Portland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee: 2025 Annual Priorities
After exhaustive research and consideration, the Portland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee has adopted the following policy priorities for Portland, Maine in 2025.
While progress has been made towards some of our 2023 and 2024 priorities, much of that progress is in the realm of long term planning. To achieve accessible and safe streets the smaller actions PBPAC has advocated for in prior years must be accomplished. These documents will continue to guide our advocacy work, and we encourage other advocates and councilors to refer to them.
Portland has a responsibility to act as a leader in Maine: transportation reform can achieve affordability and sustainability goals, but if it can’t work in Portland, it is hard to make the case that we can achieve any level of significant mode shift statewide.
These policies are a step towards the future Portlanders deserve: a future where our transportation system is accessible and safe for all users: cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists alike suffer injury and property destruction on our roads today. This future offers us:
Economic opportunity: Accessible and safe transportation options expand access to employment, and connect the public to businesses & services. Investments in alternatives to private vehicle ownership will increase economic opportunity and productivity, improve public health, lower social costs, and save public and family budgets over the long term.
Affordability: Portlanders are pressured on every side by the cost of living: increasingly the expense of car ownership is becoming too much to ask.
Sustainability: Portland will not meet the goals laid out in the One Climate Future Plan without a significant shift away from the use of automobiles. To encourage cycling, walking and public transit use we must create safe infrastructure for all.
Equity: Portland’s transportation planning has historically taken little heed of anyone considered less than desirable, forcing the destruction, bisection and blight on Portland’s most affordable neighborhoods through the destruction of 2,800 units of housing to make way for I-295, portions of Spring Street, and Franklin Street Arterial. We must center access and safety for all in all our transportation planning, no matter what neighborhood, or who lives there.
If our vision for a safe and accessible Portland is to be realized, other actions will need to be taken by state and regional authorities. What follows is a plan for the Portland City Council, School Board and City Staff.
If you want to see progress towards safe streets in Portland, email the Portland City Council at council@portlandmaine.gov and let them know you support the Portland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee's Priorities for 2025, and you want to see progress towards these goals this year.
PBPAC recommends a systems approach to establishing our transportation safety and development priorities. As such we’ve divided it into three general categories:
Vision
Adopt the Greater Portland Council of Government’s Vision Zero Plan as soon as possible to establish our values & priorities: traffic fatalities can be eliminated in Portland, but it requires commitment on every level, from the council to the committees, local organization and residents. More details below.
Planning
Create a Comprehensive Transportation Plan that allows for coordination between big projects and implementation of the Vision Zero goals on all of Portland’s streets, even those outside the scope of GPCoG’s Vision Zero plan. Details.
Implementation
The City of Portland should create a Complete Streets Board to provide oversight of street planning and ensure future compliance of projects, manuals and plans with our complete streets policy and with the Vision Zero goals.
Create a Street Design Manual: Chapter 1 and Appendix A of the city’s Technical Manual and the Traffic Signal Policy & Guidance Manual should be merged into a new document and renamed the Street Design Manual to set standards for traffic calming, crosswalks (including raised crosswalks), bike lanes, multi use paths and other infrastructure.
Hire a Sustainable Transportation Manager to facilitate revising the Street Design Manual and liaison between the Sustainability and Transportation Committee, the Dept. of Public Works and the Planning Dept.
Progress needs to be made in all three of these categories if Portland is to meet the safety and development challenges of the next 30+ years. They do not need to be done in any particular order, except that adopting GPCoG’s Vision Zero plan without further delay should be done first to provide guiding principles for all the other decisions.
Adopt the GPCoG Vision Zero Plan to Establish Our Values & Priorities
GPCoG’s Vision Zero plan emphasizes the importance and value of human life in our infrastructure decisions to reach zero traffic fatalities by 2045. Adoption alone is not enough, but if followed through by future decisions by staff and the council, it could be transformational.
Portland must Adopt GPCoG’s Vision Zero Plan because:
The plan should guide all future plans, thus eliminating costly and redundant “goal setting” for each and every project. The Vision Zero plan informs and provides:
The Transportation Master Planning process.
Much needed additions to the Street Design Manual.
Smaller ongoing projects and temporary plans.
A value system for implementation and evaluation of existing plans.
GPCoG’s plan asks municipalities to adopt it or develop their own plan - addressing regional decisions alone cannot achieve Vision Zero, each municipality must do their part.
The plan identifies tools and strategies for reaching Vision Zero and identifies action steps that GPCoG and municipalities should take to achieve the goals of the plan. They include:
Daylighting, also known as clear zoning - removing parking that obscures sightlines at intersections and crosswalks (this is a proven strategy which greatly helped accomplish the Vision Zero objective in Hoboken, New Jersey, pop. 60,000).
Identifying dangerous intersections and streets that must be updated to add protected crossings such as curb bump outs, raised crosswalks, and other safety measures.
Rightsizing fleet vehicles to provide better driver visibility.
Not adopting the Vision Zero plan sends the message that a certain number of deaths and serious injuries are tolerable.
The Portland City Council must pass a resolution to adopt the GPCOG’s Vision Zero Plan as Yarmouth recently did.
