Whether you’re walking, rolling or driving, there’s not much to love about Bend’s Franklin Avenue tunnel. It’s used as a public restroom, is unsafe and when it rains, it turns into a flooded disaster. A number of years ago, hopeful volunteers painted the walls inside the tunnel to make the area more cheerful. Attempting to put lipstick on the pig of the tunnel wasn’t a success; the artwork was quickly defaced and had to be painted over.
The Franklin tunnel is an eyesore, and we’re having a hard time understanding why people are opposed to improving it.
Its most popular name is the “pee tunnel,” for goodness’ sake.
When considering the notion of making this area better for everyone who uses it to get in and out of downtown, people don’t seem to want to ever be inconvenienced. Some gripe that even after the improvements, the tunnel will still only offer one lane in each direction for cars. Mentioning the fact that the entire street surrounding it is going to be improved for pedestrians and cyclists — in an area with plenty of them using the streets day and night — doesn’t seem to alter some people’s perspective much, either. But here’s the thing: when the Franklin Avenue corridor gets improved for bikes and pedestrians, it gets improved for cars, too — at the very least, to make it so it doesn’t flood every time we get a downpour.
And that, unfortunately, is going to come with some inconvenience.
A six-month closure of one of the few thoroughfares into downtown is a big deal. It is going to be a pain to navigate the one-lane or total closures, for sure. (That said, at least one side of the pee tunnel will always stay open for walkers and cyclists, the City says.)
But it’s being torn up, because it’s messed up. That’s what happens in cities: they grow and need changing. Whether we like it or not, the area just east of the Franklin tunnel, known as the Bend Central District, will one day be home to a lot more people. Property owners adjacent to the tunnel have told the Source in the past that developments wouldn’t begin until street improvements did. Would we like those future residents to have a way to walk or ride safely into downtown, or would we prefer that they get in their cars and add to parking woes? One day we’ll also have a pedestrian bridge from the BCD to downtown, but until then, we have Franklin and Greenwood.
In recent years, the City of Bend has attempted to adopt an “if you build it, they will come” approach to changing our streets and making them safer for those outside of cars. Lots of people have not liked it. Some say the projects already completed, such as Greenwood Avenue and Olney Avenue, are failures. It remains to be seen how improvements such as those will alter the number of people getting out of their cars to get around.
In the case of the Franklin tunnel and the surrounding street, maintaining the status quo, with the accompanying hygiene and safety issues, is not the way to go.
This article appears in the Source March 26, 2026.
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Consider making the Franklin tunnel 4 lanes for cars and move the 2 pedestrian lanes to an overpass (combine the Hawthorne and Franklin projects).
This is not a bad idea!
So now you want to shutdown the trains too? That’s gonna take a lot longer than 6 months. Maybe take another look at the area before wildy flinging statements into the ether.
All of the “improvements” I have experienced in Bend to encourage foot travel and cycling have been costly failures. How long do we have to wait for “them” to come. Olney is a disaster in my opinion and causes gridlock at the intersection with Wall because of the loss of the lane that would allow right turns. The concrete barrier to protect bikes slows everything even more. I pass through that intersection several times a week at mid day and I have never seen a bike ride through that protected lane. More than half the bikes I see are on sidewalks. A waste of my tax money
First of all, I think anyone with any experience in urban environments other than Bend knows that Bend hardly experiences significant “gridlock” except once in a while when a train passes through and no amount of additional lanes is going to address that. Underpasses and bridges do but those are incredibly costly and cause much wailing and heartache from Joe Citizen when asked to chip in and make it happen. Secondly, the fact that your “data gathering” has occurred midday is a clear signal that you don’t fundamentally understand transportation issues at all. In Bend and practically every city the highest levels of traffic occur in the morning and late afternoon/evening so “your experience” is not particularly representative or anything meaningful. It’s estimated that 1-2% of Bend’s population travels by bike and I’m pretty sure no one expects this number to ever approach parity with motorists, but even taking the lower number of 1% (roughly a little over 1,000) means that nearly half of the downtown parking spaces are potentially not filled because of cyclists. This also means roughly 1,000 fewer people are potentially on the various roadways. So rather than whinging about all these perceived “failures” maybe thank every person on a bike that’s no longer “in your way”. It would also be a better look if you realized that your experience isn’t necessarily reflective of anyone else’s.
-A veteran who owns cars, pays plenty of taxes, rides bikes on our roads, and appreciates it when his fellow Americans don’t run him over
Ah yes … where to begin? Scott, I’ve been down there at all hours, mornings and evenings, seven days a week. I’ve NEVER seen a bicycle going through Franklin. The whole idea that we need to make decisions that put bicycles and pedestrians on the level as cars is ludicrous. “That’s what happens in cities: they grow …” And the “BCD will one day be home to a lot more people.” So what does our bicycle mayor and her incompetent cronies do? They shrink the roads. Stop trying to make bicycle commuting a thing – it is not going to be a thing. Has anyone ever seen the bicycle mayor actually on a bicycle? The few times I’ve seen her around town she was getting into or out of a car.
A retiree who owns trucks, a beach cruiser, a Pedego, pays more taxes than you, rides bikes on our roads, and has had enough with forced road diets.