Last year, I wrote a piece about Portland Sunday Parkways. The new season has been announced, and much to my chagrin it seems that PBOT did not heed my advice. Once again, there are just three events on the schedule – and they are the same three as last year. And despite criticism from the BikePortland comments section saying that my article “wasn’t worth printing” because it didn’t go into enough detail about costs and implementation strategies, I wanted to return to this topic because I still feel that it’s a vital piece of the puzzle for making Portland a great city.
If you can’t be bothered to read my prior iteration in this series, the skinny is that Bogotá, Columbia closes about 75 miles of their streets every Sunday from 10am to 2pm so that folks can safely walk, bike, and otherwise enjoy the streets of Bogotá without the noise and pollution of incessant automobile traffic. It’s wildly popular, and has inspired similar events across the world – with at least 40 different cities in the US having something vaguely resembling it (emphasis on vaguely). In total, there are about 15,600 mile-hours worth of road closure in Bogotá for the ciclová – not the most intuitive metric, but I want some way to compare across places so it’ll have to do.
Portland’s Sunday Parkways started out with five yearly events in different neighborhoods each year, but have been reduced to just three since the pandemic. Additionally, after many years of traveling throughout the city the decision was made in 2023 to shift to a more permanent schedule – with the same three events from last year repeating this year. In total, the three events add up to 58 mile-hours worth of open street events (with each event lasting from 11 AM to 4 PM, lengths can be found here) – or a measly 0.4% of Bogotá.
As a brief aside, I made it to two of the events last year (East Portland and Southwest Portland) and had a good time at both. The events were fun, the weather was good, and I got to show off my beautiful Bianchi. But I still left feeling that the program as a whole is so far short of what it could be.
Before we reiterate what Portland Sunday Parkways should be and what that might look like, let’s take a peek at the stated goals for the program in 2024.
Compared to last year, there are two new goals, and one missing (the one about traffic management – maybe someone at PBOT was listening to me after all!). For goal 1 – prioritizing underserved neighborhoods – I’ll reiterate my thoughts from last year: a good ciclovía event should encompass the entire city, and as such differential treatment between neighborhoods ought to be a moot point. But perhaps even more than last year, it’s strange to see this goal present. All three events are repeated from last year, and two of those were repeats from 2022. It’s worth asking by what metric are these three routes “underserved by Portland Sunday Parkways” – they are the only places that have been served by Sunday Parkways in the the last five years. And while surely those who have both been in Portland and in the know for more than five years can answer without much research, not all of us are so fortunate.
But before we judge this goal too harshly, we ought to take a look into the history books for where Sunday Parkways has been in the past. Thanks to the BikePortland archives, this wasn’t too much issue. Sunday Parkways began in 2008 with a 7 mile loop through North Portland, and returned to a fairly similar route in North Portland every year until 2019. In 2009, routes in Northeast and Southeast were added – and mostly repeated every year until 2019. Each of these three core routes remained largely static, and so while Southeast could count on an event, I don’t think it’s accurate to say all of southeast was equally treated. Since the programs inception, there have been zero events in the 7.5 square miles (5.6% of the city) bounded by the Union Pacific tracks, Powell, 82nd, and the city line.
The fourth spot typically went to an East Portland route, with early years primarily being a loop featuring the section of the Springwater Corridor from about 92nd to 128th, and later years being further north (the Lents area hasn’t seen a Sunday Parkway event since 2016). And the fifth spot rotated between Northwest, Downtown, Southwest, and Sellwood. If we are judging the three current routes by pre-2020 history, I think it’s a mixed bag as to if anywhere other than Southwest is really underserved.
For context, Southwest (not including downtown) had just two total events from 2008 to 2019 while the area around the extant East Portland route had either three or ten – depending on how you split out the difference between the typical Outer Northeast Route and the typical older East Route. Meanwhile, the Northeast Cully route might be different in name than the old Northeast route, but as we can see in the 2012 route below it’s not like Cully was just left out to dry. And for what its worth, St. Johns has never gotten a Sunday Parkways route, and neither has Argay Terrace, nor Brentwood-Darlington. If the goal is underserved neighborhoods by this program, then Northeast/Cully is an unusual choice.
