Portland residents: Tonight’s community budget hearing is a key opportunity to share your input on the Mayor’s proposed budget released last week. Please attend.
University Park Community Center</span
9009 N Foss Ave.
Can’t make the hearing? Testify online or send written comments.
Background on bicycling in the budget:
The following BTA analysis may provide talking points for your testimony.
Here is a list of bike projects that would be funded by the proposed budget. The list includes 15 new miles of bike boulevards, important missing link connections, and cycletrack and buffered bike lane projects.
This is a good list, and we are happy to support all of these projects.
Current city bike counts estimate about 13% of all trips over downtown bridges are made by bicycle already, and the city wants to increase that number to 25% of all trips by 2030. It is unlikely that we will reach that number with only 4% of the transportation dollars going toward bicycle projects.
The budget also includes funding cuts for Safe Routes to School programs (from $230,000 to $200,000) and Sunday Parkways (from $217,000 to $0). Encouragement programs like Sunday Parkways play an integral role in the comprehensive plan to get more people riding bikes, and we ask the City to explore creative new funding sources for those programs.
We encourage the City of Portland to be aggressive in building the infrastructure and funding the programs needed to meet the City’s own goals of increasing the bicycle mode share to 25%. They need to spend more of the transportation budget – between $30 and $60 million annually – on bicycling.
Thank you,
Gerik Kransky
Portland Advocacy Manager
