Jamey Evenstar
Council - District 4
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Q1 A city to learn from
What city has an approach to transportation that Portland should learn from? What specific policies, funding, design, etc., could be adopted to work here?
Portland should get serious about moving toward a transportation system that does not automatically build car-focused roads as the venue for sharing public space with cyclists and pedestrians. Cities like Barcelona have used superblocks to route through-traffic to the perimeter and reclaim interior streets as plazas and slow local space. Filtered permeability, using modal filters so bikes and pedestrians pass through but cars take the long way around, does something similar at a smaller, cheaper scale. We should learn where in Portland's complete neighborhoods this could work, particularly in areas we're upzoning, so density and street design are being planned together rather than treating the road network as fixed.
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Q2 Got it right, got it wrong
What is one specific Portland transportation project (built, abandoned, under construction, or proposed) that you think Portland got right, and one that Portland got wrong?
As the lead developer of the Rose Lane Project, I think that is one we got right. We used a root cause analysis to demonstrate that Black commuters spend an annual average of a week longer in traffic than the average white commuter so we built the citywide plan to address that instead of using traffic patterns and traffic congestion data to determine which bus lines to prioritize. The transportation project I think PBOT got wrong is the bike lane on Williams Ave. I believe it contributed to the gentrification of the neighborhood. I know this is controversial, but when I worked in PBOT, I created an anti-displacement toolkit for planning and the bike lane in Williams fits into the category of projects that are on the higher end of the risk scale because it was built for outsiders to move through the neighborhood instead of being built for people who live within the neighborhood to connect to their resources of health, wealth, and education.
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Q3 Progress on biking, walking & safety
Is Portland making progress on getting more people biking and walking, and on making streets safer? What do you think is behind that trajectory?
I'll speak to biking specifically since I am not sure about walking and streets. The number of Portlanders riding bikes is mostly flat. I attribute that to our current bike plan that prioritizes the bike commuter who travels along an interconnected cross-city system. That leaves out the vast majority of people like me who are middle aged out-of-shape parents who just want to get to the local taquería. It also presumes that people who bike will choose that mode for every distance, but we can do a much better job of connecting bike infrastructure to transit infrastructure. So we should redesign the plan so it connects people within their own neighborhoods to their own local resources and so that it helps solve the first mile, last mile problem for transit.
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Q4 How they get around
How do you actually get around Portland day-to-day? Commuting, errands, evening plans, etc. What is the last trip you took by bike or transit, and what's stopping you from doing more of your trips that way?
I have been a car-free transit rider for the last nine years. I take the bus and train everywhere I go, every single day. I would like to get on a bike more, but I am a little intimidated, tbh. Would love a bike buddy!