I was going to very articulately rip Joseph Rose and the Oregonian a new one after I saw their front page article headlined, “Portland Bike Plan goes before City Council, but can the city afford it?”
But then Jonathan Maus at BikePortland.org posted such an effective, line-by-line takedown of this bullshit anti-bike pandering that I’ll just quote his thoughts at length and confine my own opinions to bullet points. From BikePortland:
The article makes apples-to-oranges comparisons of the price of the completed bike plan ($613 million) to the $575 million MAX Green Line (which is funded by the federal government), and “all transportation projects in the metro area” ($630 million a year). Then, despite the fact that the plan does not commit the city to spending anything on bikeways, the article states that Mayor Sam Adams “doesn’t flinch at the estimated cost.” …
This is an important point: The bike plan is not about creating a city where you must bike. Live 10 miles from town and need to get to work? Go ahead and drive (although transit would be a good option). Need to pick up a couch from Macy’s downtown? Go ahead and drive. There is nothing wrong with using a car when you need to. The problem is that because the way our infrastructure and policies have been historically set up, too many people need to drive too often.
Here are my top problems with the article:
• The headline sets up the idea that bikes are an expensive, perhaps unnecessary investment for the city. As I’ve reiterated again and again, the problem with digging up money for bike projects is not that they’re expensive, but that they’re currently severely underfunded at both city and state levels. Though 6.4 percent of Portlanders get around primarily by bike, less than 1 percent of the city’s capital transportation budget goes to bike projects. Less than one percent of the entire state transportation budget goes to bikes and pedestrians. Fully funding the bike plan would mean upping bikes’ nibble of the budget pie to a small slice.
• Portlanders WANT the city to spend more money on bikes! Across the city, a whopping 18 percent of Portlanders said bikes should be the city’s TOP funding priority over the next two decades. Not one percent of the pie. The top funding priority.
• This bullet point isn’t even a real bullet point. I just wanted to use this line to post this other pie chart, a survey of business owners in the Alta study (pdf) which also reported bikes create $63 million annually just for the City of Portland:
- ALTA
- Bikes make money for Portland. All you haters suck my balls.
• This line about funding: “Some ideas — licensing and registration fees for bicyclists, a citywide sales tax on new bikes and advertising in bike lanes — would target just cyclists. But a proposed ‘green transportation’ bond would ask everyone to pay.” Everyone should pay for infrastructure that helps the whole city! Even if you don’t ever get on a bike in your life, getting more Portlanders on bikes would decrease pollution, improve city-wide health and cut car traffic. Making the streets safer for bikes and pedestrians improves everyone’s health and safety.
• In closing, good for Sam Adams for “not flinching” at the cost of the bike plan. Let’s hope that attitude translates into actual policy and Adams pushes the Council to adopt, fund and build the bike plan when they debate the plan tomorrow.
This is the kind of bullshit that makes simple, common-sense advances for bikes a tooth-and-nail uphill pedal. I’ll see all of you at the BUILD IT bike plan rally at City Hall (1221 SW 4th Ave) tomorrow at 1:30 pm. Maybe I’ll have calmed down by then.
Update 2/4: Writer Joe Rose responds over at his Hard Drive blog.
study from Univ Wisconsin shows economic benefit to that state – $1.5 BLN per year. and we’re a much more bikeable state, more of the year (less snow, fewer cheeseheads).
the basic economic concept too often missed: not spending on something is same as saving money (duh). the less we are forced to spend on roads, the more we save (like skipping the Macy’s “sales” for years on end). reducing driving reduces wear on the roads, allowing spending to be (safely) deferred, and voila: money, well, not in the bank but not taken from taxes, fees, etc.
yet another demonstration that the bike community’s #1 job: education.
Two points: one, “hefty price tag” is a headline writer’s effort to sell papers, and probably not Joseph’s doing. As you note, in the transportation funding world (or city budget world), it’s not accurate to say $30 million a year for ALL of a mode’s network is a “hefty price.” For example, the single CRC MegaBridge would cost around $4,000 million, and as the article concludes, Geller points out we’re only talking 12 miles of highway cost. As two-thirds of Portlanders have bikes, um… no-brainer.