With Sunday Parkways shifting – in their words – to a system where “Each event route will highlight a Portland neighborhood for a few years to help build upon the investments and partnerships that are being made.” This is great, but when there are just three events per year and 90 something neighborhoods in the city it will take at least ten rotations (assuming three neighborhoods/event) to make the full circuit. If each rotation is three years, then once Sunday Parkways leaves Multnomah Village are the expected to wait thirty years until the event returns? At what point in time does a neighborhood become “underserved” by Portland Sunday Parkways?
There are also further issues I have with the Sunday Parkways stated goals. Is the best we can hope for with the marquee open streets event in Portland to “familiarize Portlanders with neighborhood greenways”? I won’t be the first active transportation commentator to touch on this, and I’m sure I won’t be the last but the success of the Bogotá ciclovía comes from giving space that is dominated by cars back to people. Neighborhood greenways – by definition – are not these places. They are already places where Portlanders can go to enjoy the tranquility of a streetscape where cars are guests and not prioritized (well that’s what they should be anyways).
In a 2015 guest piece, BikePortland contributor Ted Timmons went to Los Angeles to check out a CicLAvia event. His piece is succinct (something I could never dream of) and is still salient some nine years later. Los Angeles gets the ciclovía idea right by opening major thoroughfares up for everyone to enjoy, while Portland restricts its open streets to places where car traffic is already low enough that it won’t ruffle any feathers.
Since I’ve spilled so much ink on critiquing the goals of Portland Sunday Parkways, I think it’s worth lining out three goals for an improved version:
And here is an outline of a static route that would serve these goals well. It features major commercial corridors (SW Capitol Highway, SE Woodstock, NE/SW Broadway, N Denver, NE Alberta), wide suburban thoroughfares (SE Stark, SE/NE 148th), a few neighborhood commercial districts (SE Gladstone, SE Clinton), and the busiest pedestrian crossing in the city (W Burnside and 10th, at Powell’s). There’s also a few long forgotten streetcar routes (S Corbett and Gladstone/41st/42nd/Woodstock) – places that tend to be great for riding but aren’t currently a big part of our bike network, along with some minor neighborhood connections (SE 34th, NE San Rafael) for folks who are looking for a more relaxed ride. And it’s about 75 miles of roads – similar to Bogotá.
The choice to focus on major roads – even if there may be some transit impacts – is strategic. These are the places in the city where folks often have the most reasons to walk or ride, but instead are bullied off the road by the incessant presence of too many cars. They are routes which are straight, flat, and offer plenty of things to do. If we want to re-imagine our streets as something more than just a place to use and store an automobile, only using minor streets for the marquee open streets event in the state will not cut it.
But there are other benefits as well. Since all of these routes already have existing signalized intersections at every major road theoretically fewer people are needed for traffic control purposes or to assist with crossings. Having crossings like the one below at 113th and Stark on a route means you have to pay someone to do the work of a traffic light (on a very busy, very wide road to boot).
Additionally, I tried to steer clear of anything involving ODOT. A few troublesome points on the map are the intersection of Woodstock and 92nd (part of the Woodstock/Foster/205 exit), and S Corbett (at the I5 exit). If we model off of Bogotá, and have this event on for 4 or 5 hours every Sunday morning I imagine the impacts would be insignificant (well by my standards anyways). Still, it’s important to point out that this is just a map of streets that I think would be good places to use for our open streets events – not some perfect list.
Of course, even though using major roads could be a potential way to cut down on traffic control costs it still would cost a fair amount of money to run this new and improved Sunday Parkways program. And as former BikePortland writer Taylor Griggs succinctly put in 2022: “budget issues have long plagued Sunday Parkways”. The program has lived and died on crowdfunding, corporate sponsorship, and paltry sums from the general fund. In 2012, it cost the city about $100,000 per event, and while it’s hard to sus out exactly how much PBOT spends on them these days Jonathan mentioned a cost of $85,000/event after police were removed from it (around 2016 I believe).
In Bogotá, it costs the city about 10¢ per person, and with 1.7 million participating (1/8th of the cities population) every week that works out to $8.8 million/year ($170,000/event, 52 events/year). It’d be nice to find that money in the existing budget of a city with a transportation budget of $500 million, but given the hurdles the program has faced in the past and the rough state of the budget this year I think it’s wise to look elsewhere.
