Cycling in Portland.
I wrote this story. I never got it published or defended it as a project. Maybe it should be availble to be read somehow. So here it is. It's really fucking long:
Once upon a time cars were the wave of the future. The mobility they provided Americans, to travel the country and commute to work great distances, was intoxicating. Automobiles were to revolutionize cities, towns and the way we thought about the capacity of our daily life. In the 1970s, a golden era of flourishing car ownership and highway development, Portland, Oregon was a city that chose to proliferate its transportation options and see beyond the power of cars and trucks. There are only a few cities in United States that make it easy for its residents to live and work without owning a car. In Portland, however, it's hard to live without a bike.
With almost 300 miles of bike-friendly roadways and paths, Portland has been awarded the title of the Best Cycling City in the U.S. by Cycling magazine. Portland didn't become an urban cycling Mecca overnight; the city has been perfecting the objective of becoming a bicycle-friendly city over the past thirty years. A strong commitment to cycling from a variety of public and private organizations over the last few decades has established PDX as the best city to commute and play on two wheels from the Pacific to the Atlantic.
There are many ways in which Portland proves itself as a city that pleases the most avid and dedicated cyclist. From the commuter that rides 30 miles a day to the fifty year old car driver out for a weekend ride along the Willamette River on the East and Westbank Esplanades, there's something for everyone. The City of Portland has put in a steady conscientious effort, at every given opportunity, to improve the city's infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians.
"We're concerned whenever we put anything new in or we do something 'Is there an opportunity to add bicycle lanes?' said Maria Tia-Mai, a senior policy director for environmental concerns at city commissioner Sam Adams' office. "Is there an opportunity to add separated bicycle lanes? What can we do to make things more bicycle-friendly?'" Several city officials have been strong contributors towards Portland's evolution as a cycling city and Sam Adams is certainly one of them.
However, one of the first city commissioners to really take the reigns, Earl Blumenhauer, is now pushing the cycling agenda on a more national scale in Washington, D.C. But back before he left Portland for Capitol Hill, Blumenauer started the ball rolling with an idea that would stick with Portlanders for years and years to come – livability. "And then in the late 80s is when the city of Portland had a commissioner in charge of the transportation department, his name was Earl Blumenauer and he had this vision for livable communities and biking, cycling, was one of the legs of his platform for livable communities," said Jay Graves, owner of the highly successful Portland cycling retail chain The Bike Gallery and longtime cycling advocate. "He hired 5 or 6 people for the City of Portland Bike Program that was housed inside the larger Transportation Department." Blumenauer may have ignited the second wave of significant steps towards becoming a bike city but it was citizens who took the bull by the horns almost twenty years earlier.
Robert Moses was a man that some would say destroyed a lot of communities. Moses was a man who had a vision that featured miles and miles of highways in the sky and neighborhoods were generally considered in the way. His designs for New York City freeways are said to have destroyed the South Bronx as well as the Brooklyn Dodgers. It was this design philosophy that threatened Southeast Portland in the late 60s and early 70s with the watershed proposal of the Mt. Hood Freeway. The freeway was to be eight lanes wide and would tear up most of the neighborhood south of Division St. along Clinton St. But some grassroots organization and the impending leadership of a budding Portland political leader, Neil Goldschmitt, put an end to the Moses-inspired highway.
Perhaps inspired by Jane Jacobs, an influential writer and activist whose "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" (1961) critiqued urban renewal policies for destroying communities, the Mt. Hood Freeway was to be met with very strong opposition. Al and Kayda Clark, a couple in their mid-30s, organized against the freeway at night and soon Goldschmitt came along and carried the torch all the way to the freeway's demise in 1974 with a 4-1 vote of the City Council.
"The Mt. Hood Freeway was supposed to go out here and the people living along it just rose up and said 'You have got to be kidding us, this is our neighborhood, we live here, you're not building a freeway through here,'" said Michelle Poyourow, Events and Outreach Director for the Bicycle Transportation Alliance. "Freeways have been fought before and prevented, but the change was this time, they got the money, they argued in court and got the federal government to give them the money they would have spent on the freeway and then they got to spend it however they wanted. So the City of Portland said 'You can't tell us how to spend our federal transportation dollars and you can't build this freeway, so give us the money.' And that's how the MAX got built. I think that was pretty watershed right there."
Not only was the Mt. Hood project demolished but Portland was on its way to achieving its variety of transportation options; options beyond driving a car. Taken from a note on European culture, especially Amsterdam, bikes would soon fit right alongside light rails, buses, and streetcars. "And this is my vision of Heaven," said Graves pointing to a picture of a three-level parking garage, a bike parking garage, next to a train station in Amsterdam. Graves likened the marriage of several Dutch transportation options to an orchestral performance, and in some ways Portland is hitting a lot of the same European musical notes.