Second, in helping people compare costs, it’s best to only switch one or two factors, while keeping all others constant. The article switched several things at once, hence the apples to oranges note. It switched the mode, the years of costs, and the single facility v. network issue, keeping only cost constant (i.e. comparing [681] miles of [network] for [bikes] over [20] years to [about 8] miles of [Max Green Line] of [single facility] over [a few] years.) People can’t make fair comparisons when they’re asked to change so many variables.
The take away from the article: decision makers need to find some money to make sure the bike plans aren’t just plans, but actually built facilities. Our job is to keep the pressure on them so they do that.
I love you for saying “suck my balls” in a news article. Just saying…. 🙂
It strikes me that if fewer people felt the need to own cars, it would most likely reduce a lot of personal debt in the area. A decent bike and concomitant gear is two months of car payments.
People with less debt (and therefore fewer monthly payments) are going to be able to spend more money locally instead of sending it off to Citi or Chase or whoever every month. This means a healthier local economy from both a business and a personal perspective.
You would think all of this was self-evident by now – clearly we still have some work to do. Old habits and preconceptions die really hard.
A study done by a company that specializes in designing infrastructure for bicycling saying bikes bring in $63 mill. I bet they take more than a few liberties to get to that number. A Matt Davis expose on these conflicts of interests is surely forthcoming.
As for the poll question, if would seem to make much more sense to ask business owners if spending $613 million in tax dollars over the next 20 years on bike projects is something they would support. I’m guessing the results wouldn’t be to ALTA’s or smirks liking in that case.
I think it’s plenty reasonable to think spending that kind of $$$ on something a relatively small number of people will use is a poor decision. You’d have to greatly increase the number of people who frequently bike to make that kind of investment worth the while, even taking into consideration the benifits increasing bike use has on non-bikers.
Is the O’s article skewed anti-bike? I think that’s very possible (though I don’t know they have a dog in this fight), but you could make an even stronger argument that everything smirk writes skews heavily pro-bike (and yes, I do realize that pro-bike initiatives benefit those who don’t necessarily bike). In fact, I don’t think that’s even debatable. Anything short of an outright stamp of approval is going to be met with with derision by the mer.
So wait, is CH seriously comparing “front page Oregonian” to “offhand Mercury blogpost?” Wow either smirk is way more powerful than I realized, or the Oregonian is even more poorly edited that I suspected.
p.s. Here’s a quick Math™ lesson: 6.4% < 1%. If you're gonna rage with logic like "that kind of $$$ on something a relatively small number of people of use is a poor decision", you might want to haul out a calculator and reckon how "relative" that small number is.
Heh, that should be 6.4% > 1%. D’oh!
@CH: I read the report… They asked bicycle-related businesses what their gross revenue was, and then categorized the businesses, with clear definitions of what comprised each of the four categories. So it’s an estimated gross revenue of bicycle-related businesses in the area. Unless some of those companies interviewed are lying or cooking their books, I don’t see where they could be taking liberties to reach the $63m figure.
We are asking the city to spend less than 5% a year, on more than 5% of the people. That isn’t unreasonable in the first place.
The “more than 5%” number is 6.3% now, but they expect that if they spend the “less than 5%,” that the “more than 5%” number will be 25%. Then add in the health/congestion/reduced maintenance benefits, and suddenly it is a no-brainer.
If we followed your logic, we never would have paved the roads in the first place, after all, in the 1900s “a relatively small number of people” owned cars.
axo: 6.4% of Portlanders are being counted as “bicycle users”? First, I doubt that. And second, that’s still a relatively small number. If you assume Portland’s population to be 582K, spending $613 mill over 20 years pencils out to $850 per year per cyclist. Number of cyclists will surely increase in the next 20 years, but so too will population. Basically $850/year per cyclist doesn’t seem like a good return on investment.
As to biases, I don’t know how size of publication or the means of publication (re: print vs. blog) factors into that discussion. Bias is bias.
tk: I read the report too, and to my admittedly imperfect knowledge of such things, it’s seems rather specious. If I’m reading it correctly, numbers from larger stores that wouldn’t release their fiscals are estimated in the study. If a pro-bike organization calls up a bike shop and asks them how much money they made, I’d probably be inclined to inflate the number both for my own pride and for the good of the cause.
