By Madeleine Voth
For decades, Portland has been known as one of the country’s most bike-friendly cities. From Pedalpalooza to the infamous Naked Bike Ride, biking is not only supported, but celebrated. Today, the city houses over 400 miles of bikeways, including roughly 100 miles of Neighborhood Greenways, or low-speed residential streets designed to prioritize people walking, bicycling and rolling to their destinations with ease.
But for many, the question has never been whether Portland has the right bike infrastructure. It is whether that infrastructure feels safe enough for the tiniest of Portlanders.
In recent years, that concern has fueled the rise of bike buses, which are organized rides to school led by parents, where schoolchildren bike together along neighborhood routes. Now, the movement is shaping the city’s next round of transportation investments.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation’s (PBOT) Neighborhood Greenway Bike Bus Project is a pilot program that is funding targeted safety improvements along four elementary school bike bus routes, including Abernethy Elementary in SE Portland. The project grew out of conversations with parents, bike bus organizers and transportation advocates who argued that if the city wanted more children biking to school, it also needed infrastructure centered around how children actually experience their daily rides.
PBOT says the project was built around that feedback. According to Hannah Schafer, Communications Director for PBOT, the bureau identified nearly 30 active bike buses across the city before selecting one elementary school in each of the four council districts to receive improvements. Abernethy Elementary was chosen to represent District 3, alongside Lent, James John and Maplewood elementary schools for the other districts.
The project has a $500,000 budget spread across two years. The first year, July 2025-June 2026, focused on outreach, route analysis and project development, while the remaining funding will go toward construction July 2026-June 2027.
“PBOT conducted community surveys around needs, which led to project proposals with planning-level estimates for construction costs,” Schafer said. Residents then ranked those proposals, allowing the bureau to prioritize which improvements moved forward within the available funding.
Across all four schools, families consistently identified “stressful or difficult crossings” as the biggest obstacle to walking and biking. Rather than expressing concern about neighborhood greenways themselves, survey respondents pointed to the places where quieter streets intersect with busier roads.
In SE Portland, many of those concerns centered on SE Clinton St. Parents reported limited visibility at intersections and frequent conflicts with drivers approaching from side streets.
PBOT’s proposed solution followed: move parked cars farther back from intersections, improving sight lines so people walking, biking and driving can better see one another. The improvement became the highest-ranked project in PBOT’s prioritization survey.
For Lindsay Huber, Interim Executive Director of The Street Trust, that community-centered approach highlights something important. “The growing popularity of bike buses shows that there is strong interest from families in biking to school when they feel supported and have safe, comfortable routes,” Huber said. “This project also reflects the real needs and concerns identified by parents, volunteers and community members who have been leading bike buses. Their experiences help highlight where our transportation system is working well and where improvements are still needed.”
Still, Huber believes infrastructure projects cannot stop at isolated intersections. “One project alone will not make every family feel comfortable letting their children bike to school,” she said. “Parents think about the entire trip, not just individual blocks.”
That concern resonates throughout SE Portland, where neighborhood greenways frequently cross busy corridors such as Powell Blvd., Division St. and SE 82nd Ave. Even if most of a ride feels comfortable, one intimidating crossing can be enough to convince families to drive.
PBOT has heard such concerns. Although most of Portland’s neighborhood greenways already carry fewer than 1,000 vehicles per day, and many fewer than 500, Schafer said children participating in bike buses still reported not always feeling comfortable riding on them. Instead of immediately lowering its traffic-volume standards, PBOT plans to use this project, along with a pilot in N Portland, to better understand how street design influences people’s perception of safety.
The bureau also hopes to measure whether the improvements actually change behavior. After construction, PBOT plans to collect operational data while continuing to gather feedback from bike bus leaders, participating families and the broader community. Officials will monitor traffic volumes, speeds and travel patterns where appropriate while evaluating whether the improvements make children and parents feel safer riding to school.
For Huber, success is about more than a single project or a single school. “The goal is not to make driving impossible,” she said. “It is to make walking and biking possible for more people who want those options. Families deserve to have choices in how they get around, and creating safe, connected routes helps make those choices realistic.”
Because funding allowed improvements at only four schools, PBOT hopes the project will become a model for future investments across Portland’s neighborhood greenway network. There are already nearly 30 active bike buses throughout the city, and officials say the lessons learned from this project could help improve routes serving many more schools in the future.
For a city that has long embraced cycling, the Neighborhood Greenway Bike Bus Project suggests that being bike-friendly is measured by more than mere miles of bikeways, but something more important: whether children and their parents feel confident enough to use them.
The Glencoe Elementary School bike bus. Photo by PBOT.