"The fact that bikes are an integral form of their transportation [is inspiring], from the time that they're little to the time that they're really old," said Graves. "It's just that people don't think of bikes as fun or toys, they think of bikes as transportation over there and what I call it is it's a symphony of different transportation choices that just flow together: they have cars and trucks and scooters and taxis and trains and bikes and the trolly…and they all just blend together so smoothly." One way in which Portland's transportation options compliment bicycles is TriMet's placement of bike racks on the front of their buses.
A bike rack on a bus is a simple and yet amazingly convenient perk to commuting in Portland. In a city that is not flat and goes downhill towards the Willamette and uphill away from the river, being able to take a bus for the more physically demanding portion of your commute is a blessing. Furthermore, if riders are not adequately equipped with a waterproof jacket, pants or shoes, bus bike racks are essential. It is very easy to simply signal to your bus driver that you're going to pull down the bike rack and throw your bike up on the front of the bus and board. Bus bike racks were one of the first accomplishments of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BTA), a strong and enduring force in the bikability movement.
"Their first major accomplishment, before they even had a paid staff person, was to get the bike racks on TriMet busses. I don't think Portland was the first in the country but we were one of the first," said Poyorouw. "It's huge. Especially in a place that is not flat and not necessarily dry. A lot of people really need that option." If the 70s were a milestone for the defeat of a Portland highway culture, the early to mid 90s were the beginning of a revitalized effort to make PDX the premiere urban cycling destination.
Earl Blumenauer was elected to the Portland City Commission in 1986 and in the early 90s he hired Mia Birk to write up the Portland Bike Master Plan. "In the early 90s when I was at the City of Portland Bicycle Program, I spearheaded the Bike Master Plan effort and it was adopted in 1996. It was a blueprint for making the bicycle an integral part of daily life in Portland," said Birk, a partner at Alta Planning, the premier pedestrian and bicycle planning firm in the country. "We had a vision of a 630-mile bikeway network of different kinds of bike lanes and paths, and bike boulevards… Lots of bicycle parking has been installed, bike transit improvements, tremendous efforts on encouragement and outreach to get more people to bicycle and it's really been very effective to a large extent. We've seen bicycling increase tremendously." Indeed, cycling has gone through the roof and only continues to do so.
Portland has many nicknames and one of them is Bridgetown for the seven bridges that cross the Willamette; but the crown jewel for cyclists is the Hawthorne Bridge. Bridge traffic is an indication of the volume of cyclists entering the city and leaving. Bridges are an easy way to gage cyclists making trips probably for work or events but there are also thousands of cyclists riding to their local grocery store or to their friends' homes within their neighborhood. But for the past two years bridge traffic has been higher than it has ever been before. Cycling in Portland is flourishing and only picking up more steam.
"It's raised 33% in the last 2 years, 15% two years ago and then 18% this year. And that's just huge, and that's just part of the culture that Portland has been able to develop," reports Graves on bridge traffic. "So as bikeway miles got up above 250, they're currently at 263, they've gone from 2,800 trips to over 12,000 trips across the bridges. So it's like 6,000 into town and 6,000 out of town. But that's 12,000 people using a bridge on a bike everyday." The word is out that not only is it enjoyable and healthy to ride a bike but it many contexts biking is actually the most reliable and convenient form of transportation.
City Commissioner Sam Adams sees this as one of the primary reasons why Portland is a cycling city: "Portlanders are practical people," he says. "It's about a competetiveness of commuting options. With cars you have to get your car, drive it, park it and fight traffic. With a bike it's free, reliable and you can avoid traffic. In many ways cycling is the most reliable, the fastest and possibly one of the safest modes." The secret is out that for young professionals, students, moms, dads and politicians, cycling just makes sense in Portland; more sense than driving a car, and sometimes more so than riding the MAX or taking the bus.
Michelle Poyorouw had a very insightful explanation for why it might take a bit for drivers to realize that cycling is ideal for getting from A to B. When you think of driving a car, how often do people think about sitting in a hot, sticky car at 5pm rush hour on I-5 or in downtown Portland? Even more so, auto drivers often feel entitled to zip across town or arrive at their destination with anything more than a few stops at red lights. "We assume that there will be room and that they have the right, like it's a fundamental right, to go quickly places in your car and to not be in congestion and to not be stuck behind a bicyclist," she said. "And I can't blame them because that is something we are taught by the U.S. government, by car ads, by car manufacturers. You look at car ads and there are cars freely speeding along empty country roads." As Portland's population continues to grow so do traffic concerns.
