I enjoyed this column from Steve Duin about the risks of biking in Portland along the streetcar tracks:
“Almost everyone you talk to who has ridden downtown has crashed,” said Jonathan Maus at BikePortland, and that battered list includes his mother, who went down on Northwest Lovejoy and broke her jaw.
“I don’t think people should have to fall to figure it out. If there was a similar issue with any other mode of transportation, with a similar potential for serious injury, do you think it would just be sitting there as an issue, for columnists to write about and cyclists to grumble about at the coffee shop?
“As of now, there is no ongoing design discussion on how to address this.” Urban planners and bike enthusiasts are stuck, Maus said, on, “Be careful.” [...]
Warning signs aren’t effective, [city bike coordinator Roger Geller] added, and the city is down on the rubber flange fillers that occasionally pop up in Europe. That rubber — which depresses when streetcars pass, but not bicycles — has a significant failure rate unless it is used on the kind of low-volume lines that don’t exist in Portland.
I learned about this on my first bike trip downtown the way everyone else does in Portland: By turning onto a street with tracks and nearly wiping out. I was lucky enough to avoid falling and skidded into a parking space, but if a car had been parked there it would have been a bad crash indeed.
There doesn’t seem to be a good solution to this other than not building more streetcar lines. Unfortunately Portland is laying tracks in my neighborhood even as we speak thanks to the generous contributions of taxpayers from around the country, so I’m expecting more bike crashes here soon. My skepticism about the benefits of this expansion here and here.