census tract own no motor vehicles at all, and an additional 44% have only one car available per household. The people who live on Munjoy Hill now, in other words, don't necessarily need the ground-floor parking that characterizes dingbat buildings.

But the wealthy suburban newcomers who are buying up and tearing down the neighborhood's older buildings insist on bringing more cars and more traffic with them. They're the ones commissioning this architecture.

And at this week's planning board meeting, some of them asked the city to bend the rules to favor even more egregious dingbats on Munjoy Hill.

The owners of 40 Quebec Street recently demolished their property's vernacular apartment building – which had no off-street parking but nevertheless provided attractive homes for renters for decades – and have applied for permission to replace it with an extra-wide driveway that would take up most of the width of their narrow lot.

Dingbat proposal for 40 Quebec St.
Source: GO-LOGIC via City of Portland

It's one of the dingbattiest building proposals that Portland's seen yet (pictured at right is a rendering from their planning board application).

Ironically, the architecture firm for this project is GO-LOGIC, a firm that claims to build super-energy-efficient Passive House buildings. That makes sense, because burning heating oil in a furnace is bad, but burning gasoline in one of the multiple internal combustion engines parked downstairs in order to pop down the hill and pick up some organic take-out at Whole Foods is something that you just can't challenge your clients on.


Luckily, city staff have told the applicants that their design violates the city's zoning rules. The owners don't care, though: they're taking their case to the Planning Board tonight on appeal.

The applicants are asserting that their appeal has merit because it's a "hardship" for them not to have their exhaust pipes stored directly underneath their bedrooms. In other words, that it's a "hardship" for them to park some of their multiple cars on the street, or, heaven forfend, to imagine a life lived with fewer automobiles, as the majority of their neighbors do.

But the planning board also needs to consider the hardships that the applicants want to impose on their neighbors by cramming more motor vehicles and more parking into the neighborhood. On Munjoy Hill, the majority of residents walk on a daily basis. Children and seniors in particular rely on safe, clear sidewalks – sidewalks unencumbered by clumsily-parked vehicles and driveways with poor visibility.

The applicants' proposed home design, with its recessed ground-floor garage, thumbs its nose at the pedestrian streetscape. By privileging storage space for cars instead of space for people at the building's ground-level facade, the architects are capitulating to and showcasing the homeowners' car dependency.

Oil addiction, climate change and the violence of motor vehicle crashes are also serious hardships – far more serious than the applicants' fears of on-street parking.

Dingbat architecture has no place in a city that strives to favor more sustainable modes of transportation. If parking is so important to the applicants, they should build their home in Falmouth or Windham – places where the hassles of car-dependency are accepted and where drive-though architecture is the norm.

Bigger bumpouts aren't always better

The first phase of construction to narrow down the failed Spring Street urban-renewal scheme is just about complete, and for the most part, it's an improvement: the ugly median barrier is gone, there are fewer lanes of traffic, sidewalks are wider, and bike lanes are coming soon.

But even with the improvements, Spring Street still feels like a forlorn, too-wide speedway through empty parking lots. The hope is that some of those parking lots will soon transform into buildings, and then Spring Street might feel more lively. But for the time being, it's still a sad place.

The weirdest part of the new street is probably at the western end of the project, where the 1970s urban renewal project ended. There, the old street quickly bottlenecked down from 4 lanes east of State to two lanes a block to the west. The traffic engineers' plan for eliminating that bottleneck in the new plan has been causing some controversy. Here's a cyclists'-eye view of what it looks like:

Photo by Steven Scharf

 That's Portland's newest, biggest sidewalk bump-out, sitting right in the middle of what clearly used to be the historic path of the old Spring Street.

Now, as much as I like bump-outs, this design is stupid.

On the north (right, in the photo above) side of this corner, there's a clearly-defined street wall defined by the Little Tap House building, mature street trees, and other historic buildings a little further on up the street. And on the south side, there's a city parking lot – a remnant scar of Spring Street's urban renewal demolitions and a prime opportunity for a new building that could activate the corner.

But for some reason, the engineers designed the new Spring Street to avoid the historic corridor. Virtually of the site's contexts – the buildings, the trees, the streetlamps – tell motorists and cyclists to "stay right", but the paint on the pavement says, "swerve left, then right."

This, unsurprisingly, is confusing people. The Press Herald even got photographs of a driver rolling their car right over the new bump-out. To the driver's credit, this is exactly what the street's visual cues suggest you should do. But if you're a traffic engineer looking at a blueprint of the intersection, you don't see those visual cues, or the intersection's historic context.

Portland Press Herald graphic

Here's another problem with the bump-out: the reason it's so huge - two lanes wide! - is because on the eastern side of the intersection, in front of the Portland Museum of Art, the new Spring Street incomprehensibly bloats to 3 lanes, including an idiotic double-right-turn lane. While the rest of Spring Street got a road diet, this particular section senselessly got a widening.

