What follows is one of the many articles in the Mercury‘s 2026 Transportation issue. Find a print copy here, subscribe to get a copy mailed to you here, and if you’re feeling generous and want to keep these types of articles coming, support us here.—eds.
In 2005, Portland’s bike scene was weird and thriving. Pedalpalooza, the summertime bike festival, had started just a few years earlier, and featured events like a bike “kiss-in” in the middle of a busy thoroughfare. Critical Mass, the global bike protest that hasn’t been held in Portland in almost 20 years, was alive and well (and heavily monitored by the Portland Police Bureau). The Sprockettes, the nationally-known, all-female bike dance troupe, were just getting off the ground.
Jonathan Maus, a starry-eyed, enthusiastic new Portland transplant at the time, was captivated by it all. So much so, he decided to start BikePortland, a blog dedicated to chronicling the local bike scene. While many parts of Portland’s early-aughts bike culture have long faded away, BikePortland is still here 21 years later.
I worked as BikePortland’s staff writer for a year and a half starting in 2021, just a few months after I moved to Portland. My time at BikePortland served as a Portland crash course and writing boot camp. (I also got schooled, via the site’s infamous comments section, in learning to deal with harsh backlash.)
The job was supposed to be part-time, but it was immediately clear I would need to put in more than 25 hours a week to do the work well. I spent my days reading archival planning PDFs and biking around the city, figuring out the difference between Portland’s neighborhood greenways, bike lanes, and shared-use paths (among other, more complicated infrastructure puzzles). I put in a lot of hours and thousands of miles on my bike.
I had a great and highly educational time at BikePortland, but my short time in the position wore me out. That’s why I wanted to check in with Maus, 21 years into BikePortland, to see how he’s feeling about the past, and what the future might hold.
Going back to 2005: Maus first launched what became BikePortland as a web column for the Oregonian. A few months later, he jumped ship to start his own site. The site’s early posts reflect an earnest enthusiasm for the sheer weirdness of local bike culture.
“We were at the start of this really meteoric rise as America’s best bicycling city in 2005, and we’d have several more years of that,” Maus told the Mercury in a recent interview. “It was fun, and BikePortland plugged right in.”
At the start, Maus didn’t consider himself a journalist. His early posts were short dispatches from the streets and quick updates to help readers connect to the local bike community. More than two decades later, Maus still occupies a unique position straddling the worlds of journalism and advocacy. But BikePortland is indisputably a key source of information for Portland transportation news, big and small.
BikePortland has demonstrated there is a big audience for this stuff.
Jonathan Maus
When someone biking or walking is hit and injured or killed, for example, Maus is often the first reporter on the scene, and sometimes the only one. The site has also pushed transportation news into the local mainstream, showing other news organizations that Portlanders care about these issues.
“Over the last 20 years, BikePortland has demonstrated there is a big audience for this stuff,” Maus said. “It’s helped the local media realize that not only is biking information important, but there’s a huge demand and market for it.”
Maus also isn’t afraid of holding other reporters’ feet to the fire when it comes to their transportation coverage. From the beginning, a part of his beat has been media criticism, pointing out coverage he sees as victim-blaming or ignorant of transportation issues. (This criticism extends to police press releases, which have historically informed news reporters’ angles.)
BikePortland’s sometimes-fiery coverage can be divisive. Since starting the site, Maus has become somewhat of a polarizing figure in Portland. Some view him as the essence of a perceived entitlement among Portland cyclists, perhaps best parodied in Portlandia’s “cyclist rights” sketch. But Maus gets plenty of flack from people within the bike community, too. (A look at the BikePortland comments section will quickly make it clear that transportation advocates and cyclists are definitely not a monolithic group.)
“I’ve always allowed people with very different opinions to leave comments, and I’ve gotten in trouble for that in some regards,” Maus said. “Some people feel some people’s voices don’t belong in the bike community. And I’m sitting there going, you don’t get to define what the community is, right? None of us do.”
Sometimes, the backlash is warranted. Maus, like all journalists and human beings, has made mistakes, and without an editor’s guidance, the fallout is all on him. He says he’s been able to weather the truly bad moments by lowering his guard and talking to people directly.
“I have an open door. I really do talk to everybody. I pick my phone up when it rings,” Maus said. “The community is my boss. If I don’t make decisions that are the right ones for the community, then I won’t have a business, really.”
Healthy cities desperately need media, especially aggressively independent media.
Michael Andersen
Michael Andersen was BikePortland’s news editor from 2013 to 2016—one of only a few other people who have held a BikePortland staff job. Andersen, who came from a newspaper background, told the Mercury that while Maus made some journalistic decisions he found surprising, BikePortland’s approach has served him and the broader public well.
“[Maus] has an incredibly nuanced and intuitive understanding of his audience, both the loyalists and the potential newcomers,” Andersen said. “Jonathan is a civic hero and Portland is lucky as hell to have him at work all these years. Healthy cities desperately need media, especially aggressively independent media. Yes, Jonathan throws elbows, and yes, he is a grump, but those qualities are why he had the gumption to start this crazy thing and will it into existence every day for the last 20 years.”
Maus says over the past few years, things have changed for him. He’s no longer able to dedicate the time and energy to go to and cover every big bike ride or newsworthy transportation event. He’s thinking about the future of BikePortland, and isn’t sure what it’s going to look like.
“I’ve pretty much confirmed in my own head that I don’t want to keep devoting my entire life to this one thing,” Maus said. “I think, five years from now, BikePortland will be a lot different.”
For now, his feelings ebb and flow. Three years ago, Maus launched a weekly bike happy hour, which he sees as a big success in bringing people together on a regular basis. For the last year and a half, the happy hour has rotated between Migration Brewing on North Williams and Gorges Beer Co. on Southeast Ankeny.
“I’m there every Wednesday at 3 pm if people want to talk. I try to introduce everybody, get everybody connected,” Maus said. “That’s what it’s all about, building community strength one person at a time. People who are informed and connected can’t be messed with and taken advantage of. That makes them powerful, and able to do cool things.”
BikePortland’s belated 20th anniversary party will be on Wednesday, May 6, at Migration Brewing, 3947 N Williams, 3-6 pm, free, all ages.
