September 23, 2019
This summer, on my street, Northeast 128th just off Glisan Street, Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) showed its true colors. It made a public show of its social engineering agenda that favors recreational, mostly adult bicyclists over...elementary school kids.
My short street fronts and feeds Menlo Park Elementary school with parents driving and walking school kids and with David Douglas School District busing school kids every day. It is a ritual that must be witnessed to be believed: a narrow, unimproved, 2-way, pot-holed street with no sidewalks and not even lane striping.
My street on Northeast 128th Avenue has been this way--and worsening regularly every year--for the past seventeen years I have lived here.
PBOT has for years warned drivers of the sensitive school zone by way of school zone warnings and 20 mile per hour speed limit signs during school hours.
Menlo Park Elementary school has been a part of this neighborhood for almost as long a time as I am old: Menlo Park Elementary school opened 67 years ago.
Vulnerable kids and their hand-hold parents have been part of the scene in my immediate neighborhood for 67 years.
I guess PBOT thought for 67 years that my narrow, wannabe two-lane, unstriped, no-sidewalk street was safe enough for school kids by merely posting 20 MPH school-day speed limits ignored often in my first-hand experience by the odd speeding or racing vehicle.
Six months ago, PBOT decided, without public notice, to turn my street into a bicycle corridor (PBOT calls it a "Neighborhood Greenway" and its signage implies it is for bicyclists and pedestrians).
Then three months ago, PBOT finally but not coincidentally saw fit to install speed bumps on my street. Four speed bumps punctuate travel along three blocks around the Menlo Elementary School entrance/exit.
Evidently--based on the close timing of the new speed bumps and the bicycle corridor designation--the speed bumps are intended to protect Portland's 'Favorite Sons': Bicyclists.
The youngest and most vulnerable Portland school kids--including my own nephew and niece who attended Menlo Park Elementary a few years ago and who crossed Northeast 128th Avenue often in my protective hand twice a day--evidently enjoyed less favored status, safety-wise, from PBOT, than do Portland bicyclists.
Let that PBOT social engineering experiment sink in:
Recreational adult bicyclists over elementary school kids.
Comments