The sudden bloat in turn lanes is obviously confusing to drivers – the driver who got caught cruising over the bump-out is trying to drive straight on Spring from one of the new right-turn-only lanes. The intersection worked just fine when there were only two westbound lanes there, though. Getting rid one of the three westbound lanes there and restoring the former layout would be an easy short-term fix.

And here's my final beef with the bump-out. The city owns a parking lot on the south western side of Spring Street. Greater Portland Landmarks owns the building on the southeastern side of Spring Street. Both of those corners are prime opportunities to activate a new Spring Street with attractive new buildings that match the context of the historic neighborhood and honors the historic street wall.

If we were willing to shrink the bump-out AND sacrifice one of the new right-turn-only lanes, we could actually get more pedestrian space overall, and get a more sensible intersection, and put more city-owned real estate to work to create new housing. How about it, City Hall?

Suburban streets get complete

Two large-scale construction projects have delivered impressive "complete streets" transformations along parts of Route 1 in South Portland and Falmouth this summer.

To the south, a sewer upgrade project along Main Street in Thornton Heights slimmed down a four-lane road into a two-lane city street in the neighborhood's center, widened sidewalks, and added landscaped curb extensions that will also help filter stormwater before it flows into storm drains. Construction's not quite done, but some of the new sidewalks and curbing have been installed, along with some of the basic stormwater filtration gardens:

Thornton Heights is a classic streetcar suburb, but the neighborhood has had a hard half-century since it became the dumping ground for traffic from a nearby Maine Turnpike spur road.

Unfortunately, the new Main Street is still only an island of walkability – it remains cut off from surrounding neighborhoods, thanks to that previously-mentioned Turnpike stump at the neighborhood's southern edge and the inhospitable stretch of Route 1 that leads through the ugly Cash Corner intersection.

Also discouragingly, South Portland city councilors last year rejected a proposal to allow more walkable and transit-oriented zoning in the neighborhood. So, even with a more urban, walkable street, it's questionable whether neighborhood-oriented small businesses will follow, given that the status quo zoning favors auto-oriented strip mall development.

On the other end of Route 1, in Falmouth, they've just finished a very similar street project for that town's main drag. This one also includes new, wide sidewalks, lots of new street trees, lighting, bike lanes and several landscaped medians for safer crosswalks:

Unlike Thornton Heights, Route 1 in Falmouth is mostly surrounded by strip malls and parking lots – it's hard to tell there whether you're in Maine or in suburban Texas, so the town's nice new street feels pretty lonely.

But Falmouth is one step ahead of South Portland in one important respect: it's enacted some progressive zoning to encourage new walkable development along their new main street. That's been slow to come so far, but the new sidewalks and street trees should help encourage the hoped-for investment.

UCarShare is growing and Portland's parking reforms are working

It's hard to believe, but UhaulCarShare has been operating in Portland for over six years now.

They started with four cars parked near Monument Square and the ferry terminal. Here's a screenshot of their website in 2009:

As of this fall, they've doubled the local fleet to 8 cars and expanded into South Portland with a car parked at the Southern Maine Community College campus. Here's their new coverage map:

A lot of UhaulCarShare's success here comes from a helpful new reform of parking rules in the city's zoning requirements. For the last few years now, city planners have allowed a reduction in developers' expensive parking-construction mandates if the developers agree to sponsor a carsharing vehicle on-site.

Several new apartment buildings have taken advantage of this incentive, most recently Avesta Housing's 409 Cumberland Avenue apartment block, which built only 18 basement parking spaces for its 57 new apartment units and sponsored a new UhaulCarShare vehicle to be parked on-site. This arrangement benefits everyone: reduced construction costs for the developers, reduced housing costs and more mobility options for residents, and a more convenient carsharing network for neighbors.

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

City-owned garages ask Portland taxpayers for a $865,000 subsidy

The city has just posted the city manager's proposed capital improvements program for 2016 and beyond.

This is the budget document that typically allocates local funds for traffic calming and bike/ped infrastructure – but there's not much of that in this year's proposal.

The one line-item for bike or pedestrian infrastructure is $500,000 for basic sidewalk maintenance and repair – which is in line with what's been spent in recent years.

Why should Portland taxpayers pay for Falmouth's motor vehicle storage?

However, the rough draft of the budget does include $865,000 just for parking garage maintenance and equipment.

So, in a city that proclaims that it supports cleaner air, safer streets, and progressive causes, we've got a budget that proposes to spend more money on taxpayer-subsidized parking than on bike, pedestrian, and transit infrastructure combined.

