I have big dreams for a bikey future in Portland. Two dreams,
actually.
One is the vision that Portland will live up to our recent
designation as a Platinum city—that we can become a placid
biketopia, where it’s so normal, safe, and easy to ride a bike that
nobody considers it anything special or strange to hop in the saddle
for any trip.
The other is a more raucous vision of innovation, variety, and
adrenaline.
Vision number one may sound familiar. Such communities already
exist, and Portland is working to follow their lead. Bike advocates
often wax enthusiastic about bike-friendly cities like Amsterdam and
Copenhagen, where your grandmother doesn’t think twice about cruising
everywhere on a bike and separated bike-only highways abound.
These bike cities (and their bikey suburbs) are great role models
for Portland. Like us, they had been overrun by cars for decades.
Starting in the 1970s, a conscious new direction was undertaken on all
levels to build up transit and bikeways, to make cities walkable, and
to choose not to drive.
We are also looking to New World cities like Melbourne and
Bogotá. These cities, built for cars, are connecting communities
with “ciclovía” street closure events like Sunday parkways,
building bikeways, and creating business-lined arcades and plazas
without cars. Bogotá even has a proper car-free day once a year,
when cars are barred from the central city.
Portland is already forging ahead in this direction. Innovative new
infrastructure, advocacy, and laws have been successfully whittling
away at an old system that discourages or even penalizes cycling. Every
new mile of bikeways produces more riders and an unequalled return on
investment. Enforcement is starting to become more balanced. And I’ve
been noticing daily improvements in the skills and awareness of
cyclists on our streets, and the drivers who encounter us.
Sooner than we think, if we play our cards right, nobody will be
able to remember that it was ever difficult to ride a bike in
Portland.
But we’re not nearly there yet. Even in über-bikey inner
Southeast, where the biggest infrastructure investments have produced a
critical mass of everyday cyclists and a template for the
“bikification” of the rest of the city, we still lack good ways to
cross many major streets. Cyclists and drivers must share narrow roads
without necessarily having the skills, knowledge, or patience to do so
safely.
Even though many people long to escape their cars, Portland is still
a car city. The situation is dangerous, noxious, inequitable, and just
plain stressful. The body count, the road rage, the air quality, the
inactivity—we’ve taken this all for granted for a long time. It’s
still hard to be bold enough to say that we need to find, and quickly,
less traumatic ways to organize our mobility.
Advocacy groups, the city, businesses, and institutions of citizen
involvement like the Bicycle Transportation Alliance have all been
working hard to realize this dream, in fits and starts, for at least a
decade.
Meanwhile, the bike community has been on fire.
My ideal bikey future contains the often-outrageous explosion of
grassroots, community-powered creativity that’s come with the growth of
our bicycle culture, which arose out of adversity and is expanding like
wildfire, spinning off more and more improbable iterations. The results
have been awesome and varied, as this month’s Pedalpalooza festival
amply demonstrates.
How to describe the bike community? It’s constantly emerging, often
divided, but always encouraging of new riders and new innovations. It
spans the wild and woolly bike funnists, the earnest activists
promoting doughnuts as an alternative fuel, the gearheads, the amateur
traffic engineers, the families loading their kids into sleek Dutch
cargo bikes, and so much more.
Most of all, the bike community is the ordinary people in the middle
of life, compelled to start biking—by finances, health, or
conscience—rediscovering the joys of riding, being active, and
doing something concrete, unambivalent, and with immediate results for
themselves, the community, and the world.
I can’t actually envision anything better than all this, but every
day some new twist comes along to blow my mind.
Many of us are just trying to live out the placid dream of utility
cycling right now, and it says a lot about our city that this is
possible. But just as often, we want something more. We’re angry, or
passionate, or just have a really geeky idea. We’ve set our sights in
100 directions at once, and there’s always a willing cadre of cyclists
ready to ride all night in pursuit of a glorious or geeky vision.
This second, more wild and unpredictable vision of bike culture is
my favorite. I would rather live in Portland with all its flaws and
conflicts than in any European bike city where riding a bike is just a
way to get to the destination. In my ideal bikey city, this kind of
utility approach to cycling would be a no-brainer—but biking
would still be the destination in itself.
Elly Blue is the coordinator of the Towards Carfree Cities
Conference being held in Portland this June (carfreeportland.org).