A New Study for Front Street, Lingering Questions on McGilchrist

On Monday, acting as the Urban Renewal Agency, Council will consider a proposal for a new study on Front Street just north of the Union Street Bridge.

Imagining Front Street at Market Street

You will recall the recent excitement over the prospect of redeveloping the cannery site on Front at Market Street. (Previous notes here.) 

The City proposes to budget $250,000 in unallocated Urban Renewal funding for two studies, $150,000 for a new one on Front Street and $100,000 to update the grocery store study from 2018:

The Front Street multi-modal project encompasses the corridor that will link the Downtown area to the Cannery property project north of the URA. The corridor is impacted by the rail line, a potential trail, a pedestrian bridge over Mill Creek, and bicycle accommodation, which all need to be accounted for during the planning phase and before the developer finalizes plans. The grocery store update is to refresh data from the 2018 analysis in the Riverfront-Downtown URA given increased development completed and underway.

With the railroad, and the desires for housing and for substantial retail and recreation amenities, reconfiguring Front Street will be a challenge - but a worthy one!

That study will probably have a public process and hopefully direct conversation about trade-offs and different notions of balancing all the user types.

It is possible to imagine a lively district there in 2050.

By contrast, it is much harder to imagine a lively district along McGilchrist in 2050. 

This is one of the things that hampers discussion of McGilchrist. Certainly in the nearish term, say 2030 or 2033, even with terrific bike lanes and sidewalks, there is not going to be a high volume of people walking or rolling there, even with the brewery district, the Social Security office, and Veterans clinic. Non-auto travel will remain occasional rather than constant. So from that standpoint it may not be the best place for the City to focus on state-of-the-art bike lanes and sidewalks.

Further out, it's harder to imagine conditions on McGilchrist in 2050. Will robot trucks be the main user? Technological change may impact that area more than downtowns, where the basic act of something like eating in a restaurant remains tethered to the forms of our embodied existence.

But even granting that truck and auto traffic will remain primary on McGilchrist, speed remains a concern.

Over on FB, Commissioner Slater posted 15 theses from the meeting, representing the City position. Most of them seem broadly true and accurate, thought it is possible to quibble with some of them on smaller matters of degree and detail. But the whole seems driven by a tone of "Look at how much bigger it could be. Be thankful for the concessions we have already made." The lack of a public conversation about what we want from McGilchrist shows here.

I want to look more closely at two of the theses and to contest them a little, maybe more for future conversations and studies, for the "next time," rather than for McGilchrist itself:

• The current professional understanding is that it is safer for bikes to cross intersections on the street, which is how this street is designed.
• The engineer who did the design believes that speeds will average 30-35 mph.

Here is an enlarged detail from the plan at 22nd Street. (Comments in red and pink added.)

Eastbound on McGilchrist at 22nd
(red and pink comments added)

One concern is the set of ramps and transitions between the multi-use path and the short segment of on-street, paint-only bike lane at intersections.

Even ODOT says, "don't weave"
(Oregon Bicycling Manual)

The ramp transitions will create a kind of weaving, a deviation from straight through-lines, and this introduces an element of unpredictability for drivers and adds zones they must attend to when checking for other users of the road.

Just considering parallel travel, and not any cross-traffic, drivers will need to look at the lines along the multi-use path, the segment of bike lane, and also the crosswalk. Cross-travel will add more places to look.

This is one reason we are seeing the crossbike immediately adjacent to a crosswalk. It concentrates the non-auto travelers in one general zone (even with separate crosswalk and crossbike) and makes them easier to see. Recent installations on Wallace Road and the Commercial/Division/Front charlie foxtrot use the side-by-side configuration.

Crossbike and crosswalk on Wallace at Edgewater
(June 2022)

The City's defense of the transition from multi-use path to bike lane segment and then in-line through the intersection deserves more scrutiny. Protected bike lanes work well with protected intersections, and the City's comment dodges the matter of protected intersections.

Then there is the matter of the large radius turns. The large turning radius conflicts with and may even wholly cancel any benefit from an in-line bike lane.

Again, it's true freight is driving the design of McGilchrist. Still, it is a city street, with the brewery district and other hoped-for destinations there will be more people walking and rolling, even if not lots of people, and the position here is we should not want people taking fast turns.

NACTO pretty consistently argues for turning movements under 10mph in urban contexts. (See also how the crossbike and crosswalk are clustered in the diagram.)

NACTO and slower turns (yellow added)

As for "average speeds," this is a dangerously seductive formula.

At any given average speed lots of people are going faster!

Here's a clip from an official ODOT speed study conducted on 17th Street between Mission Street and Silverton Road in late 2020.

ODOT speed study on 17th in 2020

See previously in 2021:

• "City Council, March 8th - Speed Zones and our Autoism"
• "Latest Dangerous by Design Report is Good Context on 17th and 45th Street Speeds"

The street was mostly posted for 30mph, though one segment was for 25mph. It's also mostly two auto through-lanes with a center turn lane. So at least somewhat comparable to the new McGilchrist cross-section. But it's also residential.

Its median speed was 32mph. 71% went faster than the posted speed of 30mph (and even more in the 25mph zone). Some are just barely going faster, but some are going much faster.

The industrial nature and vacant land use along McGilchrist will prompt more speed, especially if it is not posted for 30mph and is posted for 40mph instead.

Design speed and probable user speed deserve much more scrutiny here.

For more, again, see NACTO's discussion of protected intersections.

It may not be worthwhile to dig in on McGilchrist, since it will remain industrial rather than fully urban, but the way the City is approaching that debate and analysis suggests Staff still look retrospectively to 20th century standards and are not yet embracing our 21st century needs on climate and safety. Hopefully this new study on Front Street can buck that trend.