Two New Crosswalks Outside Newport Market Being Used as Car Lanes
Bend voters approved a large transportation bond in 2020 and as the upgrades are finally coming to fruition, so are the mistakes.
As the weather hovered around 12 degrees, school goers of Highland Elementary shuffled into its halls a little faster than usual. The neighborhood, no matter the weather, see’s lots of families walk or roll to school in the highly sought after westside neighborhood.
The City of Bend has recently been undergoing huge infrastructure upgrades thanks to Transportation Go Bond passed by voters in 2020. One of those planned upgrades has been the Newport Avenue Corridor, a five phase, now nearly 3 year project that is slated to end in the spring of 2023. One of the main objectives of the project is to make the area safer and more accessible for pedestrians and bicyclists by slowing down cars.
Highland Elementary is located in the busiest area of the Newport Avenue corridor. It’s surrounded by large neighborhoods of single family homes, increasingly being filled with well off, younger families looking to build a life. The area is extremely accessible, one can walk to downtown, the Deschutes River, Newport Market - and most importantly for families - their school.
A few blocks down from Highland Elementary, two new roundabouts were added on 11th and 12th street, in addition to bulb outs, concrete dividers and islands. These roundabouts, however, don’t allow a driver to do a full circle as there is not enough space in between for cars to pass and for a crosswalk. This is a very similar design to SW Industrial Way in the Box Factory neighborhood.
The yellow indicates the car lanes and the yellow shows the crosswalk, and where the roundabout also ends
Many were happy to see the improvements, especially Newport Market, which has been at the forefront of the construction since 2021. But there have been many safety issues with the upgrades - the most pressing being that two newly constructed crosswalks are being used as car lanes for drivers.
Though drivers were using these as car lanes before the snowfall, the built up ice and snow has made these two crosswalks' paint and yellow flat top bumps even harder to see and resulted in an even bigger increase of drivers using these walkways as car lanes.
Crosswalk at Newport Ave and 12th St being used as roundabout
Closeup of Newport Ave and 11th Street Crosswalk
Crosswalk at Newport Ave and 11th Street
Close up of the crosswalk at Newport and 11th Street
The City of Bend this week installed big orange diverters to both of these crosswalks to alert drivers that it is not a car lane for the roundabout. Though this has helped, our reporting saw several drivers, on different days, attempt to turn around in these crosswalks even with the orange diverters.
An email to the City of Bends Transportation and Mobility Department asking about the plans and timeline to amend these safety issues has not been returned.
Though emails were never returned the City did add 3 flex posts to each crosswalk, which helps in preventing cars from going through.
This brand new dog bone roundabout should have been engineered to prevent car cut throughs with hard barriers. It's failure points to the same reason why paint alone (think: bike lanes around town) isn't enough to encourage people to use a bicycle to get around town - there's practically no penalty for ignoring it. That's why mom says we can't have nice things ;)
Bollards maybe?