Ride north on Willamette Boulevard from Rosa Parks Way on a weekday morning and the concrete-protected bike lane does exactly what it's supposed to do. It holds a clean line between you and traffic past Overlook, past the bluff views toward downtown, all the way to Alma Avenue. Then, without much warning, it stops. The protection disappears, the lane narrows to paint, and for the final stretch into the neighborhood the project is actually named after, you're back to sharing the road.
That gap has sat there for two years. It closes this fall.
The North Willamette Boulevard Active Transportation Corridor project is Portland's largest protected bikeway, a five-mile spine meant to connect St. Johns and Cathedral Park all the way to NE MLK Jr Boulevard. But the piece of it closest to St. Johns, the neighborhood whose name anchors the whole route, has been the last to get finished. Understanding why tells you more about how this corridor actually works than any press release about ribbon-cuttings.
Where the Gap Actually Sits
In 2024, the Portland Bureau of Transportation ran what it called a quick-build extension, striping buffered bike lanes between Alma Avenue and Richmond Avenue to close an obvious hole in the network ahead of the bigger project. That gave riders paint where there had been nothing, but paint isn't protection. The concrete curbs that separate cyclists from cars along the rest of the corridor never made it to that last mile until now.
The full build, the one wrapping this fall, adds three miles of concrete curb-protected bikeway between Rosa Parks Way and Richmond Avenue. Combined with the bike lanes already in place on Rosa Parks Way, that finally makes the five-mile connection real, from the St. Johns Bridge approach and Cathedral Park down to MLK. The project has been funded mostly with federal money, about $4.5 million of its $6.1 million total cost, which is also why it took from initial outreach in 2021 to completion in 2026 to get built. Federal grant money moves on federal timelines.
What Changes on the Ground This Fall
If you drive, walk, or bike Willamette Boulevard, here's what's different once construction wraps:
- Concrete curb separators run the full three miles between Rosa Parks Way and Richmond, finishing the five-mile protected connection to MLK.
- Nearly all on-street parking between Rosa Parks Way and Richmond is gone. The one exception is a single block on the south side between Van Houten and Portsmouth avenues, kept in place because it serves University of Portland student housing.
- The speed limit along the entire corridor drops from 30 mph to 25 mph.
- New pedestrian crossings go in at priority points, especially near bus stops, following the city's PedPDX and Vision Zero guidance.
- Two bus stops, at Ida Avenue and Wabash Avenue, get ADA-accessible platforms that let cyclists pass behind a stopped bus instead of merging around it into the travel lane.
That parking removal is the detail that will actually land on people's daily routines faster than the bike lane will. If you've relied on curbside parking along Willamette for guests, deliveries, or your own second car, this is the fall it disappears from most of the corridor. Construction crews have also scheduled night work for the concrete traffic separators on August 31 through September 3 and again September 8 through 11, so expect noise and lane shifts on those specific nights if you live along the route.
The Neighborhood Didn't Wait for the Concrete to Celebrate
Before a single curb separator went in this fall, the city already gave St. Johns a preview of what a car-free version of the corridor feels like. On August 2, Portland Sunday Parkways ran a brand-new 6.7-mile route through North Portland for the first time, looping through Downtown St. Johns, McCoy Park, Columbia Park and Annex, and McKenna Park. The route was built specifically to showcase the newly completed walking and biking upgrades along Willamette Boulevard, and the city partnered directly with the St. Johns Boosters, the same business association that represents shops from the Historic Downtown Lombard corridor to the Fessenden corridor and Cathedral Park, to bring vendor booths and programming into the activation areas along the route.
That's a deliberate sequence. The city let residents experience the finished vision of the corridor on a single free Sunday, months before the actual concrete work was done, using the neighborhood's own business network to do it.
Lombard Street Isn't Waiting on Willamette Either
While Willamette Boulevard has spent two years under construction, the neighborhood's other spine has kept moving on its own. In late January, No Doubts Wine Bar opened at 8408 N Lombard Street, taking over the space that used to be Groovy Floret. It's a small addition, but it's one more storefront filled on the strip that runs parallel to the boulevard a few blocks east.
The bigger signal came in April, when organizers announced the 2026 St. Johns Bizarre would expand to roughly fifteen blocks along North Lombard Street between Charleston and Chicago avenues, its largest footprint yet, with a record vendor count and live music running an extra hour, from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. across two stages. The Occidental Beer Garden and a second beer service area from StormBreaker Brewing anchored the drink side, and organizers kept the event's ban on single-use plastic cups, using reusable steel cups from Earthwell instead. None of that required a bike lane. It required foot traffic on a street that was already built for it.
Put those two threads together and a pattern shows up that neither one tells you on its own. Willamette Boulevard is being rebuilt as a through-corridor, a way to move people by bike and bus past the neighborhood efficiently. Lombard Street is doing the opposite job, absorbing more vendors, more seating, more reasons to stop and stay. St. Johns isn't becoming one thing this fall. It's sorting itself into two different kinds of street, a few blocks apart, each getting more efficient at its own job.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
If your daily routine runs along Willamette, plan around parking that's already thinning out and will keep thinning through the fall. If you commute by TriMet Line 44, the upgraded stops at Ida and Wabash should make boarding less of a squeeze with bikes in the mix. If you bike into downtown St. Johns from the south, this is the season the ride stops feeling like it drops you halfway there. And if Lombard Street is more your speed, the street fair calendar and the small storefronts filling back in suggest that side of the neighborhood isn't slowing down for anyone's construction schedule.
Two rebuilt spines, one neighborhood, and for once the piece that took longest to finish is the piece that runs straight through it.
If you're curious how changes like this ripple through property values or neighborhood demand in St. Johns or anywhere else in the Portland-Vancouver area, Karen Higgins tracks these shifts closely and is always glad to talk through what's happening on the ground, whether or not you're planning a move anytime soon.
