February 2026 round up -- please help a newbie get up to speed

[Clayton Hopkins]

Hi PBPAC, I'm Clayton. I moved to Portland in August and came to my first PBPAC meeting in January. I've been on a BPAC in Illinois and have been a member of several local coalitions in San Francisco, Oakland, and St. Louis. Excited to get involved as a new Portlander. At a glance: I bike commute to work, gravel bike, ride with Gear Hub on the weekly Thursday social rides in the warm months, and love to urban walk and hike. What I hope to be better prepared for is winter biking by next year since I need to upgrade to warmer gear. 

Help me and fellow newbies out - I'm trying to get up to speed with PBPAC and the local scene:  

1. How would you describe PBPAC's priorities right now? 
2. To you, if you could only say one thing, what is the most meaningful 'thing' that PBPAC has done in the past?  
3. Do we need a member to help own website and social media updates? If so, I'm a web designer and would love to get involved. 

I ask #1 in particular because as a newbie, it's always hard to get my head around where a group's efforts are focused. So far, it seems like this group is super detail oriented in terms of communicating with the mayor's office, advocating with both the city and MaineDOT), tracking crashes (cyclist deaths in particular, which is so tragic), and promoting surveys.   

Thanks and see ya at the Feb 16 meeting,

Clayton

[Damon Yakovleff]

Welcome Clayton! Nice to have you with the group. I've been involved for almost 2 decades now and it's been very rewarding.

To me the biggest accomplishment of the group is not one thing, but rather a sum total of detail-oriented infrastructure and policy improvements. Progress has been incremental, but meaningful. If I had to pick one thing, through, it would be be the sidewalk snow clearing policy improvements.

As far as priorities go, I think our annual priorties posted on the website are a great starting point. I am sure some website help would be welcome!

To add to the list of things we do, we have also conducted numerous ride and walk audits with city staff, Coucilors, and other elected officials. The audits usually go with a report. They are often well attended and a great opportunity to engage and to highlight specific infrastructure gaps in a neighborhood or corridor.

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[Zack Barowitz]

Hi Clayton! Thanks for introducing yourself. We just went through our biannual goal setting which one of the officers will share. Two of my current priorities are:

1. Continuing to the develop the TSP Report (Transportation Plan Supergroup) to present to the city when they hire a consultant to do the comprehensive plan. Your tech skills would be helpful.

2. In August I'd like to start organizing a "How to Ride Through Winter Fashion Show"

Aside from sidewalk snow, some of our ongoing priorities include:

- Pushing the dime are the numerous major projects that are moving along at the speed of a glacier 

- Redoing the street design manual

- Recreating the Street Design Manual

- Eliminating road deaths (Vision Zero)

Cheers!

Zack

207-838-6120

917-696-5649
ZacharyBarowitz.com

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[winston.lumpkins]

Hi Clayton, 
Welcome!  

First of all, my apologies as we've been better organized and a tiny bit easier to get up to speed with in the past; hopefully we can work through some of our issues tomorrow night!  
Second, what's important to know is that we're a democratic organization: after your second meeting you're in: our work is decided by the passion and capacity of our membership.  

To me our biggest accomplishments are yet to come, and take the form of significantly impacting design choices that the city and it's consultants are making based on our walk and ride audit reports, which can be found here:  https://www.portlandbikeped.org/documents 
They have been having an impact, though most of that impact has been to plans which have not yet become reality.  They are big and take a lot of volunteer time to pull off, both in planning the events, and more than that, in creating detailed collaborative reports.  Many hands make light work, unless they all disagree, then it's more like many hands make a lot of work for the facilitator :) :(.  

For me our priorities are very simply: push to make the goals we debated and adopted at the last meeting a reality.  
In too much detail here: https://www.portlandbikeped.org/priorities-2026 

1. Implement a participatory crash response protocol.
2. Adopt a maximum speed limit of 20 miles per hour.
3. Improve traffic signal configurations.
4. Improve sidewalk and bike lane snow clearing.
5. Continue to improve our public transit experience by improving service frequency, quality and accessibility.

We are also still pushing on these 3 from last year: 
Establish a Complete Streets Board by ordinance (we aren't enough, being an ad-hoc unofficial often ignored committee)

Create a Street Design Manual. 

and 
Hire a Sustainable Transportation Manager.

For various reasons this will  be a challenge, even though it really shouldn't be.  Portland really needs PBPAC if it can possibly achieve any of it's safety or climate goals... 

[Zack Barowitz]

Link to Vets Bridge memo

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ziP8DCKEhWCCR7Zmje6-tqnlunut1tjZazo5Gr8I6Lc/edit?usp=sharing

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/PBPAC/e08a7ef5-2de8-4ebd-92df-1f976292d6f2n%40googlegroups.com.

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[Clayton Hopkins]

Hi Damon, Zach, Winston and PBPAC, 

Thank you so much! It's clearly a passionate, motivated, witty group so I'm excited to get involved. Thanks for sharing some thoughts with me on your favorite accomplishments and this year's goals. 

Portland is the first place I've lived that has a sidewalk snow plow! The first time I saw one it action, I literally took a picture. So cool. 

Excited to help out with the TSP report and the priorities outlined by Winston. 

And love the idea of the winter fashion show. 

See you all tonight! 

[Scsmedia]

The Capital Improvement Plan Request Document has two different sidewalk snowplows, plus a third for the Portland Downtown District.  There is a third John Deere tractor that is one third the price and personally I think is more useful for the role.  Of course, PW management thinks we should buy the more expensive one.

Note that the two snowplow requests came from different departments, Public Works and Parks.  They are clearly not communicating with each other.

Steven Scharf

207-415-4662

SCSM...@aol.com

https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/PBPAC/45badf45-4ef2-4d70-97ae-705529f3e2b7n%40googlegroups.com

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