understanding Portland greenways

[Peter Dobratz]

OSM User nvk (from Mapzen) has been editing streets in Portland and other cities designated as a bicycle greenways by changing highway=residential to highway=living_street.  The intention was to cause their router software to not send cars on roads that have been designated as a greenway.

I've commented on a changeset (and also on the talk-us email list)

http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/46967476

My question is what makes a greenway in Portland different from any other residential road?

I see that PBOT is encouraging people to post yard signs "Greenways are not cut-through streets"

https://www.portlandoregon.gov/transportation/article/557196

Are cars actually not allowed to get from point A to point B with a greenway in the middle somewhere?

Is it wrong for router software to suggest a car route that includes a Portland greenway?

Perhaps in OSM the roads could be tagged with motor_vehicle=destination which would indicate that cars can't drive through.  But I'm not sure if that accurately reflects reality.

Peter

[Grant Humphries]

I know a law passed a couple of years ago that lowered speed limits on neighborhood greenways from 25 to 20 mph.  On the wiki there is no elaboration of what defines a living street in the US, but for several other countries having a speed limit of 20 is the defining characteristic so I can see the logic behind these changes in light of that.  As far as their router needing this change, these streets could already be identified by some combination of the tags highway=residential, cycleway=shared_lane and maxspeed=20 mph, so I think the important thing is that the edit is made because it best characterizes those ways, not because their router needed a hook.  This will have implications for bicycle routing for the TriMet trip planner as we viewed living streets as having speeds more like 10 mph and even lower traffic volumes, but if a neighborhood greenway is a more accurate example of a living_street making that adjustment should be fairly easy on our end.

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[Madeline Steele]

Thanks for initiating this conversation, Peter!

After some reading on Portland greenways and living_streets, my take on this is that a tag of motor_vehicle=destination is not appropriate, and living_streets is probably ok.

Regarding motor_vehicle=destination: the City is using traffic calming measures to discourage drivers from cutting through greenways, but there is no hard rule in place. I think the destination tag would be overly prescriptive.

As for living_streets, it seems like the designation is meant to be somewhat flexible based on location (i.e., "The tag maxspeed=* is implicit according to the rules of the country"). The city of Portland has a target speed of 20 miles per hour, which is about 50% above the top speed listed in the living_streets page (20 km per hour). However, there is quite a range in speed designations on that page (from 8 to 20 km per hour), and I don't think our maxspeed is so much higher that the tag shouldn't apply.

If we had a type of street that was even more protected and slowed than the greenways, then maybe we should reserve the tag for that and use something else for greenways. However, I'm not aware of such a street class in our region. Is anyone else?

Thanks much,

Madeline

[TC Haddad]

Regarding cut-through traffic, the situations I'm aware of are that many (most?) greenways are within a couple blocks of more primary routes, and at peak traffic times, there is a marked increase in people in cars diverting to parallel streets to get around certain lights or bottlenecks. Of course this is also when a lot of bike commuters are on the greenways, so it definitely causes dangerous conditions (especially if the driver doesn't know / understand they are now on a greenway).

It is of course legal for cars to be on greenways, but lots of speedy cutters are a pretty undesirable situation for a street that is supposed to be a safer space for bikes to travel.

Often the greenways have wide flat speed bumps, and so I don't know if this also factors in to the routing algorithms somehow? Seems like it should if it can. Also I would say that the segments of a greenway that connect around a "bottleneck" are especially vulnerable to abuse, so if you want the tagging to be more selective, focus on those areas.

Examples of "abused" segments I've heard about on message boards:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=17/45.46359/-122.65714

SE Umatilla between 6th and 13th

SE Spokane between 6th and 13th

Both of these get drivers around 2 sets of lights (@7th & @13th) on SE Tacoma, but are also important bike connectors to the Springwater Trail segments to the north and east. People who live on Umatilla witness a lot of near miss bike vs car situations. There used to be a bike shop at 13th and Umatilla, and that business actually had a running count going and would warn their customers (you'd think a greenway would be a nice safe place for a bike store, but...).

