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Residents largely backed the plan at a neighborhood meeting this week, but some questioned whether it does enough to slow speeding drivers along one of the city's key north-south routes.
Bike lanes are coming to Polk Street next year.
In spring or summer 2027, the city of Eugene will make room for the bike lanes by removing street parking on both sides of Polk from 18th Avenue to the alleyway between Sixth and Fifth avenues, a north-south corridor stretching from the Whiteaker to the Friendly neighborhood.
There is $230,000 from the 2022 Street Repair Bond Measure set aside for the project, which the city plans to put out for bid. Transportation staff have surveyed more than 1,000 people, studied Polk Street traffic and parking, and held three community meetings on the proposal over the past several months. The most recent was in the Jefferson Westside neighborhood on Tuesday, July 14.
“Polk is a really key bicycle connector street,” Associate Transportation Planner Catherine Rohan told the roughly two-dozen residents who came to the meeting. “It connects to lots of other bike-friendly streets in the area. It really acts like a spine.”
Residents voiced overall support for the bike lanes, but shared concerns that removing the on-street parking could create the appearance of wider lanes, leading to driver speeding.
Some neighbors said they often see drivers exceeding the posted speed limit of 25 mph, and were frustrated that the city doesn’t currently plan to add traffic-calming measures to Polk, like speed bumps, due to a lack of funding.
“My major concern is speed on that street, and I’m not really sure anything that I’m seeing is going to address that,” said Michael Kresko, a Polk Street resident of 10 years.
Planners said they’d do a speed study of the corridor after the bike lane installation, and they shared data from 2024 showing that median vehicle speeds on Polk were at or below the speed limit.
“We looked at what the speeds were, and so we have those data, and it did not reveal to us that there was a significant speeding problem compared to citywide, compared to some other places where people are speeding at a much higher rate,” said Senior Transportation Planner Reed Dunbar.
The city also plans minor improvements to the Fern Ridge Path crossing of Polk near 16th Avenue, including added signage, striping, lighting and tree-trimming.
A few neighbors said vehicles frequently ignore people waiting at the east-west crosswalk by the bike path along Amazon Creek.
“For those of us who have lived on Polk for 25 years, we’ve been fighting for 20 years to get speed deduction devices, speed bumps, shutterflies at the crossing to no avail,” said resident Victoria Field.
Parking and pavement
Removing the parking lanes on the affected stretch of Polk Street will eliminate 172 street parking spots.
About 25% of those spots are typically occupied, according to a Polk Street on-street parking report published by the city in March. The street is primarily lined by single-family homes.
Polk Street residents will now have to park in their driveways or on side streets. There are more than 400 street parking spots one block east and west of Polk, per the parking report.
In surveys, residents on Polk Street were less supportive of removing the parking compared to those living between a block and five blocks away.
As a way to mitigate the reduction of on-street parking, Eugene also plans to add between four and eight parking bays to Polk Street between Seventh and 18th avenues, depending on funding.
There are limited places to put the parking bays — cutouts into planting strips between the vehicle lane and the sidewalk — due to street trees, driveways, utility poles and stormwater drains, Rohan said.
“A lot of parking bays will be on the east side,” she said. “Where exactly those are will get dialed down in this engineering and design phase.”
On-street parking will remain on the northern tip of Polk Street, between Second Avenue and the Fifth Avenue alley. The city plans to add “neighborhood greenway” elements to this stretch, Rohan said, features to slow traffic and make it safer for multimodal transportation, like sharrows, wayfinding signs and a traffic circle.
Crews also will repair the pavement on Polk Street between Second Avenue and 18th Avenue after the city identified funding for the work. The potholes currently cause cars to slow down on Polk Street, Kresko said, suggesting that their removal could inadvertently increase speeding.
“What we’re hearing in this room is that people are really concerned about speeding on Polk Street,” said Willow Hamilton, the city’s transportation planning community engagement coordinator. “We hear that from you all, and we hear it from people on other streets too. But it doesn’t mean that we’re not taking it seriously, and it doesn’t mean that speed humps are off the table.”
A plan rising from the ashes
The city shelved plans for bike lanes on Polk Street more than a decade ago.
Transportation Planning Manager Rob Inerfeld told Lookout Eugene-Springfield that the city was considering removing a parking lane to install a bike lane during a previous repaving project.
“The neighborhood association was pretty strongly against it, and we haven’t been feeling that this time,” he said. “We also didn’t have the public outreach tools that we do now, so we didn’t have good ways of just telling people about what we’re doing and engaging folks.”
Ted Coopman, the chair of Jefferson Westside Neighbors, said the neighborhood association’s past leadership was “very much opposed” to losing on-street parking. The city’s process of collecting feedback for the project this time around has been “exceptional,” he said.
“I think it’s going to be a good project,” he said.
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