- Matthew Billington
When the City Club of Portland released a report on bicycling in late May, much of the coverage—ours included— centered around some of the more sensational findings. For instance, the report’s suggestion than an excise tax be levied on new bike purchases.
I actually found most of the report sort of predictable at the time. Bikes are good? They should be accepted and provided for in the urban landscape? Thanks, City Club.
Now I’m thinking I was wrong. There are some really interesting details in the report I glossed over the first time around. Mainly, an idea I’d not heard: Bike lanes are no longer going to help Portland attract new cyclists.
The change of heart was spurred by an e-mail sent out recently by Portland economist Robert McCullough. McCullough did a lot of the heavy data lifting for the City Club report, and he’s about to present his findings further in a lunchtime talk tomorrow.
Relying heavily on numbers from the Hawthorne Bridge bike counter (as well as census data and Metro infrastructure tallies) McCullough’s essentially concluded [pdf] Portland’s gotten as much use of the handy paint stripes as its likely to get—at least where attracting new users is concerned.
Sure, the city’s seen a bike boom in recent decades, McCullough says, but the strategies that got us here are no longer enough. We’ve reached a point of flattening growth on the “logistic curve” and things will be harder from here on out. Simply slapping paint on the side of a road, his data suggests, isn’t going to push the city past the stubborn stagnation in cycling growth we’ve seen recently.
So what are we supposed to do, especially when the stated goal [pdf] is to have a quarter of all trips in Portland made by bicycle by 2030? (We’re nowhere close.)
While it’s interesting regular old bike lanes might not help, McCullough’s solution isn’t particularly jaw-dropping. He—along with about every bicycle advocate in the world, basically—thinks more “protected bike lanes” are the answer. These are stretches like NE Multnomah through the Lloyd District and SW Moody near the South Waterfront, where cycling paths are physically separated from car traffic.
Bike boulevards, the sleepy, velocipede-designated routes often adjacent to major thoroughfares, are good, too.
“Frankly, I’d put away the paintbrush,” McCullough told me earlier today. “It’s better than nothing, but if we really wanted change behavior, we have to cater to the customer.”
The line of thinking—and it seems obvious—is that people who are currently hesitant to use a normal bike lane may be willing to ride when they feel more protected. (McCullough suggested those demographics could include older folks and women, but I was thinking of Erik Henriksen, who is simply terrified of making the easy and short bike ride into work. He won’t do it.)
It’s a notion that jibes with the “four types of cyclists” you’ll often hear mentioned. Nearly 70 percent of people could be convinced to ride a bike, that idea goes, but the overwhelming majority still see it as unsafe.
“You already have an entire group of 25-year-old white males (who’ll ride anywhere),” McCullough said. “What we do know is there are other groups.”
But as bikeportland.com pointed out only yesterday (and we’ve explored before), Portland’s simply not pursuing many of these projects, at present.
That’s a shame. They’re money savers.
Biggity biggity BIKES, y’all!!!!1! 1!
I would also suggest some sort of weather altering device so that it isn’t rainy, cold and dark here 8 months of the year. That would probably help with the cycling.
Or maybe we could admit that only a very small and vocal subset of our population “really wants to change behavior” to force more cycling and we could stop catering to them. Because a vast majority of people don’t want their “behavior changed” by government planners.
We have these things called weather and topography that make that 2030 goal laughable.
That bike counter actually demonstrates it pretty well. A little bit of cold, and the number for yesterday dropped dramatically (unless there’s some malfunction because that does seem like a steep drop off).
Same with the wetter weather (I think this September was wetter than normal and had 30,000 less monthly trips than last September).
http://portland-hawthorne-bridge.visio-too…
And before someone chimes in a says “but Copenhagen,” yeah, there’s similar weather but 1) density; 2) topography; and 3) commute distances are vastly different.
Plus, fuck Copenhagen, I prefer Skoal.
Blabby, you are NOT supposed to tell people about that. Damn it man!
“Government planners” are controlling your behavior already by forcing most people to have only one transportation options: the car. If you’re that scared of having the freedom to choose, you may be suffering some sort of Stockholm Syndrome.
Blabby. So are you against the decades of marketing, messaging and other conditioning that went into convincing people it was safe to drive around (even though about 50k were killed a year for a while) at 20+ mph? Are you against the decades of conditioning that told people if they give up on their cities and move to the suburbs things will be better if they run away from their community and their problems? Are you against the conditioning to encourage people, “yeah, the suburbs are great, you can just drive EVERYWHERE!” You’re against the conditioning encouraged by Ford and Chevy that “roads are the responsibility of the people” to the Government and it should provide all subsidy necessary to offset the private operation of alternatives (actual market decisions be damned I suppose)? Are you against the conditioning of people to love their cars more than other people? How about the conditioning that has led to increased road rage and violent behavior?
What kind of conditioning do you support and don’t you support? I see you think biking is some form of “beahvioral change” from the Government planners, but it appears, that even with all the “Car love conditioning” and “suburbia love” conditioning people still made an objective request to allow some money to be allocated for “bicycling”, mainly , as pointed out, merely some stripes on the road.
Doesn’t seem very much like conditioning as you purport it to be, if a little small vocal minority rides (oh ya know, like 90k people in a 580k person city) and asks for infrastructure it seems to pan out that maybe they could lay claim to like 1% of the budget eh?
Yeah, in case it’s hard to tell… that’s smart ass sardonic sarcasm for ya. “Behavior change” my ass. btw – if you aren’t handling math to well these days, 90k out of 580k is not a vocal minority, it’s more of a substantial percentage of people and it is growing.
I read this as:
duduh duduh duduh duduh duduh duduh duduh
duduh duduh duduh duduh duduh duduh duduh
Continue reading »
duduh duduh duduh duduh
throws Erik under the bike
duduh duduh duduh duduh duduh duduh duduh duduh
I would bike more if there was better safer bike storage, I would happily pay for it like car parking in dense places like downtown portland…I would love to bike downtown but never will because my bike isn’t safe and I can’t afford to buy a new one when someone steals it which has happened several times despite heavy locks. So additional bike lanes aside and safer bike only pathways aside…if you want me to bike more give me a safe CONVENIENT place to lock up my bike, I have money for you