The Northside Street Names, They Are a-Changin'

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Springtime, and the City of Portland's fancy turns to renaming streets.

Well, maybe not every springtime. But I remember May, about a year ago, where the CoP created a short-ton of new street names by the simple expedient of re-christening streets in the leading-zero segment of SW as S. Goodbye, SW Macadam Avenue; Hello, S Macadam Ave. Well, they're at it again.

Perhaps with an eye toward some sort of increased development in the city's far north margin, the CoP has deemed it possibly confusing the way street names change on that rim of town. Lombard Street and Columbia Boulevard, together, define a rather hard edge to the north side of town; south of these two streets, north and northeast neighborhoods march in stately array, and are abruptly ended at these arterials and the railroad line they dance around. North of this, the Columbia floodplain, meadows, a major international raceway which is also the site of Vanport City, industrial tracts, auto salvage yards, a branch of the Oregon State Dept of Corrections, and Portland International Airport. And I suppose it can be a bit disorienting:

Starting at Kelley Point, where North Marine Dr bends south to become the outermost end of N Lombard Street, said street descends inward, goes through a bit of a chicane, and becomes N. Columbia Blvd. If you fail to turn right on N Burgard Rd, it's Columbia Blvd upon which you'll remain. Turn on Burgard, however, go through another turn, and the name changes once again to Lombard. Now, in the business district of Saint Johns, Lombard pics up the US 30 BYP shield, which debouches onto N Philadelphia Ave from the Saint Johns Bridge, then for the next seven (give or take) miles, maintains the name Lombard Street from N going into NE, then, and this is unheralded, once you pass the NE 47th Ave overpass, you are no longer on NE Lombard Street but NE Portland Highway (the name is borrowed from the official ODOT name for the road). 

The road remains NE Portland Highway until the wide curve passes you by NE 72nd Avenue; it' s NE Killingsworth Street after that, until its terminus at NE Sandy Blvd in central Parkrose. 

There are other anomalies; the most irritating (a mild irritation to be sure) being the small snakey part of Columbia that starts at NE 89th and (for now, anyway) Killingsworth and ducks under the railroad trestle there by the Airport Holiday Inn to join old Columbia Blvd. This minuscule road is called NE Columbia Parkway. Just that. No other part of the road.

To fix and rationalize all this, the City o'Portland has devised a thing called the Columbia-Lombard Wayfinding Project and this simple thing aims to fix this by doing, majorly, the following:

• Renaming the part of Lombard Street at the city's extreme northwestern corner, alongside Port of Portland Terminal 5 and Kelley Point, as N Columbia Blvd.
• Eliminating the names of N Burgard Rd, NE Portland Hwy and NE Killingsworth St. east of NE 72nd Avenue in favor of a unified N/NE Lombard St along this entire length.
• Small street renames and adjustments to tributary streets.

The result is a Columbia Blvd that runs unbroken from Kelley Point all the way to NE 89th Avenue and a Lombard Street that runs unbroken from just west of Saint Johns all the way into Parkrose. This CoP illustration will make it a bit more graphically clear:

As someone who has lived in the city for almost forty years and has been addicted to the Portland street grid for longer than that, I can see the practicality of it, but I'll miss the quirkiness of having a road neither originating from outside or nor necessarily travelling toward or away from this town being called Portland Highway (there's a "N Portland Road" that exists similarly, so not all is lost). Also, seeing a level segment of Lombard defining the 5500 block north of Burnside will take a little getting used to.

But, just a little more than one year out, this will be the new reality. 

Update your maps, kids. 

The city's page on this foo-fraraw lives at https://www.portland.gov/transportation/pbot-projects/construction/columbia-lombard-wayfinding-project.