PM Network - July 2015

6 PM NE TWORK JULY 2015 WW W. PMI. ORG theEd

Pedal Power
Cyclists are taking to city streets, and the cities are responding.

In Copenhagen, Denmark, a global leader of cycling infrastructure, half of residents commute to work by bike. At just 6.1 percent, the city of Portland, Oregon has the highest cycle commuting rate in the United States.

While this number is small in comparison, the country’s bicycle culture is blooming. The number of bike commuters jumped roughly 60 percent between 2000 and 2012, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The growing popularity of two-wheelers, fueled partly by city-backed bike-sharing programs, has inspired a spate of bicycle-friendly initiatives on both sides of the Atlantic. But from passionate stakeholders to regulatory red tape, bike-focused projects in any location face similar bumps in the road.

Line of Sight

The team in charge of Portland’s US$134.6 million Tilikum Crossing bridge, for instance, worried that the car-free structure’s design would not be approved by the local government. As part of a US$1.49 billion light-rail program, the 1,720-foot (524-meter) bridge will carry only light-rail trains, buses, streetcars, pedestrians and cyclists. When it opens in September

2015, Tilikum Crossing will be the largest car-free transit bridge in the United States.

From the start, the high-profile project generated a great deal of interest from permit-granting agencies and potential users. “As the first new bridge in our downtown core in 40

years, it had a lot of public interest,” says Robert Barnard, project director, Portland-Milwaukie Light Rail Transit Project, Portland.

The project team determined it had to mitigate the risk that its design would not be approved. It commissioned a bridge-design study and formed a stakeholder group headed by a former Portland mayor. This group gathered public consensus on the design before engineers starting working on it.