The New Forest Park Entrance Makes A Loud First Impression
Will the people embrace it?
I put off publishing this post for weeks because I thought it might make me out to be a grouch and complainer. Ultimately, though I think it has some value as using a soundwalk as documentary tool for discussing noise, and perhaps starting a conversation about our sound environment as it relates to policy and planning.
Portland’s Forest Park is one of the largest urban forest reserves in the United States. It is an asset that city residents cling to as a point of pride, where perhaps hometown pride runs in a little shorter supply these days.
It sounded like a no-brainer back in 2015 when Portland Parks & Recreation announced Forest Park needed a “front door”, and they were going to build it. “This is a house with 22 back doors and no front door,” said bureau director Mike Abbaté in 2017. By that he was referring to Forest Park’s menagerie of trailheads, mostly gravel lots offering less than 10 parking spots, and scant amenities. At the time of the announcement the city previously acquired the lots fronting NW St. Helens Rd. near the intersection with Highway 30 and the NW Kittridge viaduct, and were starting to seek proposals from design teams and input from the community.
It would be interesting to know how they arrived at selecting that site. Were they mostly working with maps in an abstract way, or were stakeholders invited to walk the land? The nearby intersection may be one of the loudest in the Portland city limits. I took a 15 minute sound measurement from the lot at 9:30 am on a weekday. The average sound level was 92db:
According to The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), continuous exposure to loud noises can cause permanent hearing damage. The maximum recommended exposure time to 91db levels is two hours.
Hiking up a steep bank from the new parking lot, the onslaught of noise didn’t begin to diminish meaningfully for a half hour or so, as the only existing route to the park interior is via Firelane 1 (re-branded Forest Lane) which runs parallel to Highway 30 for 1.5 miles. The roar of trucks, trains, and heavy industry drown out the sounds of seasonal creeks and birds. It didn’t feel particularly welcoming to me.
Exhibit A: Forest Park Entrance Soundwalk.
I couldn’t help but notice how much engineering, grading and concrete work went into the parking lot buildout. The city says PP&R had $4.8 million allocated for Phase 1 of the project, which was finished in Fall 2022. The price included the 30 space parking lot, a sidewalk, an 80’ x 30’ “wetland” swale, and some drainage improvements on Firelane 1. Still it seems pricey to me. A spokesperson for the city said it officially opened in late February, 2024. A “soft launch”, I guess. No press release. Even the project web page wasn’t updated for about a month. For a year prior to that the gate had been locked every time I passed by.
From what I could ascertain this lower section of Firelane 1 never enjoyed much popularity from any of Forest Park’s user base, outside of blackberry foragers in Summer, so it’s odd to me that this was selected as the “foyer” for a front door. It seems to me that constructing a new trail that more efficiently connects to Leif Erickson Drive, the park’s arterial multi-use trail, seems crucial to the adoption of this as a primary trailhead destination. Despite drainage improvements and repairs, Firelane 1 is still a long, loud, muddy, and slippery slog in the wet months.
A future phase of building promises a nature center that is estimated to add 13.2 million dollars to the cost, but I wonder if once people start using the parking lot, they’ll question the value in locating a trophy building here? A spokesperson says, “There is no timeline or funding for the areas identified as ‘future phases’ on the schematic shown on the website.”
I did return on a Sunday at 9:30 am to take another sound reading. Predictably it was quieter, but I have to admit I was astonished by just how much: a 66db average this time. Because the decibel scale is logarithmic 90 db is four times as loud as 70db. So if you’re heading out to the Forest Park Entrance I recommend the weekend for about 5x less noise!
It’s both late and cynical to debate if there might have been a better site, but I was so put off by my own introduction to this one, that I couldn’t help myself. The two lane section of NW St. Helens Rd is a logical start, served by public transit, a bike lane, and safe and efficient vehicle access. If I was tasked with selecting the site, I might have pointed to the roughly 2 acre site at 3821 NW St. Helens Rd. less than half a mile south. It’s relatively flat, begging for redevelopment (the large quonset hut structure presently appears mothballed), and most importantly, it sits at the entrance to one of the park’s deeper canyons. An effortless stroll would have you embraced by the hills and lulled by the sound of a creek in less than two minutes (recording is made with identical equipment, identical levels, and at the same time on a weekday):
Exhibit B: A Lost Option
Admittedly there are a number of reasons this parcel could have been dismissed out-of-hand. Mostly I offer it as point of comparison. The larger point I want to make here is that I think there’s a need for city governments and parks planning bureaus to pay closer attention to sound, and not just with respect to planning and design, but policy and enforcement as well. That apex reading of 107db on the first measurement was not a massive, groaning dump truck. It was a small passenger vehicle with a modified exhaust system going about 20mph up a small hill, measured from over 100 yards away! (Oregon law says all vehicles should not exceed 91db from 25 feet away.) We have to start somewhere and someday to make our city soundscapes more livable. Why not today?
Thank you for this. I discovered this new entrance by chance last weekend. Wish PPR would have asked us what we thought prior to the location.... But going to get it in circulation as a starting point. BTW, are you the same Chad Crouch as the painter? I have two of your pieces; city scape and holding hands