Editorial: Bend bike hopes run into budget reality

Published 5:00 am Thursday, February 23, 2023

Biking on Wilson Avenue on Bend’s east side got a lot better recently. There’s a roundabout at 9th Street that is more bike-friendly. And because of built-in plastic cones lining the street there is a nice stretch of road where the bike lanes are buffered from cars.

It should make it safer for cars, bikes and pedestrians.

The improvements came at a price. The work on Wilson had cost overruns.

The roundabout’s cost went over earlier estimates, in part because the city did a different design. Assistant City Manager Russ Grayson said Wednesday he thought the cost was about $1 million over.

Improvements east of the roundabout on Wilson also went over the budget estimate. For the section of Wilson from 9th Street to 15th Street, the city’s original estimate was that it would cost about $2.2 million. That was for a shared-use path and a low-stress bike lane.

But after conversations with stakeholders and councilors, the decision was made to do more. The city ended up rebuilding the Wilson corridor from 9th to 15th. The actual cost was $3.5 million.

Expectations and hopes exceeded budgets. That Wilson kind of problem may lead to more problems unless councilors and staff rethink what they are doing. City staff realized that and met with a city council subcommittee Wednesday to figure out what to do.

Already staff has gotten feedback that its plans in other parts of town don’t do enough for bike safety. Grayson said there is a hope from some members of the public that the city will be doing protected bike lanes or even separate bike paths wide enough for two-way traffic all around town.

“We don’t have the budget or the existing policy direction” to get us there, Grayson said.

There was only so much money in the 2020 transportation GO bond and only so much was directed to bike safety. And the city’s transportation system has other needs.

The councilors at Wednesday’s meeting — Anthony Broadman, Barb Campbell and Megan Norris — seemed very clear they wanted to fulfill what was promised to voters in the 2020 bond for cars, bikes, pedestrians and transit.

And what they also talked about doing is setting up a process for a city committee to vet some of the transportation policy choices the city faces and make recommendations to council.

Should the city pick a few routes, put more money in them and make them as bike safe as the new Wilson section? Which routes should it pick? When there is a nearby off-street path, is that enough or should the city also have a buffered bike lane on that street?

Bend’s network of bike paths is a patchwork. Some places you might feel safe letting a child bike alone. In other places, it can feel like you should have reconfirmed your health insurance coverage before you started pedaling.

You may disagree, but to us it seems like the city should have a few crosstown routes with maximized safety and then the city should look at improving the worst places to ride bikes to get to and from those routes. That’s so easy for us to say and much harder for the city to pull off in a way that will please everyone.

You should expect that this policy tension over how much to do for bikes will feed into the coming debate over a city transportation utility fee.