[jdeibele]

Portland is supposed to be one of the most bike-friendly cities in the United States. What the city has done is paint bike outlines on streets that are supposed to be mostly for bikes.

It's supposed to be about every 10 blocks north-south and much further apart east-west. Downtown for most of the city is west. Every few streets there might be something that blocks cars (signage or physical barriers) or is supposed to slow them down (bumps, planters in the center of an intersection).

One problem is that they're not dedicated to bikes. So you're sharing the street with other cars. And it's gotten worse because the city is cutting 4-lane feeder streets down to 2 lanes. They call it "traffic calming", which is not what most people would call it. So frustrated drivers are moving over to residential streets and zooming down them as fast as they can.

It really seems like a lost opportunity to take the extra lanes and make them dedicated bike lanes. Have bollards in them that prevent cars from using them.

[beerandt]

One of our local major surface streets went through this, but it was sold as helping make it more of a trendy shopping/market street.

4 lanes (2+2) reduced to 3 (1+1+turning).

People have been fawning over the proposal for years, and are only now realizing what a disaster it is.

And the businesses that thought they were getting a boost, end up with traffic counts cut by more than half, since people now avoid the purposely created congestion.