And ALTA counting their own employees and budget in their study, along with that of the BTA, is, in my opinion, bullshit. Counting the jobs of those who work for the city who sometimes work on bike projects is slightly less bullshit, but still shady. Counting donations brought in for OHSU by the Lance Armstrong Livestrong ride? Again, that’s suspect.
@CH: Fair enough, that certainly warrants some skepticism. Thanks for the detail.
I will be happy if the bicyclists start paying – or helping to pay – for these projects. All of the comments above are great points, but that’s becoming a bottom line issue for me. If you’re not willing to pay a fee to register your bike, pay a fee for a bike license, or pay transportation taxes to use these bike projects – then you can’t have my money. I’d prefer another 20 feet of pavement somewhere, thank you.
Oh god, this shit again? I pay taxes, moron. Like most bicyclists, I also drive a car, and I pay all the taxes and fees associated with that. How many times does that need to be pointed out?
@Chunty – So? Just because you drive a car doesn’t mean the state should use your car taxes to support your hobbies. I drive a car and I love my Xbox – why can’t the transportation fund be used to buy ME some new fun? Because the two things have nothing to do with each other. You pay taxes on your car for car projects. Pay taxes on your bike and you can have some bike projects. Heck, we can even share the pot, and use the same fund for both – as soon as your bike starts contributing.
Our taxes should support all reasonable forms of transportation. Bike funding is a drop in the bucket when compared to the costs of building and maintaining automobile infrastructure.
And if you want to claim that my ten years of bike commuting is “recreation”– well guess what? I think our tax dollars should support recreational facilities too, like all those horrible, evil city parks that nobody ever uses.
Reymont you’re either an idiot trolling or an ignorant citizen.
All Oregonian tax payers (which includes cyclists, drivers, or none of the above) pay for transportation, just like all Oregonians pay for public schools.
You can’t just pick and choose what you want your taxes to pay for,[REST OF COMMENT DELETED: UNNECESSARILY ABUSIVE. KEEP IT SEMI-CIVIL, FOLKS.—EDS.]
How can you possibly expect me to avoid the impression that bicyclists want something for nothing, if they continue to demand public funding without contributing to it?
Bikes contribute no taxes; I don’t ride a bike; I don’t like the idea of my tax dollars going to bikes. Is that really such an unfathomable opinion? You can say that I’m missing the point by claiming that more bike projects will mean fewer drivers on my roads – but can you honestly not understand why the topic still leaves a bad taste in my mouth?
Bike taxes to contribute to bike projects! It sure sounds logical to me.
…and a big fuck you for the name calling, Jackattak.
@Reymont: My fingers are tired, so you’ll have to read my comments on another thread to get that answer:
http://blogtown.portlandmercury.com/Blogto…
I also like the comment: “Perhaps we should also tax people who pick up litter to pay for garbage cans and street cleaning.”
Okay, so I say the following as a part-time bike commuter, a wholehearted supporter of the bike plan and somebody with a lot of respect for Ms. Mirk.
Sarah, I don’t understand how any of these bullet points are problems with Rose’s article. If Portlanders generally believe that bike facilities are worthwhile, as you persuasively report, then Rose’s reporting that it costs a lot of money to build bike trails will not deter Portland from supporting their construction.
I mentioned this on the BikePortland thread: I don’t know why Rose decided to compare a 20-year figure to a 1-year figure. To my mind, that’s the biggest weakness in the article.
But I honestly don’t understand why Rose is the target of so much vitriol because he’s reporting that there are plausible arguments against funding this plan.
Here and on the BP thread, I think it’s simply strange that people want to evaluate Rose based on the presumed outcome of his article, not based on the factual content of the piece.
It seems as if you’re implying that the question of expense doesn’t even deserve to be publicly raised. I think Portland’s pro-bike community needs a noisier debate about the merits of bikes, not a quieter one.
Hi, just wondering how 18% qualifies as “whopping”.