Quote:
Originally Posted by johnliu
Anyone hearing anything about plans to improve Sandy? Anyone want to hazard a guess how much more development on Sandy will be required to get the road improved?
Sandy is a very useful diagonal connection and thousands of apartments are in development on and near it, just from 12th to Hollywood. But the road itself is basically a car sewer. No bike lanes, few safe crossing points, few street trees.
I live near Sandy and ride my bike on the street. I am usually the only cyclist I see on the street.
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I hear you. There are few poorer street designs than 4 lanes with no median through an urban environment. In the doc below you'll see that 744 crashes on Sandy were rear-enders (40% of the total), which is a direct function of the design. Be thankful they're rare in Pland. DDOT (DC) loves them.
Sandy has been the object of MANY plans with little fruition. Here's
one. It is, of course, a
high crash network road, which includes most of the arterials in Portland. Here's the Sandy
plan back in 2014.
To be as straightforward as possible, there is little to no hope that the current administration will decide on an evidenced-based, NACTO-informed reconstruction of Sandy. And keep in mind part of the reason historically Sandy has not been considered for a road diet could be its potential future as a streetcar route.
Perhaps in the future Sandy will get the same treatment as Foster's planned 4->3 conversion lane design, which is certainly an improvement but far from the gold standard based on research (ie PBLs and protected intersections with median crossings). As with any radical safety redesigns, the pattern that seems to occur (and happened very recently in
BKlyn with a couple kids) is the following:
1. A person(s) is killed
2. A large enough group protests
3. A political figure decides to change the street