"I hate this!"
“Yes, you can use my name. I DO hate this.”
Denise Meer, on Main Street in Medford, Oregon
The road to discord is paved with good intentions.
Today’s post is hyper-local. It is about striping the lanes on Main Street in Medford, Oregon.
Main Street was re-striped to encourage bicycle travel by making bicycling more convenient and safer. The state of Oregon gave the city of Medford a million dollars to do it. The new traffic pattern slowed traffic on Main Street, toward the goal of revitalizing downtown Medford as a business and commercial district. It made the prior three-lane, one-way Main Street less of a thru-fare and more of a destination for businesses and shoppers.
The strategy was to put a two-way bicycle path alongside the left curb in the place where cars would normally park. Then put a parking lane to the right of that, separated by traffic bollards. Then have two traffic lanes to the right of that -- one fewer lane than before.
The bicycle lane on the left looks like this:
Bike lane, then bollards, then parking lane, and travel lanes to the right.
The theory is that more people will travel by bicycle if it is safer and they are protected from traffic by parked cars. The goal is a farsighted, non-coercive, good-government solution toward a sustainable future, where bicycling was normalized.
Real life interferes. It turns out that parallel parking between a striped line and a bollard, without the cues of a curb, and with the possibility of bicycle traffic on one side and vehicle traffic from the rear on the other, gives people the willies when trying to park. I watched drivers attempt it. It requires parking in what feels like the middle of the street, while avoiding hitting a post.
I smiled and nodded encouragement at Denise Meer as I watched her park. I did my best not to look threatening or judgmental as she moved her car back and forth five times as she slid into the slot without hitting anything. Apparently I managed to look harmless, so she willingly rolled down her window and answered my question: “How to you like this parking arrangement?”
She said she hated it, as did every single person I have ever talked to about this innovation.
Medford’s eight-person City Council and mayor voted unanimously this week to end this experiment. The only disagreement within the Council was whether to go back to the former system, with three travel lanes, or to go to a modified system, with a dedicated bicycle lane on the right, with parking on the right curb, and two travel lanes. No more bollards.
Here is the diagram of the choices the City Council examined:
Two travel lanes would be more than enough to carry the traffic, but to break a four-four tie on in the council, the mayor voted to take option two, back to square one, thus assuring the public that city leaders got the message.
Oregon is a blue state. It has been a leader in encouraging good-for-us-all ideas. These include statewide land use planning, tight urban growth boundaries, subsidies for buses, road diets, demand that a new bridge over the Columbia River have mass transit, energy efficiency standards, access to abortion, DEI initiatives, trans athletes in high school women’s sports, expanded Medicaid, sanctuary for immigrants, tax credits for solar, tax credits for electric cars. The list goes on.
There is a risk to having the votes to win big. Government must not be too good for the people it governs. Few of us would choose chopped kale for dessert, even though it is better for us than typical desserts. Oregon Democrats risk that. It would have been possible to have retreated a half-step back, and keep the fully-adequate two lanes of traffic as shown in the Buffered Bike Lane option. But the public was fed up, so the city leaders demonstrated that they got the angry message and made a total retreat from bicycles having their own space.
There is risk in winning big. Democrats have a supermajority in the legislature. Why not run up the score when one has the votes? The reason to be tread carefully is that over-reach sows the seeds of its own destruction. People want what the want. People get angry and revolt.
Trump is making the same mistake. He claims a landslide mandate. He is running up his score with tariffs, Greenland, extorting media companies, ICE cruelty, Trump cryptocurrency cronyism and much, much more. His list goes on, too.
He is over-reaching and losing his mandate.
I rode my bike to work across town for many years and I have to say, the downtown reconfiguration looks like an unintended consequence of legalizing pot. But even if it had been a useful design, it covers such a short distance that the cost/benefit is lacking. Making Medford more bike and pedestrian friendly would be good for the environment and the residents, but it might help to make long-term plans patterned after places that have already done it, such as Boulder, Co. In fact, if some of the scenic country roads encircling our valley were upgraded a little, we could have an annual Tour de Rogue.
I think what bothers me the most about the E. Main St. traffic reconfiguration is that I knew nothing about it until it was done. That is in part because I no longer subscribe to the local paper. I tried the Rogue Valley Times for 3 years but always felt that I’m getting the same news three days in a row. I finally gave up my subscription. I rode my bike from the corner of East Main & Valley View to Jackson pool every day in the summertime for 3 years as a city lifeguard. I went down Jackson St. That was in the 70s. My confusion on the reconfiguration of E. Main St. was why they did not just extend the bike lane on Jackson Street all the way through to West McAndrews. It’s a straight shot and there’s already a bike lane on the right side of E. Jackson St….it could have been extended.