Tanya

[TC Haddad]

In reading a bit more I learned [2] Portland greenways go for these attributes:

1. Slow cars. Speed humps every 350 feet, and legal speed limits of 20 mph.
2. Few cars. Daily traffic counts are in the neighborhood of 1,000 or fewer. To maintain this, some intersections completely block through traffic by autos.
3. Easy crossings. Signs, medians and/or marked crosswalks at busy streets.
4. Useful signage. Sharrows in the center of the roadway and directional signs at key intersections.
5. Controlled intersections. Stop signs for every intersection, none facing the greenway unless necessary.

Interesting, but maybe doesn't help your tagging discussion. #2 and #5 would seem to make these routes attractive to car cut-through behavior if not otherwise address by #1...

Tanya

[1] http://www.peopleforbikes.org/blog/entry/portland-should-greenways-count-as-quality-bikeways

[2] http://www.peopleforbikes.org/blog/entry/portland-what-makes-a-great-neighborhood-greenway

[Peter Dobratz]

My main experience with living streets is in Germany, where they are nicknamed "playing streets".  They are all marked with standard signs, which depict children playing with a ball in the street in front of a car.  In order for this to be safe, the cars are required to go walking speed (about 3 mph) and must give priority to pedestrians who can roam throughout the entire street.

I feel like highway=living_street is very much a foreign concept that really doesn't exist in the US.  Pedestrians and cars are not meant to freely coexist on our roads.  Pedestrians are expected to walk either on sidewalks or along the far-left side of the road and only cross the road at intersections or marked crosswalks.

Generally, where people are using highway=living_street in the US, I feel it would be better to use one of the following:

• highway=residential
• highway=service
  service=driveway
• highway=service
  service=alley
• highway=pedestrian

The highway=pedestrian tag would be closest to highway=living_street in terms of ability for pedestrians to use the whole road surface.  However, these streets are closed to almost all motor vehicles most of the time.

As far as greenways, they seems to be geared toward bicycles with no special considerations for pedestrians (other than reducing the car traffic in general).  I wouldn't want to start a game of soccer in the middle of a Portland greenway with all the bicycle traffic.

In the general case of a greenway, we had:

roads:

highway=residential

cycleway=shared_lane

bicycle=designated

maxspeed=20 mph

route relations:

type=route

route=bicycle

network=lcn

In addition, we mark various traffic calming measures such as short highway=cycleway segments to pass through bicycle-only traffic islands.  There are also standard OSM tags for speed humps and stop signs.

I agree that we don't want motor_vehicle=destination if there isn't any official "no thru traffic" or "local traffic only" sign posted.

I'm thinking that the already well-established OSM tags are enough without needing to invent a new tag or re-purpose highway=living_street to describe a greenway.  Router software should be able to take into account all of the traffic calming devices tagged in OSM and route down other streets with higher speed limits.

I've noticed that in general speed limits around Portland have been reduced in various places and OSM may be out of date.  Some segments of the greenways may be tagged in OSM as "25 mph" but they are now signed as "20 mph".  Is there an official public record of the speed limits somewhere?

It's often cumbersome to map the speed limits because I'm usually walking along a small section of a road so just by looking at one speed limit sign I can't tell where that speed limit starts and stops.  I'll often just record a node next to the road with tags like highway=traffic_sign + maxspeed=25 mph + direction=WNW.

Peter

[TC Haddad]

I know Seattle recently dropped speed limits city-wide:

http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/slow-down-seattle-speed-limits-drop-but-officials-allow-grace-period-before-fines/

and there was talk of a push to get the same in Portland eventually (other cities are doing it too). That would make tagging easier, but for now I assume there must be a source at the city that has this info?

[Madeline Steele]

Hi all, 

Peter, thanks for the clarification on why you prefer not to use the "living_streets" tag in Portland. That all seems fair, though it's probably worth pointing out the Germany seems to have an atypically slow speed limit on such streets based on the table on the tag's wiki entry. Still, I think there is a fundamental lack of consensus on what a "living_street" really is that would make it very challenging for people in our region to apply the tag systematically. I think that the other tags you mentioned that describe street type, speed limits, bike routes, etc., are more concrete and provide a firmer foundation for routing.

