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Last summer, the city of Portland dedicated one of Northwest Everett Street's two lanes to bicyclists. The traffic delays caused by the reconfiguration, the city says, are a small price to pay for a safer road.

(Joseph Rose/The Oregonian/2009)

Last summer, Portland rearranged Northwest Everett Street, kicking motorists out of one lane and giving it to bicyclists.

Since then, the phone calls and emails from drivers convinced that the city is revving up its "war on cars" have only become more frequent and desperate.

"I used to support bike lanes in Portland," wrote one reader, "but it seems like I'm always running into traffic jams on Everett that didn't exist before the change."

"How much time is the city's latest traffic experiment sucking out of the lives of drivers who use Everett as part of our daily commutes?" asked a woman who called earlier this week.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Portlanders have a low hysteria threshold for traffic. With Portland's population growing and development booming again, that's going to need to change.

Yes, the city's decision to channel two busy, one-way lanes of vehicular traffic into one has slowed Everett between Northwest 23th Avenue and Interstate 405. But we're talking about an extra minute or so per trip, at the worst, according to travel-time data provided by the city.

That's not exactly bumper-to-bumper buzzkill. The intro to U2's "Where the Streets Have No Name" lasts longer.

Using Bluetooth sensors that track the flow of mobile devices inside passing automobiles, the Portland Bureau of Transportation has collected a lot of detailed data from before and after the 10-foot-wide bike lane.

When motorists had access to two lanes, the average travel time along the corridor took between 120 and 150 seconds, the data show. It now takes, between 160 and 210 seconds, depending on the time of day.

In some cases, it took 70 seconds longer to drive that stretch of blacktop at mid-day. But there are also times when there were no changes.

Still, those minutes can stack up.

If you drive that busy half-mile corridor every day, the Everett road diet could be adding about six hours per year to your commute.

Diane Dulken, a PBOT spokeswoman, said the agency sees those lost hours as "small consequences" in the city's larger campaign to reduce traffic injuries and deaths.

Actually, that may be a little too dismissive. Life's short. None of us are going to be on our deathbeds, saying, "I wish I had spent another minute in traffic."

Still, it's hard to argue against the desire for safer roads.

PBOT can't say whether the number of bicyclists using Everett has gone up since it kicked cars out of one lane. Before the dedicated bike lane, the last city count observed 60 bikes per hour. Between noon and 1 p.m. Wednesday, I saw five bicyclists.

Noontime traffic stacks up near the signaled intersection of Northwest Everett Street and 19th Avenue.

Between 2007 and 2012, there were 10 recorded "right-hook" collisions involving cars turning right into bicyclists where Everett connects with the I-405 on-ramp at 16th Avenue. By placing the bike lane on the left side of the street, "there's no conflict anymore," said PBOT traffic engineer Lewis Wardrip.

He said the changes should also make things safer for motorists.

In recent years, the city has seen a slew of crashes caused by drivers attempting to make sudden left turns by cutting over from Everett's right lane. With only one auto lane, those collisions shouldn't happen, Wardrip said.

What's more, for whatever reason, the elimination of an auto lane has slowed drivers. Calmer traffic is better for a neighborhood known for its shopping, restaurants and foot traffic.

In the reshaping of the big city commons, this type of road rationing is hardly radical.

More cars are coming to Portland, but there's no room to build new streets or widen the existing ones. Imagine Stumptown becoming perpetually gridlocked like London, where they've set up hundreds of photo tolling cameras to charge drivers a hefty fee for driving downtown.

Compared with that, an extra minute of crawling along eastbound Everett doesn't seem so awful.

-- Joseph Rose

503-221-8029

jrose@oregonian.com

@josephjrose