City crafts 20-year transportation plan

The plan focuses on all modes of transportation

By Mathew Graham

The Clackamas Review, Nov 13, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

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Heather Andrews used to determine whether she’d come to Milwaukie by calculating her chances of survival.

“Biking north of my house and biking south of my house, I would always think about the death factor – basically how safe I would feel going to either of these places, depending on time of the day, day of the week, whether it was heavy rain,” she said.

Much of the time Andrews, who primarily travels by bike, said she would choose to go north toward Portland if she could because of Milwaukie’s poor biking conditions. So when Milwaukie officials announced that they would be revising the city’s transportation system plan (TSP), Andrews figured she should get involved.

Milwaukie’s TSP is an analysis of the city’s transportation conditions and an overhaul of its future transportation plans. City council will hold public hearings on the TSP Dec. 4 and 18 and is expected to adopt the new TSP in December, culminating a project that city planners will have worked on for over a year.

Andrews, who has been commuting by bike for 10 years, lives in a pocket north of Milwaukie and south of Portland. As she says, “I pay my taxes to Clackamas County, have a Portland zip code and am in the Milwaukie school district.”

She said that the problems in Milwuakie are with both street conditions and other users of the road.

“Linwood does have a pretty wide bike lane, but people park in it a lot, and there are parts where the asphalt is really sub-par, where it’s like going over a washboard surface … And then King Road actually has some sections where even though there’s a bike lane there, there’s sections where the bike lane’s not there,” she said.

“An overall issue with biking in and around Milwaukie is how other road users treat you, because there aren’t a lot of bicyclists really … cars tend to make assumptions there they may not make a little closer in to SE Portland, and it can lead to some difficult situations … of course everybody’s reading about the deaths that happened (in Portland) … I’m kind of surprised that wouldn’t have happened a little farther out first. I have had some close calls in and around Milwaukie.”

A vision for the city

One of the overriding themes that came out in the TSP, both with biking and traffic in general, is connectivity.

“Milwaukie is a developed city with a largely incomplete street network,” city planning director Katie Mangle told the city commission in October.

So when the city received funding from the state to update the TSP, city planners decided to overhaul the old plan rather than just update it.

First they assessed the state of the city’s transportation network, including streets, bike and pedestrian accessibility, public transport, freight routes and more. Then they generated projections of the kind of traffic Milwaukie can expect over the next 20 years and started looking for the best ways to guide the city toward development.

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