"As this city becomes denser and as traffic becomes worse, and it's already getting a lot worse just in the couple years that I've been here, people will start to get used to the idea that you don't have the fundamental right to zip across town in your car, nobody does, it's a public space and we're all sharing it," Poyourow adds. Cycling can sometimes strike you as ultimately satisfying when traveling faster than cars or passing by a line of a dozen cars waiting at a red light. It is one thing to enjoy riding a bike for the sake of riding bike, but it seems another thing to ride a bike because it is so much more satisfying than driving a car. However, there's still a significant portion of Portlanders who are not comfortable enough with the way things are to get on a bike.
A BTA "Blueprint for Better Biking" publication shows a pie chart breaking down Portlanders into four categories: Fearless (<1%),>
"I think a lot of times…you get a perception that something is a lot further away than it actually is and so you don't think of it as something that you can actually bike to," says Roland Choplowski, Sam Adams' cycling policy advisor in the city commissioner's office. "But getting people out of that really car-centric view of the world, and getting people to see the reality that actually it's not very far [is] important if we're going to be a truly bike-oriented city."
It is a testament to the City Commissioner's office that providing cyclists with the ideal city layout and favorable traffic control is not quite enough. Turning non-cyclists into cyclists is no easy task. Choplowski suggested that as people get older they become resigned to certain ideologies of transportation. But that does not mean he and his peers have given up on conversions. "Hopefully, [we will] figure out 'How do we get more people more comfortable biking? What facilities do we need to provide? Do we need to de-emphasize bike lanes and start looking at bicycle-only facilities that don't have cars? What sort of issues, when people make the decision to bike or not, what can we do to give incentives?'" he asked.
Smart Trips caters to citizens who have responded to a mailing list asking for more information about safe cycling. Interested citizens receive a kit showing them nearby grocery stores within biking distance, nearby bike boulevards and bus paths that would discourage driving a car. Actively creating more cyclists is reasonable because the roads can handle a glut of cyclists. But is Portland's cycling popularity peaking or only just beginning? It seems that once many cyclists or would-be riders get a taste of the Portland culture they are hooked.
When asked if Portland's biking population is building or peaking, Jay Graves said this: "I think there's a lot of synergy that's coming together. One of the big reasons I feel is that there is a sense of 'Well if all of these people are doing it, then I can do it.' It used to be when I rode my bike downtown, I'd be the only person, maybe one other person on the bridge at the same time. And now I frequently find myself, even in weather like this, I'm part of a six or eight bike group that's going over the bridge at the same time."
Cycling is infectious and once cyclists get a taste for the perks of riding around Portland, sometimes that's enough to make the move to the 1 cycling city in America. Many cyclists get frustrated with a lack of cycling in their home city or that the cycling is dangerous. Sometimes visitors are amazed at the quality of life that a cycling city offers and that's enough to take the plunge.
Michelle Poyorouw said she's seen friends fall for Portland's cycling climate: "I also just know some people who are my age pass through town visiting friends or something, or come to Pedalpalooza in the summer, and are so blown away by how much fun it is to be a part of this community that they stay. I don't know if they'll stay for a long time but I definitely hear about people who moved here either because of the biking or got here and knew that they wanted to stay because of it."
With a City Commissioner's office improving an infrastructure that already supports cyclists everyday, a robust presence of bikes on the road everyday that auto-drivers accommodate, plenty of retailers, hundreds of miles of shared bike paths and bikeways, and a public transportation system that allows riders to bring along their bikes on board, it's no surprise cyclists have been coming to Portland to experience a new brand of urban livability. Portland is a thriving city growing everyday and so many of its newest arrivals are active, young, liberal professionals eager to consider alternative forms of transportation.
Many young people are looking for cities that offer something far different from the residential diagnosis of suburban sprawl that so many car-oriented cities require of a working class. Portland may have its suburbs (Gresham, Tualatin, Beaverton, and Hillsboro) but even the suburban commuters have the opportunity to ride a bike into the city along bike lanes or split their commute half way with the MAX rail or a bus. Even Portland's suburbs don't need to be a prescription for car commuting everyday.
Over the past 35 years Portland has gained more and more momentum in its goal of making the bicycle one of the most significant forms of transportation. Mia Birk, one of the creators of Portland State University's Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation (IBPI), is trying to secure research funding because Portland is a living, breathing model of success. "We are the living model here of a city that has transformed itself into one that is pedestrian and bicycle friendly…we have tremendous leadership here in every way: in our city governments, in our private firms, in our advocacy organizations, [and] in our universities," said Birk.
This city has transformed itself into a city that embraces cyclists and that's why it has earned the title of the 1 cycling city in America. Cycling enthusiasts are converted with one visit, a weekend of riding around the city or along the river. There's nowhere better in America to shun a car culture and pick up a bike and forget about what it was like to feel trapped by the isolating effect of highways and freeways. Robert Moses would be so disappointed.
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