Lombard Investment Strategy

Lombard Street, designated as State Highway 30 bypass, is one of the few commercial corridors for the North Portland neighborhoods of Arbor Lodge, Portsmouth, Kenton and Piedmont. The current configuration as a four-lane, high-speed roadway functions well for moving traffic, but poorly for supporting growth and livability for some 400 multi-ethnic business owners and residents who live and work along Lombard. The businesses and surrounding neighbors in Piedmont, Kenton and Arbor Lodge have long advocated for improvements to this street in support of business stabilization.

Prosper Portland has $2 million budgeted for infrastructure improvements on the 2.2-mile stretch of North Lombard Street (from North Chautauqua Blvd. to North Rodney St.). Community workshops on March 6, 2015 and April 28, 2015 centered on new ways of showcasing and interconnecting the street’s impressive list of existing assets to improve economic performance and create more connection. In early May 2015, walking tours visited three key focus areas, allowing stakeholders to discuss and identify the improvements that would have the biggest impact for the funding available.

Building upon the input from the spring workshops, a series of draft streetscape concepts were created for each node, which identified specific improvements in each area given available resources. These draft streetscape concepts were then presented to the public at an open house in October 2015, attended by more than 50 community members who voted for improvements in each node.

The feedback gathered from the open house was used to develop final streetscape concept designs for each node, which were presented to the Working Group for additional feedback. The overall streetscape concept design will serve as the foundation for the design and engineering work.

Prosper Portland’s next steps are to work with PBOT to design, engineer, and build the improvements recommended in the streetscape concept, using the $2 million in Prosper Portland funds. Types of improvements in each node will be phased based on stakeholder priorities and available funding. Highly valued items like street trees and safety improvements such as crosswalks and lighting will be also be prioritized.

ODOT recently leveraged multiple funding sources to develop a potential project to reconfigure North Lombard Street between North Woolsey at the west and North Greeley at the east. This safety project extension would re-stripe the roadway, creating a three-lane cross section by removing one lane in each direction and reallocating the space to create either on-street parking or bike lanes on both sides of the road.

The design and construction of this lane reconfiguration will be completed between 2019 and 2021 with opportunities for public input. Coordination of this effort may impact schedule of some of the streetscape improvements along the 2.2 mile stretch of Lombard described above, but the overall goal is to complete those improvements in FY 17/18.

TriMet has also planned several stop consolidations to improve efficiency of its bus services along Lombard. Stops planned for consolidation in 2016 include: