With a push from UO students, city plans fast-tracked safety redesign on Patterson Street

One day in mid-June, Hannah Norris was stressed. 

The University of Oregon student was about to present a proposed redesign of a five-block stretch of Patterson Street, from 19th to 24th avenues, to city transportation planners and community partners at a downtown Public Works office.

Over the past month, she and other students with Live Move, a UO sustainable transportation group, had been designing safety improvements for the corridor — a one-way street with two southbound driving lanes — using digital modeling tools.

By June, they invited the city to review the plans in hopes of their adoption. The meeting had finally arrived. Posters showing their renderings were tacked to the walls.

“It was like, ‘Oh my god, we were so nervous,’” Norris said.

But she recalled telling her student peers: “If we do this right, we’re going to get it installed one way or another. It might not look exactly the same, but we’re going to push as hard as we can, and it’s going to be us that makes this change happen faster than it usually does.”

During the meeting, feedback from city staff, Lane Transit District and nearby property owners like the Eugene Family YMCA helped shape students’ plans into a design that Eugene expects to install this summer — faster and at lower cost than most capital projects.

Under the design, which will be finalized later this month, the city will remove the right-hand travel lane on the five-block segment of Patterson Street, reducing the roadway from two travel lanes to one. In its place, crews will install a lane for parking and buses, along with a curbside bike lane protected by flexible plastic bollards.

Once that phase is done, the corridor will also get a public art project.

“This is a unique opportunity where the community was supportive of a change, the engineering best practices said a change would make sense, and where it penciled out that we could actually provide that change,” city transportation planner Reed Dunbar said. 

A ‘double threat’ 

In late January, UO doctoral student Erick Njue was fatally struck by a car while cycling across Patterson Street at 22nd Avenue. 

Streets like Patterson are sometimes referred to as a “double threat” at crosswalks because vehicles that stop for pedestrians or cyclists in one lane often obscure the view of cars in the adjacent lane, creating a high risk for a collision at the crosswalk. Another UO student, Elizabeth Cardenas Figueroa, was struck and killed at a different “double threat” crosswalk last year.

Their deaths, and other recent pedestrian and cyclist fatalities, have led to community calls for safer streets, particularly interventions on multilane one-way streets.

“It is a scary experience,” Norris said, of crossing Patterson. “You have to be extremely cautious of your safety the whole time that you’re engaging with the intersection and the street.”

Patterson Street is near a number of busy family-friendly spots: South Eugene High School; Roosevelt Middle School; the former YMCA site and the new Y; and UO family and graduate student housing at Spencer View Apartments.

The road has a speed limit of 25 mph, but its wide lanes make it more likely people will speed and even switch lanes mid-intersection, risking crosswalk collisions. The car that hit Njue had been traveling at an estimated 50 mph, according to court documents.

Cars zipping down the street on Thursday, July 10, noticeably decelerated as they drove past yellow roadside posters telling drivers to slow down.

“Erick Njue DIED HERE,” one of the signs reads.

“That stretch of roadway feels like a racetrack,” said Rob Zako, who leads Better Eugene-Springfield Transportation, a transportation-safety nonprofit.

With the lane removal, “[Drivers] might lose a few seconds, and we save another life,” he said. “Is that a fair trade off for our community? I certainly hope so.”

Project logistics

Dunbar said Patterson doesn’t have as much traffic as other one-way arterials in Eugene, meaning a traffic-calming project like a lane removal was possible instead of more expensive alternatives like pedestrian signals or yellow flashing beacons. 

Both LTD and Eugene Springfield Fire approved the reduction to a single lane, he added.

Dunbar said the estimated cost of the project is about $100,000, well under most other capital projects.

The improvements will require grinding off the road’s existing striping and adding new 4-inch white lines for the parking and bike lanes — work that the city plans to contract out as it lacks the staff capacity, Dunbar said. He said designs could go out for bid by the end of the month.

“Hopefully we’ll get some good bids on that,” Dunbar said. “It will be done during striping season, which is basically from now until it starts raining in the fall.”

Eugene will also update striping and signage at up to 23 marked multilane crosswalks across the city, adding a solid white centerline leading up to the crosswalk to discourage drivers from changing lanes right before, Public Works spokesperson Marion Suitor said in a late June release.

UO crews will handle the other portion of the Patterson Street project, installing flexible bollards in the space between the parking and bike lanes. Dave Reesor, the university’s transportation services director, said his team did the same thing on Agate Street between 13th and 15th avenues.

“It’s a good example of a partnership to get things done quickly between the city and the U of O,” Reesor said.

Efforts overlap

The June design review meeting downtown marked a joining of forces for the Patterson Street project. 

Eugene has many ongoing street safety projects through the city’s Vision Zero initiative and other departments. But students’ designs largely drove the specific fixes planned for Patterson Street, according to some of those involved.

“That conversation was really crucial to having them seriously consider adopting or taking inspiration from the elements in our design,” said Norris, a third-year student interested in pursuing a career in urban planning.

City officials asked questions, suggested changes and even asked students to help teach them how to use certain rendering tools they weren’t familiar with, she said.

“What was originally intended to be a way to persuade the city of Eugene to adopt the students’ ideas actually by that point had morphed to a mutual two-way learning opportunity,” said Zako, who was also in the meeting. 

Dunbar said the city will hold an open house this summer to share final project plans with the community. The date is to be determined, he said. 

“We’re going to evaluate how it works over time, and if we need to make adjustments, we’ll be able to do that,” Dunbar said.

Art on the way? 

Mayor Kaarin Knudson, who has been involved in many of the recent community events for safer streets, told Lookout Eugene-Springfield on Thursday that a public art project is coming to the Patterson Street corridor in the future.

Details are scarce, but she floated the idea of asphalt art highlighting the personality of different neighborhoods in Eugene and the city’s history and ecology.

“The work we do this summer and into September, that’ll be the first phase here,” she said. “But I am personally committed to working on a community project, a public art project that is also part of this corridor, and that could be something that we do in the near term.”

She acknowledged that the final design would need to be sensitive to “circumstances” like previous fatalities or injuries at the site. The mayor wrote to Njue’s family after his death, committing to honoring his memory and making Eugene’s transportation system more safe.

“What I am really proud of in how our community responded to this tragedy is that it turned us towards a shared goal and then we kept our attention on that,” she said.