Barbur Boulevard is a major thoroughfare in Portland. In fact, Highway 99 as it’s also known, is already being eyeballed for light rail, but now BIG BIKE, aka the Portland Bike Lobby, aka the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (funded in part by your tax dollars), has convinced far lefty Commissioner Steve Novick to spend city funds to study installing even larger bike lanes than exist now. See their rendering below.
Barbur was built for cars, of course. Cars provide the fastest, efficient, affordable, and most liberating mode of transportation ever invented. Cars allow citizens to live one place and work in another without being reliant upon the government transportation which dictates stops and timetables (not to mention taxes). For folks who travel by car on Barbur Boulevard, it appears things are about to become much less hospitable for you.
Barbur is not a ride in the park for bicyclists, of course. But Big Choo Choo (Tri Met) and Big Bike (Bike Lobby) want to take a huge chunk out of Barbur for politically correct modes of transportation. That doesn’t include yours if yours is a car.
Take a look at that photo below to see what little room there is for even the existing car traffic! Despite that photo, Barbur is a heavily used thoroughfare. It appears from the above rendering that bike activists plan to replace one lane of car traffic with bike lanes. Light rail would take another, what–two lanes? So what’s left for cars again?
Just so you know, this isn’t about light rail (Big Choo Choo) and bikes (Big Bikes), this is about hating cars.