Organizers of the James John Elementary School bike bus held a special Earth Day edition of their morning ride to school, and it was made even more special because of a temporary traffic diverter that kept car users off their route.
As I reported last month, there’s huge demand for the bike bus in the St. Johns and Cathedral Park neighborhoods. The one big thing stopping advocates from meeting it is that many families either don’t have a bike and/or don’t feel safe sharing the roads with drivers. James John Elementary school parents and school groups came together back in March to give out free bikes to kids and parents in need, and now they’ve taken concrete steps to make their route safer.
According to ride organizer Jessica Fletcher, they pulled off what the Portland Bureau of Transportation referred to in a meeting last week as a “community initiated diverter” this morning. Fletcher applied for and received a block party permit from PBOT and was able to prohibit drivers from turning on North Charleston between N Smith and N Hudson.
They used a combination of hay bales, “Street Closed” signs, and homemade bike bus route signs to communicate that drivers were not welcome. Further strengthening the route and the ride were PBOT’s brand new bike bus wayfinding signs that James John’s bike bus used for the first time. These signs were made possible thanks to a $50,000 grant delivered to PBOT from Metro that aims to shift travel trips away from cars.
“The diverter worked great,” Fletcher shared with BikePortland. “Our neighborhood association provided all the barricades and the ‘Street Closed’ signs. The SJNA [St Johns Neighborhood Association] and Cathedral Neighborhood Association are all about community and safe streets!”
To get the block party permit, Fletcher knocked on every door along the blocks and let them know what she was working on. She’s now sold on the idea of doing these quick and inexpensive diverters as a way to demonstrate their effectiveness and show how they are often well-supported by folks who live along bike bus routes.
Fletcher also enlisted the help of advocates at BikeLoud PDX, who showed up to help install the diverter and assist with the ride. Former city council candidate Nat West, Brendan Price, and active BikeLoud volunteer Joseph Perez were among the helpers. One of their jobs was to count car traffic as part of the PBOT-sanctioned diverter pilot program.
The cherry on top of this wonderful effort in St. Johns is that several of the students riding this morning received free bikes last month. Fletcher says a group of four fifth graders who received bikes ride their bikes to school every day (and even park their bikes in the racks together).
It’s so great to see how this bike bus effort in St. Johns has grown in such a relatively short time. It validates so much of what many advocates have been saying for years: if you just get bikes in the hands of those in need and make streets in their neighborhood safer to ride on, magical things will happen.
Way to go Jessica, Joe, Brendan, Nat, and everyone else who’s working on this project and many others around the city!
