Surprise! You Just Got a Bike
It’s the 2016 Bike Issue, and It’s for the People
Meet Your New Bike!
We Put Biketown to the Test on a Volcano. It Got Us to the Top... Eventually
The E-Bike Is the Perfect City Bike
How I Learned to Stop Worrying About Hills and Love E-Biking
The Life-Changing Magic of Bike Maintenance
A Guilt-Free Approach to the Care and Feeding of Your Steed
Demanding More from the City
Portland’s Most Prominent Tactical Urbanism Movement Explains Itself
YOU Can Learn to Ride a Bike Right Now!
Our Music Editor Just Did
Meet Your New Helmet
Try Your Hand at Winning One of These Custom Bike Issue 2016 Beauties
LATE LAST YEAR, rogue safety cones began popping up around Portland bike lanes, and an interesting conversation began online. A mysterious figure using the Twitter handle PDX Transformation (@PBOTrans) started gleefully posting pictures of sections of the cityâs streetscape that he and others had attempted to make more safe with purloined traffic cones. Theyâve since expanded to ersatz speed limit signs, and even a pop-up crosswalk. The movementâs got people talking, and forming up behind it. So we asked PDX Transformationâs founder to explain his motivations.âDIRK VANDERHART
HI EVERYONE! Maybe youâve heard of us as the people who put down cones on the streets, and youâre wondering why we do it and what else weâre up to. Those are fair questions!Â
We know you think of us as bike activistsâand that this is the Mercuryâs Bike Issueâbut this isnât a bike issue. Itâs a people issue. Itâs the issue of what we want our streets to be, and who they should serve. Some think they should serve only the people driving on them. We disagree.
Streets are public places that should connect people rather than cutting them off from their neighbors. Nobody should feel endangered when they are using our streets. Nobody should feel like they might get injured or die if someone else isnât paying attention. Nobody should literally die. But that has happened way too often in Portland this year.
So we have to talk about what makes our streets dangerous: speed. Speed turns mistakes and misjudgments into tragedies. Speed amplifies every small bad thing into a big bad thing. Speed makes a huge difference whether or not someone dies from a collision.
Sure, we have made fantastic progress with safety features on cars, but those are all about keeping the carâs occupants safe. When it comes to crashes between cars and people not in cars, basic physics has not had the same safety upgrades. The survival rate of a person being hit by a car at 20 MPH is around 90 percent. The survival rate at 30 MPH is roughly 50 percent. At 40 MPH, itâs about 10 percent. We bet 40 MPH is a tiny fraction of your carâs maximum speed. Think about how easy it is to go fast, without even realizing youâre doing it.Â
Everybody should slow down a little, but of course the people who most need to slow down are the ones in the cars.
What does that have to do with PDX Transformation? Well, we look for places in the city that are dangerous, but can be made safer with some small adjustments. We use cones, âflexi-posts,â signsâwhatever tools we can findâeither to lower speeds to safe levels, or provide separation between cars and modes. (We hate the word âmodeâ when every mode is just a human trying to get somewhere and trying to live, but itâs a useful term to describe how the different ways we move about make us behave differently.)
Some of the things we do are illegal, to be sure, but we try really hard to make sure theyâre not dangerous. None of what we do is meant to be permanent. We hope our temporary fixes will inspire the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) or other agencies to enact proper changes with more durable materials. We think this has already happened.
Recently, we placed a crosswalk (made out of white tape!) at SE 52nd and Gladstone to show that every intersection is a legal crosswalk, even if unmarked. Some people said it was unsafe, but they really meant nobody is aware of the law, so people donât cross there. But people do cross there. All we did is add visibility for them for a few days.
We think PBOTâs hearts are in the right place mostly, but they sometimes put convenience or political expediency ahead of safety, and we want to point it out when they do. They need encouragement to act faster, and we reject the position that we are interfering with their work. We are only demonstrating Portland residentsâ pent-up demand that our streets be made safer now.
We want to keep transforming our beloved Portland, and we now have dozens of Agents of Transformation working to make more positive changes, to make our streets safer and more human. We have some big plans coming up. Maybe youâd like to help!
Expect more from us, and together letâs demand more from our city.
Sincerely,
PDX Transformation