It would be pretty quick work for me to query out and remove all the "living_street" tags in the area, if people think that's appropriate. What's your take?

As for your question about speed limits, Tanya, yes, I think they are out of date in many places, though we at TriMet do attempt to update them when we hear about a change and can fix them accurately without a survey. Surprisingly, it seems that there is not an easily accessible government dataset of speed limits for the area. A friend of mine who used to work at Metro ran into this issue, and said that the best thing currently available are some PDF maps from ODOT. At some point, when we're a bit less busy with other priorities, we would like to look into this and try to get this updated (unless someone else gets to it first).

Thanks much,

Madeline

[Cone, Paul]

PBOT has been working on a speed limit layer, though I believe it doesn't have every street -- just the ones that have speed zone orders from ODOT.  I'm cc'ing some PBOT colleagues who know more. 

Paul

-------------------------------------------
Paul Cone
Corporate GIS
Bureau of Technology Services
City of Portland, Oregon
paul...@portlandoregon.gov
(503) 823-4071

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From: osm...@googlegroups.com <osm...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Madeline Steele <madelin...@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 4, 2017 11:59:32 AM
To: osm...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: understanding Portland greenways

 

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[Richard Crucchiola]

It appears that Washington County has taken the same approach as PBOT regarding speed limits mapping.  We only map speed limits by exception (State Speed Review Board orders).  Everything else falls under the basic rules category (extracted text below).

 

 

State statutes give Oregon motorists the following speed zone standards:

·         15 mph-alleys, narrow residential roadways

·         20 mph-business districts, school zones

·         25 mph-residential districts, public parks, ocean shores

·         55 mph-open and rural highways (all vehicles);  trucks, school buses, worker transport buses on interstate highways

·         65 mph-autos on interstate highways

 

Posted speeds override these statutory standards.

 

 

Richard Crucchiola | Senior GIS Analyst
Washington County, Dept. of Land Use & Transportation

Engineering and Construction Services Division

1400 SW Walnut Street, MS18 | Hillsboro, OR 97123
503.846.7839 direct 

richard_c...@co.washington.or.us

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[McEwen, Kirk]

Like Washington County, PBOT GIS staff map speed limits by exception, including speed limits implemented by order as well as statutory limits for business districts, neighborhood greenways, and school zones. Most street segments have no posted speed, and the statutory speeds that Richard outlined apply. You can find PBOT’s speed limit data exposed in this public map service: https://www.portlandmaps.com/arcgis/rest/services/Public/Transportation/MapServer

 

Thanks,

 

Kirk

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Kirk McEwen | GIS Technician 3

Bureau of Transportation | City of Portland

503.823.7179 | kirk....@portlandoregon.gov

 

The City of Portland complies with all non‐discrimination, Civil Rights     laws including Civil Rights Title VI and ADA Title II. To help ensure equal access to City programs, services and activities, the City of Portland will reasonably modify policies/procedures and provide auxiliary aids/services to persons with disabilities. Call 503-823-5185, TTY 503-823-6868 or Oregon Relay Service: 711 with such requests, or visit http://bit.ly/13EWaCg

[Peter Dobratz]

Madeline,

I'm in favor of removing the highway=living_street and changing them back to highway=residential or highway=service as appropriate.

Peter

[Peter Dobratz]

There's a map by ITO World to visualize existing speed limits in OSM:

http://product.itoworld.com/map/124?lon=-122.65166&lat=45.50017&zoom=13&fullscreen=true

25 mph and under show as green on the map, but you can click on the roads to see the actual OSM tags.

According to the PBOT map both SE Umatilla and SE Spokane are 20 mph zones for their entire length in Sellwood, but only part of SE Spokane is tagged as maxspeed=20 mph in OSM.

Also near there on SE Tacoma St, the PBOT map shows 30 mph, but I remember seeing at least one 25 mph sign there.  I'll have to swing by there again and take some pictures.

Peter

richard_crucchiola@co.washington.or.us

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[TC Haddad]

Just posting this so that it gets attached to the thread:

https://bikeportland.org/2017/04/14/portland-is-now-one-step-closer-to-a-20-mph-default-residential-speed-limit-224965

richard_c...@co.washington.or.us