Bike Plan Wobbles Along
Cycling advocates say draft needs pumping up
T
he city of Eugene is moving
forward with a draft plan that
envisions doubling cycling
in 20 years with bike lanes
on south Willamette Street, a
separated cycle track on High
Street, a bridge over Beltline
and miles of “bike boulevards.”
But many other important bike projects are missing and
the draft has disappointed many in the bike community
who say they fear that it lacks teeth to actually make the
big shift to the greener, healthier, more livable and cheaper
mode of transportation.
“I’m very disappointed in the plan,” said Fred Tepfer, a
UO planner involved in bike advocacy for decades in Eugene.
The proposed new policies are “weak” and “asleep,” he said
at a meeting of the city’s Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory
Committee (BPAC) last week. “Business as usual could fi t
very well into the goals that are stated.”
“I think this plan has got to have teeth in it,” said BPAC
member Judi Horstmann. If the City Council decides to
remove tough policies, “then we can fi ght there,” she said.
The bike plan, the large part of the city’s new Eugene
Pedestrian and Bicycle Master Plan, has already generated
record citizen interest with more than 900 comments during
its development this spring. The early draft of the plan will
go out for public comment this month and is expected to be
fi nalized with City Council approval by the end of the year.
But despite citizen enthusiasm for the issue, Eugene’s
draft plan comes across fl at by comparison to Portland’s.
That city’s new bike plan touts the social, environmental
and economic benefi ts of quadrupling biking in the city.
“You just can’t get a better transportation return on your
investment than you get with promoting bicycling,” the
plan quotes Portland Mayor Sam Adams.
But Eugene’s dryly worded plan contains only vague
proposed policies that largely correspond to existing city
policies without calling for measurable increases in city
efforts and results to increase cycling.
The draft plan states that doubling bike trips by 2031
is a “vision,” but it doesn’t say whether it’s a city policy.
Nor does it say how to measure bike trips. Eugene now
has a bike commute mode share of 11 percent, the highest
percentage for a city of its size or larger in the nation,
according to the U.S. Census.
The plan doesn’t explicitly state that the city’s policy is
to double that number to 22 percent in two decades, still
well below many cities in Europe now. Nor does the plan
state an interim 2021 goal of a 50 percent increase.
There’s a call for reduced bike theft, but no measurement
of by what percentage. In the past, Eugene has been rated
by Kryptonite as one of the worst cities in the nation for
bike theft. Nor does the plan call for actual increased police
efforts or new laws to reduce theft.
The plan calls for developing programs to shift from
driving to biking, but it doesn’t say how. New York and cities
in Europe are now pursuing policies to make driving and
parking more diffi cult and expensive to encourage alternative
modes like biking. Portland’s new bike plan calls for “making
bicycling more attractive than driving for short trips.”
“We don’t have disincentives” in the plan, Eugene
transportation planner Rob Inerfeld admitted.
“Most transportation system plans would have both”
incentives and disincentives, Tepfer said. “If it’s just
incentives, we never get there.”
“What’s in the plan to get people out of their cars?”
agreed BPAC member Harriet Behm.
Tepfer noted that limiting parking has been an important
part of the UO’s success in increasing biking and other
alternative modes.
Even the city’s old TransPlan from 20 years ago
(that the new bike plan is meant to improve) includes
policies calling for reducing parking through “maximum
allotments,” paid parking and “increasing parking fi nes.”
12 JULY 21, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
BY ALAN PITTMAN
“They can’t afford it,” said BPAC member David
Gizara, of the UO’s decision not to provide more parking.
Gizara said Eugene also can’t afford all the new parking
and roads to serve cars. “We can’t afford individual autos
anymore. They are bankrupting cities.”
The proposed plan also lacks a hierarchy of modes that
would prioritize scarce funding and right-of-way space for
increased cycling. “The UO has had a transportation policy
since 1977 that says that,” Tepfer said.
The plan does not prioritize bicyclist safety over the
storage of private vehicles in the public right of way.
Parking removal has been a big hurdle to many planned
Eugene bike safety projects in the past.
The draft also does not prioritize bicyclist safety over
small delays in traffi c speeds caused by removing car lanes
for bike facilities.
The plan does not change city policy prioritizing limited
fl exible federal funds for asphalt maintenance projects over
cyclist safety projects.
The bike plan calls for the city to “obtain stable and
diverse resources” for bike projects but doesn’t give a
dollar amount or a percentage of transportation funding to
spend on bikes. Currently, about 2 percent of planned local
transportation spending goes to bike projects, well below
their 11 percent mode share.
The draft plan also does not have:
• A call for measurable decreases in vehicle miles
traveled per capita (VMT), unlike the old TransPlan and
the state Transportation Planning Rule
• A policy of 24 percent of future local transportation
funding measures to go to biking to match the city’s mode
share goal
• Measurable, specifi c increases in density and reduced
urban sprawl to increase biking. The old TransPlan noted
that the city’s housing sprawl and lack of density “limits
the effectiveness” of efforts to increase alternative modes.
• A percentage reduction in obesity from active
transportation. The city has already mapped obesity
using DMV records (see “fat map”) as part of its study of
“20-Minute Neighborhoods” to promote biking and walking.
• A policy of increasing cyclist satisfaction with road
safety as measured by a question inserted into the city’s
annual citizen survey
• A specifi c total mileage of bike infrastructure to build,
nor monitoring of progress toward that goal
• A policy of reducing serious and fatal bike crashes by
a certain percentage
• A calculation of a total bike safety defi cit in unbuilt
infrastructure similar to the city’s much-hyped street repair
backlog total and a policy in reducing the safety backlog
by a certain percentage over time
• A calculation or goal for transportation spending saved
by the use of far less costly cycling
Planner Inerfeld admitted the policy section of the draft
plan needed work and invited BPAC members to send
suggestions. But he said the city may need a “broader
conversation” about disincentives. “When we try to ram
things through from just one perspective, we get more
pushback,” he said.
The proposed plan has a confusing array of sometimes
overlapping lists and maps of “proposed,” “recommended,”
“priority” and “future” bike projects.
It appears that only the small “priority” list matters
much because they “should be given funding priority” to
build during the next 20 years, the plan states. The “future”
projects “will be implemented beyond the 20-year planning
horizon of this plan,” the document states. There’s nothing
on when the many “proposed” or “recommended” projects
will be implemented, if ever.
The priority list (see priority map) includes several
key projects that cyclists have been requesting for years,
including:
• Willamette Street bike lanes from Donald to 18th
Avenue. The city recently obtained a state grant that it could
use to study actually adding the safety improvement that
has already been in city transportation plans for decades.
• A High Street separated cycle track to connect the
Amazon bike trail to the river
• An over-crossing of Beltline near North Eugene High
School
FAT
MAP
BODY MASS INDEX
FROM DRIVERS’ LICENSES
WWW.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM • BLOGS.EUGENEWEEKLY.COM