Now, other, privately-owned parking garages manage to cover their maintenance and equipment costs without taxpayer bailouts. Furthermore, I see quite a few expensive late-model cars going into and coming out of our city-owned garages. It seems to me that the city's parking division ought to get its own customers to pay the costs of the parking that they use, instead of asking Portland taxpayers to pay for wealthy motorists' parking spots.

A safer Franklin Street – in 2024

Also take a look at page 29 of the document, where you'll find the city's longer-range finance strategy for the tackling its most visionary plans:



School construction projects will monopolize most of the city's capital budget for the next few years. That means that the city's big livable streets projects are likely to be postponed far into the future due to lack of money.

Implementing the "Transforming Forest Avenue" plan might happen, finally, in 2021. The new Franklin Street will have to wait 'til fiscal year 2024. Converting State and High Streets back to 2-way traffic: 2025.

Take a look for yourself – it's a good introduction to understanding why our City Councilors are interested in increasing the city's tax base.

"Keep Portland Livable" is making Portland's gentrification problem worse

A couple weeks ago, we learned that Peter Monro and Tim Paradis, the two men behind “Keep Portland Livable,” had been working closely with the developers of the proposed Midtown development in Bayside, and will now support a revised proposal with a large reduction in housing.

I'd been reserving judgement on this turn of events until I'd had a chance to see the revised plans. Now that those have been posted on the city's website, I'm pretty disappointed. The new project is, however, entirely consistent with the privileged mindset of the well-to-do homeowners who bankrolled "Keep Portland Livable." Here are some of its problems:

They subtracted lots of the housing, but kept most of the parking.

The most credible complaints from “Keep Portland Livable” concerned the massive parking garage being proposed. But, in the updated version that bears the Paradis/Monro seal of approval, the massive garage is still there, and it actually grew an additional level.

In fact, it now would stand as the tallest, most prominent edifice in the revised proposal (pictured at right). How's that for symbolism?

The new Paradis/Monro project dedicates a much higher proportion of real estate to car storage than to people. The original plan was to have about 1.3 parking spaces per apartment. But under the new plan, each apartment will have 1.8 parking spots. That’ll help “keep it livable” for wealthier residents who want to bring multiple cars with them into the heart of the city, but it's going to make the city's streets less livable for everyone else.

It won't be more affordable; in fact, it will likely be more expensive.
The revised proposal makes no provisions for more-affordable housing — indeed, with hundreds of fewer apartments available in this new proposal, the developers will need to charge substantially higher rents for each unit in order to satisfy their investors and break even on construction costs. And speaking of rent inflation...

The truncated apartment buildings in the revised proposal (bottom, above) will have fewer apartments, and therefore they'll only be "livable" to half as many families.

It's a lost opportunity to address Portland's housing shortage.
The original proposal would have had up to 850 apartments. The revised project, with only 440 apartments, gives 410 fewer households the opportunity to live within short walking distance of three supermarkets, a dozen bus routes, downtown retail services and thousands of jobs.

Hundreds of new families are moving to Portland each year. Many are moving from places like Los Angeles or Brooklyn out of a desire to live in an attractive city near the ocean; many others are moving from rural areas out of necessity to live near health care and social services.

How the city makes room for these newcomers is a largely unresolved question.

Now that the "midtown" proposal has been scaled back with 410 fewer homes, it’s not as though 410 apartment-seekers who would have lived in the high rises will simply evaporate into thin air. Instead of occupying a long-vacant lot in Bayside, many of those newcomers will instead take over apartments and homes in established neighborhoods like Parkside, Munjoy Hill, or the West End (where Monro himself settled a few years ago when he arrived here from Massachusetts).

Or, if they don’t take over housing in Portland, perhaps they’ll join the thousands of migrants taking up residence in suburbs like Scarborough and Windham instead, where running even the most basic errands require burnt offerings of fossil fuels.

It's a terrible precedent for civic planning
The original 'midtown' proposal was faithful to the city's "New Vision for Bayside," a 1999 neighborhood plan that explicitly called for high-rise buildings and hundreds of new apartments to be built on this site to make Bayside feel like an extension of downtown and to help reduce suburban sprawl in rural communities outside of Portland. It was a good plan, and these developers collaborated closely with city planners and neighborhood leaders as their plans coalesced over a period of several years.

The opinions of two wealthy dudes aren't supposed to trump the city's long-standing economic development and housing policies. But the "Keep Portland Livable" guys have shown us a new, unwelcome truth for our income-stratified city: that those with the privilege to buy their own lawyers, public relations flacks, and lots of Facebook advertising can assert a de facto veto over the city's progressive housing goals and neighborhood-based planning process.

No urban plan will ever satisfy everyone, but the city's planning process is intended to balance and prioritize countervailing concerns (for instance, the overwhelming need for new housing, versus a few residents' aesthetic preferences for horizontally-oriented groundscrapers).

