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Current Conditions and Safety
Broadway today is 52’ to 56’ feet wide between curbs. It has three general purpose travel lanes, a narrow striped bike lane, and on-street parking on both sides of the street. Between 17th and 26th Ave, it is as wide as 82nd Avenue. Today nearly all of the space on NE Broadway is programmed in a way that prioritizes the movement of vehicles through the district over all other modes of transportation.
There are also long gaps between pedestrian crossings on this section of NE Broadway. This is especially true on the project's eastern half, where there are fewer signals and gaps that range between 880ft-1140ft between signalized crossings. PedPDX, the City of Portland's Pedestrian Plan, calls for pedestrian friendly crossings roughly every 500ft in main street commercial environments such as this. These long gaps lead to pedestrian safety issues and less pedestrian activity generally.
This type of street design translates to:
- Too much space and capacity for vehicles to speed through the corridor.
- Real difficulty for pedestrians to safely cross the street at unsignalized intersections.
- A loud, unpleasant streetscape environment that doesn’t support sidewalk activity.
- A poor-quality and underutilized bike lane that is insufficient for most Portlanders to use.
- Too many and too severe traffic crashes.
Traffic Analysis
What we found through our technical modeling exercise confirmed what we were hearing from many of those who live near or work daily on NE Broadway: the street today is overbuilt for automobiles.
With each of the three travel lanes being able to carry 700 cars per hour, NE Broadway today is only using 50-60% of the total automobile capacity during peak travel hours (morning rush hour). It is extremely overbuilt during all other times of day. The following diagram shows the roads AM peak capacity at key intersections:
In the busiest section of Broadway, at the busiest time of day, two travel lanes is enough to serve car traffic today and in the future.
We found that if we were to eliminate the additional west-bound travel lane that is introduced at NE 24th Ave, the street would largely function well today and in the future, resulting in minimal localized diversion. Combined with right-sizing the travel lanes to meet current PBOT standards, this allows between 14ft - 18ft of roadway space to be reallocated along the corridor for community priorities.
More background information about existing conditions on NE Broadway is captured in the existing conditions summaries below:
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