Portland to Rewrite Car-Centric Street Engineering Standard

"Level of Service," or LOS, for short, is the rather arcane engineering standard that has turned streets all over America into funnels for car traffic.

LOS is essentially a measure of traffic delay. Road projects are given a grade from "A" to "F" based on how smoothly traffic flows. The problem with this, as Jonathan Maus at Network blog Bike Portland points out today, is that LOS only measures automobile throughput. It works against walking and biking by elevating motor vehicle movement over outcomes like pedestrian safety or bike volumes. In Portland, where at any given time as much of 7 percent of traffic is bikes, the drawbacks of the measure are becoming increasingly obvious.

So leave it to Portland to develop an alternative. Maus reports:

The RFP says:

Maus continues:

Maus said the city hopes to have the new standard-writing process underway by mid-September. Portland is not alone in rethinking LOS standards. San Francisco is also in the process of eliminating its reliance on LOS as a measuring stick for street redesigns.

Elsewhere on the Network today: Human Transit reviews a new Sim City-like game that allows players to design transit systems for real or imagined cities throughout history. Portland unveils a new mural proclaiming itself "America's bike capital," reports Hard Drive. And Reinventing Parking shares Matt Yglesias's observation that parking reform is just as necessary in car-based sprawling areas as in the transit-orientated urban places it is gaining momentum.