Around 2010, the city of Portland made an annoying change to the signage on Klickitat street: they changed the location of the stop sign so that traffic going on NE 17th Avenue had to stop instead of traffic on Klickitat. As someone who passed that intersection most days on my way to school, I was quite peeved. Since I was in middle school and wasn’t really plugged into city politics, I had no idea why they would have made a change like that, seemingly designed specifically to annoy me.

It wasn’t until I started high school that I noticed the difference: traveling to and from my new school – going east and west on Klickitat now, instead of north and south on 17th – I had almost no stop signs, and taking Klickitat was basically as fast as nearby Fremont street, a busy arterial, but without having to share the road with car traffic.

Around that time you could see “sharrows” cropping up around town. A sharrow is a white bike symbol topped with a triple chevron to indicate drivers should share the road with cyclists. That’s silly, I remember thinking. Drivers don’t read, and there’s way they’ll actually share with us. Others generally agree, as far as I can tell.

But something you can see biking around the city these days is that sharrows aren’t for them; they’re for us. Portland has made a series of incremental improvements over the last decade to get us to a point where in large swathes of the city seeing a sharrow on a road means you’re guaranteed a pleasant, low traffic trip, with proper protected bike infrastructure anywhere the route intersects with an arterial. In a lot of ways it feels like the city has built a network of bike freeways, in places people want to bike, with roads they actually want to bike on.

This is what the city calls the neighborhood greenway project, and in my opinion it’s one of the greatest traffic projects in American history. You can see in PBOT’s map that greenways aren’t just extensive, they form an actual network of bike friendly streets around the city:

You can also see in a lot of places direct examples of how PBOT has gone far beyond just signage to make sure greenways are prioritizing bike and foot traffic over cars. Here’s an example on SE Clinton, where you can see the original street, then a temporary traffic diversion, then a permanent diversion emerge over the course of a couple years, thanks to historical Google Maps street view photos:

It’s interesting to come across writing from the start of the greenway project criticizing PBOT for not focusing more on arterials, like this very gently critical Bike Portland post:

While you can quibble (I have, and we should) with their prioritizing of backstreets over working for higher-profile, physical separation on central city arterials and commercial main streets, the focus and effort PBOT is making on neighborhood streets is laudable and very exciting.

I also would have quibbled about prioritizing backstreets at the time; like I mentioned at the start of the post, I was young and not very plugged into city politics but I was still a pretty active cyclist and I too would have preferred better protected lanes for traveling to and around downtown.

But I and probably a lot of other people underestimated how impactful the greenway network would be, at least in the inner city. I don’t think I could have imagined, in 2011, the 2022 reality of not caring about bike lanes on arterial streets because I essentially never have to ride on arterials.

The concern about PBOT potentially deprioritizing protected bike lanes where they’re needed doesn’t seem to have materialized either; we still got Better Naito Forever, another really impressive piece of bike infrastructure in downtown where protected bike lanes are actually needed.

Greenways, like anything, definitely aren’t perfect. You can see in the map from earlier that they’re not evenly distributed, and East Portland in particular is left as it often is without the same quality of infrastructure as the wealthier inner city. I’m also not sure greenways have quite the same benefit for less experienced cyclists as they do for frequent riders; it took me at least a little while to get used to navigating using sharrows and route markers, and I worry others might not be as invested in figuring the system out. Overall, the city needs significant increases in cycling mode share that haven’t materialized yet to meet its climate goals.

Even with those issues though, they’re still a great reminder that progress is possible. It was really powerful reading about the history of the greenway program and realizing just how recent most of this infrastructure is, and seeing improvements show up every year to make my life better in concrete ways (no pun intended). If you want to feel good about biking again and get a sense of what’s possible in the world of transportation policy, I’d highly recommend taking a ride on your local greenway.

Author’s note: if you like greenways or cycling but don’t follow Portland politics closely, you should be aware that all of the progress we’ve made in the last decade is in danger this November. Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty is facing a competitive race against a far-right candidate who could potentially undermine every improvement in transportation policy that we’ve seen with Hardesty as the head of the transportation bureau. Consider donating today to her reelection campaign if you have the resources.