This is, in fact, exactly what I was talking about in the previous blog entry regarding the Sunrise corridor.

A few notes: Bend US97 is a parkway? Having driven there recently, I am quite surprised to learn this. It in fact looks and feels exactly like a freeway, sans a few stoplights and crosswalks. Traffic the day I was driving was traveling ~65 mph (during the snow).

Perhaps a better model would be Barbur Blvd directly south of downtown and the TCLH (?) neighborhood where it travels through the dense tree canopy. In fact, this is perhaps one of the strongest design features that reduces traffic - close-in vegetation, particularly trees (that dwarf traffic) seem to really slow down the speed at which people drive at. The further back nature is pruned from the roadway, traffic seems to travel faster & faster.

I don't really want to go into detail why you want slower traffic speed, but I will summarize it here:

-residents living along the corridor will experience much more noise pollution with higher traffic speeds
-higher traffic speeds = lower traffic capacity (~35 mph being able to handle the most amount of capacity due to closer spacing of cars)
-lower speed limits will encourage commuters to not attempt ridiculous commute distances (eg, I am assuming we don't want to overload the existing freeways with 100,000 additional commuters travelling from Damascus to Hillsboro on I-205, I-84, I-5, and 26)
-lower speed limits will allow a multi-use path to be constructed along its length and actually be used by the public. People generally don't want their kids riding bicycles along a 65-mph freeway (not always; see Eugene's Willametter river bikeway along 105)
-freight really doesn't need to travel at 70 mph on such a short highway; for long distance travel they will spend most of their time on I-5, 84, etc

I wonder if I-205 between West Linn and I-5 would qualify as a "parkway", at least in a sense. I've always found that stretch of road, with its wide, heavily treed median, gentle curves, and very few buildings in sight, to be rather beautiful, inasmuch as a freeway can be called "beautiful."

- Bob R.

Perhaps, tho parkways are more typified by lower speed limits (45 is common) and stoplights (in addition) of only having onramps.

The Parkway design is the preferred way that Clackamas and the citizens have chosen since we liked these bypass concept plans best during the last two years of public input. We knew that keeping the through traffic on the current highway alignment was counter productive to what we want Damascus/Boring to become.

We really, really, liked the hard edge concept of a transportation asset having the Big Park to its South, thus creating the Urban/Natural divide.

Ray Whitford