If the city's wealthy citizens are going to veto any new housing proposal that they don't like, then the city will quickly become inhospitable to everyone but the wealthy.

Urban design needs to be less elitist
I've heard from several people in the past few weeks who have seen the new plan, observed its weaknesses and wryly concluded that Paradis and Monro have "sold out" their values by agreeing to this compromise.

Saying that they've “sold out” misjudges the men’s intentions, though. Peter Monro and Tim Paradis are wealthy homeowners (Monro would really like to tell you about his recent two-month Spanish vacation), whose West End and Old Port property puts them in Portland’s top stratum of real estate wealth.

The city's housing shortage simply isn't a problem for these guys. And so, in the absence of real problems, it makes a certain amount of sense that they'd get so wrapped up in a first-world problem like a moderately tall apartment complex being built in the middle of the city.

Still, struggling to maintain some degree of egalitarianism in our cities against the desires of an increasingly powerful and wealthy 1% will be the defining challenge of urban planning in the next few decades. These guys are on the wrong side of that struggle. As Victor Gruen was to freeways, so Keep Portland Livable is to gentrification.

The challenge for the next generation – my generation – is to make sure that our revitalized cities will still make room for the diversity of people who would like to live in them. Keep Portland Livable's midtown intervention – like the destructive urban renewal of the last century – is an instructive example of what not to do.

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.

New St. Lawrence Theater offers to pay for better bus service

The new performance hall for the St. Lawrence Theater on the top of Munjoy Hill is going up for its planning board review this month, and the proposal includes a nice treat for Portland's bus riders: in order to entice more of its audience to ride transit to the facility (which, in an unusually progressive fashion, will be built without any on-site parking), the nonprofit is offering to pay to increase frequency and extend service hours on METRO's Route 1, which runs up and down Congress Street from one end of the peninsula to the other.

Currently, METRO's Route 1 runs roughly every half-hour from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., with a couple of additional runs until 10 p.m.

If the new St. Lawrence Arts venue is approved, the bus would run every 20 minutes, until 11 p.m., six days a week. They're also proposing to rebrand Route 1 as the "Art Line," a reference to its route through the heart of downtown's arts district.

The funding required for the additional service – $70,000 a year – would come from a surcharge in ticket fees at the new venue.  They're also planning other goodies, like abundant bike parking at the front door and discounts for cyclists. You can read the full "transportation demand management plan" here. 

Obviously, the enhanced bus service wouldn't just benefit theater patrons at St. Lawrence Arts. It would also benefit late-night hospital workers at Mercy and Maine Medical Center, on the other end of the line, plus dozens of restaurants and other arts venues downtown.

But no good idea goes unpunished: a group of wealthy neighbors calling themselves "Concerned Citizens of Munjoy Hill" is working hard to sink the proposal, or at least force St. Lawrence Arts to build an exorbitantly expensive parking garage.

So, if you'd rather see more sustainable transportation on Munjoy Hill instead of yet more parking, let the planning board know: email your comments to Nell Donaldson, HCD@portlandmaine.gov.

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. 

You could fit most of the Old Port inside Portland's obsolete Exit 6 interchange

With debt to this post on Streetsblog, I was curious to see how much of the Old Port could potentially fit in the acres of downtown real estate occupied by the Exit 6 interchange on Interstate 295. Most of it, as it turns out. In the gif above, an aerial view of Exit 6 alternates with a rotated view of the Old Port at the same scale. That's the green-roofed City Hall at the western end of Exit 6 near the USM parking garage, and the Custom House is at the other end near Preble Street. Post Office Park occupies less space than the lawn of a single cloverleaf loop.

This cloverleaf intersection, by the way, is one of the most dangerous places to drive in the entire state — it's the home to several designated "high-crash locations" and has been described by state officials as having an "obsolete" design that whips cars into vortices of high-speed merges. But those are just lovable foibles! Our highway engineers literally can't think about getting rid of this adorable, city-eating monstrosity.

The Exit 6 interchange is a prime example of Governor Paul LePage's socialist land policy, whereby acres of extremely valuable real estate are wasted in extremely inefficient uses by the central-planning bureaucrats at the State Department of Transportation.

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. 

New Martins Point Bridge will open to bike and pedestrian traffic next Tuesday

Some exciting news from the Maine DOT, courtesy of a recent press release:

"As the first step to opening the new Martin’s Point Bridge to traffic, CPM Constructors will allow pedestrians and bicycles onto the new multi-use path around midday next Tuesday, June 3. The path will be open to pedestrians and bicyclists only. All motor vehicles will continue to travel over the old bridge."

The bridge between Portland and Falmouth is still under construction, so the car-free status is only temporary — enjoy it while you can!