The place to look (as it is for basically everyone these days) is the Portland Clean Energy Fund (PCEF). But unlike a lot of other programs that have been floated for PCEF funding in the past few months, an expanded Portland Sunday Parkways is a more straightforward fit. PBOT is receiving PCEF funding for the “Transportation Wallet For All” program – to the tune of $25 million. I’m a fan of the Transportation Wallet program, but I truly believe that Sunday Parkways has the potential to cause a much larger shift in behavior. But behavior is sort of tough to quantify – let’s consider just how one part of the potential Sunday Parkways network would directly impact Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT).
Outer Stark on the two mile stretch between 110th and 148th sees about 12,000 daily car trips on a typical weekday (no data is available on Sundays, data taken from this map). While closing the street seems like a sort of drastic way to reduce VMT, the evidence from the rest of the world shows that “traffic evaporation” is a real phenomena. Based on this study of tactical urbanism in Barcelona (chosen in part because of the temporary nature of tactical urbanism as opposed to long term closures), road space reallocated from cars resulting in a 15% drop in traffic on the target street corresponded with just a 0.7% increase in traffic on directly parallel routes.
A 5 hour open street event (allowing zero cars) represents a 20% decrease in traffic with a very basic assumption of equally distributed traffic throughout the day. In reality, it probably would represent more than this – since an event from 11 am to 4 pm represents a fairly large amount of active travel time for people (especially on Sundays). But this is just some back of the napkin math here, so let’s roll with that. With a 20% drop in traffic on Stark, if results from Barcelona were to hold we would expect about a 1% increase in traffic on Burnside (typical trips: ~4,000). The net result is 2,000 fewer car trips, and 4,000 fewer vehicle miles traveled on just a two mile section of Stark.
Based on calculations by the EPA, a typical per VMT rate for CO2 emissions is about 0.0004 metric tons (derived from the “Gasoline-powered passenger vehicles per year” subsection, dividing final answer there by the assumed VMT number). Over a five year period, a 4,000 VMT reduction every week on Outer Stark works out to 406 MT CO2 – so not a whole lot, but more than nothing. However, this is just on a two mile stretch of road, using fairly pessimistic assumptions. If similar VMT reductions were observed for the entire 75 mile Sunday Parkways route, we would expect to see just over 15,000 MT CO2 reduced over 5 years.
Evidently, more sophisticated methods can and should be employed, though I do think this back of the napkin math is a useful heuristic. The larger point is that by using PCEF, a larger Sunday Parkways program could have justification for it’s existence from a funding perspective based on just the fact that major roads are closed to cars. Of course, the benefits of a massive, city-wide ciclovía are almost too numerous to count.
As a final note on funding, it’s unclear to me how much this would actually cost. If each event is put on for ~$100,000 currently, then it costs the city ~$300,000 for 58 mile-hours of open street events. Measured this way, we would expect this 15,600 mile-hour program to cost in the neighborhood of $30 million/year. I’ve already talked about how some of the costs would likely be lower (like for traffic control). Additionally, there are scale benefits for doing an event like this 52 times per year rather than 3. If costs can be reduced to less than $10 million/year, I think this program would stand a chance of being possible.
Sunday Parkways needs more ambition. Even outside of the climate crisis, the popular and beloved program never managed to expand beyond its initial launch. Up until 2019, almost every route was a greenway focused loop with less of an emphasis on reclaiming meaningful and culturally important street space and more of an emphasis on a fun time. Obviously fun times are great, but without more ambitious goals Sunday Parkways feels doomed to budget purgatory.
While the current budget cuts the city faces might not be permanent, it doesn’t bode well for a program whose future is seemingly uncertain every time there are whispers of cuts. In 2010, the city budget office said of Sunday Parkways “is a popular event and great public relations for the city” while recommending scaling the program down to 3 events per year. If Sunday Parkways is just an excuse for PBOT to get some cheap PR and have a little neighborhood party, it will always be doomed to life on the budget cutting room floor.
But if the program can embrace its Colombian roots and dream a little bigger, it can be part of a larger cultural movement seeking to return the street to the domain of human beings, rather than automobiles. PBOT’s own guidelines seek to do this – our moral hierarchy puts cars at the bottom for a reason. Planners can make as many diagrams as they want (and who doesn’t love a well made diagram in a planning document!), but those diagrams will never become reality if people haven’t experienced what they mean. For the sake of the future of the planet, the city, and even just for the future of Sunday Parkways dreaming big isn’t just for whimsy – it’s a necessity.
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