Like Yarmouth’s, our resolution should articulate steps the city will take to reach zero motorist, pedestrian and bicyclist deaths
Portland’s plan should include a provision for developing a local Vision Zero policy
Additionally, we must create a process to consider every pedestrian, bicycle or motor vehicle fatality in our city as a failure, and investigate what could have been done to prevent such deaths and injuries, and identify short-term and long-term steps to prevent them from happening again.
Create a Comprehensive Transportation Plan
A comprehensive transportation plan should be a 30+ year goal-setting document of transportation related plans, projects and administrative priorities. Following the finalization of ReCode, the city has an opportunity to create a unified transportation plan, which takes into account the opportunities of this new land use plan. It would allow the city to plan for large complex projects to be implemented over multiple years and facilitate their integration with other projects.
We need a Comprehensive Transportation Plan because there is no way to plan for the future without planning for the future. Without this effort we will struggle to:
Avoid piecemeal policies and projects.
Address long term issues such as the future of the I-295 corridor.
Increase the mode share of public transportation, cycling and walking as called for by the One Climate Future plan and the Council’s 2025 Goals.
Create a comprehensive bicycle network of lanes, streets, and paths (rather than discrete and disconnected projects).
Prioritize safe routes to school.
The city has already begun looking at how to accomplish such an effort. It’s imperative that this effort be guided by best practices and be designed to accomplish GPCoG’s Vision Zero plan. In order achieve those goals the plan’s development should:
Be guided by representatives from the Portland City Council, Public Works, Planning & Urban Development, Police, Health & Human Services, Housing & Economic Development, The Portland Board of Education, Age Friendly Portland, Portland Downtown, Bicycle Coalition of Maine, Portland Trails, the Portland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee and other community stakeholder advocates.
Look holistically at all aspects of the transportation systems of Portland including the street grid, sidewalks and multimodal paths, transit systems and water related modes of transportation.
Work with the State & Federal DoT on Portland’s long term plans.
Create a Complete Streets Board
Many towns in Maine have an official board or committee tasked with overseeing their complete streets and other transportation related policies. These committees and boards are often composed of relevant department heads (or their appointees), town or city councilors and appointed citizens. Many municipalities also have a group like PBPAC to complement the complete streets board.
Benefits of a Complete Streets Board include:
A Complete Streets Board is needed to evaluate long term plans, some Technical Manual updates and individual projects to ensure they comply with the Vision Zero plan, and Portland’s complete streets policy.
Without a public gathering of high level staff, councilors and citizen advocates, it’s hard to efficiently workshop good policy.
The Transportation Master Plan will need an official committee to advise on its creation, as the Planning Board did for the ReCode process.
The Portland City Council should pass an ordinance defining the makeup and powers of the Complete Streets Board.
It should be made up of representatives from The Portland City Council, Public Works, Planning & Urban Development, Police, Health & Human Services, The Portland Board of Education, Age Friendly Portland, Portland Downtown, Portland Trails, The Portland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee and other community stakeholders.
The Complete Streets Board should be given control of revising transportation related chapters of the city’s Technical Manual and the Traffic Signal Policy & Guidance Manual to be merged into a new document called the Street Design Manual.
Technical Manual > Street Design Manual
The entirety of the Technical Manual is currently the responsibility of the Planning Board, as defined in Chapter 14 of Portland’s City Code. The Technical Manual contains guidelines and standards for infrastructure implementation. Transportation related chapters should be consolidated into a Street Design Guide and assigned to the Complete Streets Board, because:
The Technical Manual does not go far enough to mandate safe facilities for all users.
Whether the Technical Manual eventually becomes part of the Transportation Master Plan or a companion document to it, it needs to be reviewed and revised in advance of the completion of the Transportation Master Plan.
The current manual lacks standards on many basic elements of infrastructure like bike lanes, protected intersections, raised crosswalks, daylighting, and other street design elements essential for complete streets and Vision Zero.
The One Climate Future Plan calls on Portland and South Portland to develop complete street manuals; South Portland finished their Street Design Manual this spring, using a grant from the Governor's Office of Policy Innovation and the Future.
The Council should form a Complete Streets Board, as proposed above, and re-assign transportation related chapters of the city’s Technical Manual and the Traffic Signal Policy & Guidance Manual to the Complete Streets Board. It should be reassigned to the Complete Streets Board proposed above.
Hire a Sustainable Transportation Manager
South Portland was able to write its Street Design Guide because it has a Sustainable Transportation Manager, who was able to secure a grant from the State’s Office of Policy innovation and the Future. Additionally, such a position would:
Provide coordination between departments
Provide staff time devoted to bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure and other planning needs that PBPAC has previously asked the city to incorporate into its budget
Pursue grant opportunities (this historically has been a revenue-positive position)
Assist a Complete Streets Board in forming the Street Design Guide
Liaison between the Council’s Sustainability and Transportation Committee and city departments such as Planning, Public Works, and Parks, Recreation, and Facilities
Develop and manage a Safe Routes To School program
Coordinate traffic calming petitions & demonstrations
The position could be housed in the city’s Sustainability Department and could be funded in whole or in part though the new sustainability fund, which allows $125k/year to fund salaries.