Burnside: Seeing both sides of the one-way controversy
Portland faces a historic decision on a proposed Burnside-Couch couplet, and it will determine how we develop socially, physically and economically
Sunday, February 04, 2007
RANDY GRAGG
Nothing has ever divided Portland quite so peculiarly as the proposed Burnside/Couch couplet.
The Portland Office of Transportation's plan to pair West Burnside and Northwest Couch Street as one-way adjacent streets through downtown has turned developer against developer, residents against residents -- and some friends against friends -- in a battle royal of competing self-interests.
But anyone interested in the long-term health of the city might want to look beyond the narrow views, pro or con. This is a historic decision. Burnside is the city's spine. Change it so dramatically, and you alter the body.
When the couplet debate first came to a head two years ago, transportation commissioner Sam Adams decided to restudy it. He began, he says, as an agnostic, but after a 14-month study, he emerged a believer and even added the prayer beads of a streetcar loop.
Now, for the Portland City Council voting March 1 on whether to proceed with the couplet's preliminary engineering, "yes" offers a near-irresistible two-fer: They can please both the grass-roots social service agencies and neighborhood associations that support the couplet, plus real estate magnates such as Harold Schnitzer, who pledged $150 million in investment in his Burnside properties if the couplet passes.
But let's hit the pause button. Adams' earnest study -- and nearly all the debate -- skipped two important considerations: how Burnside fits into Portland's urban history, or how streets like it operate in other cities.
Burnside is unique among the city's streets. In the 1850s, Captain John Couch made a fateful choice, aligning streets on his land to the compass rather than Portland's first plats, oriented to the river for easier ship loading. The result was "B Street," a diagonal seam connecting the city's first two grids.
The street, later renamed Burnside, grew into a border: to the north, a working-class railroad district and doorway to arriving immigrants; to the south a skyscraping financial center. That division grew greater in 1950, when Portland adopted its one-way downtown street system -- but only south of Burnside. The north remained Portland's gritty connection to the wider world by boat, truck and train, while the south became an efficient mover of white-collar workers to and from the neighborhoods and suburbs.
Such historic distinctions have dramatically blurred in the past decade. But the Burnside debate has exposed an important new divide: between the "Road People," who love the couplet, and the "Urban People," who hate it.
Road People cherish the efficiency of one-way streets: The 56-second street-light cycles reward motorists inching ahead at 12 mph in any direction with steady green. To them Burnside is a disruption the couplet would fix. Indeed, some Roadies hope to expand the one-way, 56-second grid all the way to the river.
For Urban People, Burnside is second only to the Willamette River in its importance to Portland's physical and mental maps. Its disruptions -- the triangular corners, the varying widths, its strange fit into the transportation system -- all are opportunities for unique buildings, landscapes and experiences within the city's larger fabric.
The disagreement may sound like pointy-heads tut-tutting at one another. But who wins has historic consequences, determining how the city will develop, socially, physically and economically.
It's a decision between conformity and diversity.
Portland's unique, 200-foot-square blocks have made us arguably the most European of American cities in our petite scale. But we're anything but European in how we've put the streets surrounding these blocks to use.
The one-way streets south of Burnside keep traffic moving, cutting in half the so-called "conflict points" between walkers and drivers. But the result is an unrelenting sameness, the successes of which leave our transportation planners seemingly incapable of appreciating such important variations as Burnside.
Indeed, left to its own instincts, the Portland Office of Transportation would make every street the same: narrow the corners with corner "bulb-outs," put in the street trees, plug in the old-timey streetlights, plop down the public art -- job done. That's the couplet plan.
No major city in the nation, much less in Europe, is a slave to such homogeneity. Some streets move more cars and transit. Some move more pedestrians. Look for the cheaper restaurants and discount shops on the busier thoroughfares. Saunter between the boutiques and wine bars on calmer ones. From San Francisco's Market Street to New York's Houston and Canal streets, the Burnsides of the world function as thresholds between distinct places.
The couplet debate has turned into tasty media bait. It's a good ol' class war: the Brewery Blocks condo owners fighting to keep Northwest Couch Street's European pedestrian ambience against the Old Town social-service clients fighting for their safety on Burnside. Adams plays it up, continually citing how four out the city's 10 most dangerous pedestrian crossings lie between the Burnside Bridge and Northwest Eighth Avenue.
But Burnside's dangers are already better because of longer nighttime traffic signals and "walk/don't walk" lights that blink the seconds remaining for pedestrians. And much more can be done -- better lighting and signs, not to mention patrolling. It's a design and enforcement problem, not a crisis.
The real class battle about the couplet is economic. Portland, I believe, has crossed an important threshold where demographic trends and its desirability is certain to lead to more downtown housing. Left a little "undesirable" to the developer class, Burnside will change more slowly and organically with some parts remaining incubators for urban character: record stores, used clothing outlets, humbler restaurants and, yes, adult venues.
As a speed bump to the sameness racing to suffocate Portland, physically and socially, this historic street will continue its role of both divide and seam. But it has a critical new task: keeping Portland weird.
Randy Gragg: 503-221-8575;
randygragg@news.oregonian.com
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