Portland, United States
2020
Portland is often referred to as the cycling capital of the United States, and for good reason! They have long invested in bicycle infrastructure which has created a strong cycling culture in the Pacific Northwest city. We sat down with Peter Koonce, of the Portland Bureau of Transportation, to learn about their implementation of Dutch-style countdown timers in Portland.
Through a connection with the Dutch Cycling Embassy, in 2020, he reached out to Technolution (#DCENetwork), who were able to ship the same countdown-timers that you see in the Netherlands, all the way to Portland. The signals have been a big success so far, leading to hope for broader implementation across the US.
My name is Peter Koonce, I live in Portland, Oregon and have been working on traffic signals and intelligent transportation systems for almost 30 years. I’m the Division Manager for Signals, Street Lighting, ITS, & Electrical Maintenance for the transportation bureau, which is the transportation department for the City of Portland.
Portland and Oregon have been fortunate to have leadership on bicycling since the 1970s with a governor that signed a law that required public government agencies to invest a percentage of all transportation funding into cycling.
For more than 20 years, Portland, Oregon has had the highest rate of bicycle commuting of any major American city, according to U.S. Census Bureau surveys. Decades of community advocacy and political leadership have combined to create an environment where biking is a highly visible and widely accepted way for people to meet their daily needs for trips to work, shopping or school.
In 1993, Portland was the first U.S. city to create a local action plan for cutting carbon emissions. Increasing bicycling has been identified as one of the key strategies for reducing emissions. State, regional and city transportation plans and policies call for continuing to grow bicycle use.
We’ve had amazing leadership both at the local and state before I started working for the city. So, there’s always been steady progress to build a network of facilities that, within the city, make it reasonable to cycle for your daily trips.
If we’re going to get to 25% of our trips by bike, similar to Dutch cities, then we need to make sure that the basic needs are met. So, at any traffic signal that the cyclist is detected and maybe at certain intersections, they’re prioritised beyond what other modes would be.
Within the traffic engineering industry in the US, we have a standard document, it’s the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) which is clear on what is allowed from displays of traffic signals. When you visit The Netherlands, you see other ideas that are presented that are working quite well.
Adopting some of the ideas about how traffic signals are oriented towards multimodal travel has been something that isn’t common in the U.S., so we’ve had to look outside of the US for solutions to meet our goals of improving the cycling infrastructure. In comparing US practice with Dutch and international practice in general, we are less oriented around cycling. In fact, a lot of the complaints from cyclists are that traffic signals don’t detect them. It’s a key challenge for us as engineers trying to design to make sure that the traffic control will work for all travelers.
The City works tirelessly to close the gap between policies and engineering practice. In Portland, the policies are very much oriented to asking us to improve the conditions for cycling. So, if we’re going to get to 25% of our trips by bike, similar to Dutch cities, then we need to make sure that the basic needs are met. So, at any traffic signal that the cyclist is detected and maybe at certain intersections, they’re prioritised beyond what other modes would be. That’s not at all of our 1,100 traffic signals in Portland, but certainly there are a few that are key routes where we give highest priority to people biking and walking.
The first step that we took was to implement the small nearside signals. I think we spent over a year trying to buy one of those, because several years ago no one in the U.S. used them. We talked to several manufacturers, and there was no market, so nobody wanted to ship to us. Then we finally got one, and it was not a countdown timer. Simply a three-signal display.
During a subsequent visit to the Netherlands, they [countdown timers] seemed to be everywhere. I came back to the U.S., again, and still couldn’t buy them. But then I visited Austin, Texas, and they had a detector confirmation indication, which was a simple blue light, that along with a sign told cyclists, you’ve been detected. And I said, that’s a simple idea, let’s try that.
But it was clear that’s less intuitive than the countdown timer. Finally, we talked to the Dutch Cycling Embassy and through their support, got to a vendor (Technolution) that would ship Dutch nearby signals directly to us. Now, we can try them out much more robustly, and then study it as a part of a Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) Request To Experiment (RTE). The FHWA RTE is the formal process to change the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.
Our colleagues at Oregon State University have worked collaboratively with the City to assess and document the performance of these devices and then publishing research that will make the case for why a Dutch-style countdown would be a good thing to incorporate into a future MUTCD.
A recent peer reviewed paper authored by Dr. David Hurwitz and his team of students at Oregon State indicated that “The average percentage of users who committed a red-light violation decreased from 30.8% to 14.8% and the average wait time increased by +5.4 seconds with a median increase of +3.6 seconds.” (Carr, S. 2024)
The next step is to try to find another city that’s willing to implement these. With additional cities, we can get sufficient data points where we can understand that this is not just a Portland or Dutch thing. Comparing U.S. or Dutch cyclists, there are different expectations about how traffic signals will perform, but ultimately we’re not that different. We don’t want to stop, and we all would like to avoid delay if and when we can.
So, if you don’t see the traffic signal or don’t believe it’s working for you, you’re less likely to stop at the red light and wait for your turn. And if it’s that delay is over two minutes, then, especially if it’s raining, that will make anyone impatient. In Portland, the signals are programmed to make sure that those delays are as reasonable as possible, and certainly less than two minutes.
On social media, there’s people that say, whenever they see a blue light (we’ve installed many of those because they’re cheaper than a countdown timer) they think it’s a high five from the city traffic engineer. So, if we were to invest more holistically in those devices, I think there’d be more people thinking that we’re giving them a high five out there as they bike around the city, which is great. It’s a subtle thing that we can do to give people a clear indication that they’ve been detected.
I think it’s a natural outcome of being an early adopter. In Portland, we have a culture of wanting to try things differently and wanting to inspire. If we’re really thinking about the designs that we do on a daily basis, it only takes a bit more energy to consider, how can we subtly improve to make the policy match the performance of the transportation system? So, if we’re saying we want more people to choose bikes for their health or for transportation, then we should improve the design accordingly.
We tend towards having visitors come to Portland to see how we’ve done things and how it’s working for us. It’s nice to be able to share the knowledge and let knowledge serve our city and then also other cities. It’s not just our experience that is going to change the practice.
If we’re saying we want more people to choose bikes for their health or for transportation, then we should improve the design accordingly.