Bicycling

Streetfilms: Portland’s Festival Streets

By Aaron Naparstek

3:55 PM EST on October 31, 2006

Portland, Oregon’s Festival Streets
Running time: 3:39
Download size: 13.39 MB

The Portland Office of Transportation (PDOT) recently completed work on two Festival Streets, a new experiment that uses traffic calming and unique streetscape features to create a street that can easily be converted to public use on weekends or special events. In this film, Ellen Vanderslice, a PDOT Project Manager and Lloyd D. Lindley, an urban designer, explain a few of the street’s features and why this new design is so important for the surrounding Old Town Chinatown community.

And here is a note from Streetfilms auteur, Clarence Eckerson, Jr.:

Last month the Portland Department of Transportation invited me out for three days to take a look at some of the innovative ways they manage traffic, protect neighborhoods from thru traffic and support alternative modes of transport. I was able to grab short interviews with over two dozen people ranging from Portland Mayor Tom Potter to their amazingly hands-on City Commissioner of Transportation, Sam Adams. I spent 95 percent of daylight hours walking around the city and bicycling and riding mass transit with my camera filming and all my gear strapped to my back. It was exhausting but I think the resulting films show that it was worth the hard work.

This weekend I had the pleasure of premiering a half hour “working rough cut” of the film I compiled from that trip to a 300 person audience at Saturday’s “Celebration of Portland Transportation.” Sponsored by PDOT, the screening was held at one the most recognizable landmarks in Portland, the beautifully-restored, fabulously ornate Bagdad Theater. Scores of PDOT staff and reps from other government agencies attended.

Aaron Naparstek

Aaron Naparstek is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparstek's journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. He was also one of the original cast members of the "War on Cars" podcast. You can find more of his work on his website.

Bicycling | Clarence Eckerson | Out of Town | Portland | Streetfilms

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