Cities

Good morning! It’s 8:15 am on Vancouver Avenue in Portland, Oregon: bicycle rush hour. I’m swimming in a stream of bike traffic: passing careful moms in yellow safety vests towing their twins in Burley trailers, and being passed by spandexed road-captains on titanium sprinters shaving seconds off their personal best commute times. I follow two stylish hipsters on restored Japanese ten-speeds (nice!), and wave as I pass a front yard full of tall-bikes and choppers. Riding with other bikes is the norm here, not the exception. The adjacent car traffic, while rushed and stinky, is mostly polite and attentive. Bike gospel is spreading like wildfire, bike traffic is up 400 per cent in ten years and growing by dozens daily – and yet, the number of car-bike collisions in Portland has remained about flat. Drivers here, God bless ’em, have started seeing cyclists. The more we ride, the safer riding gets.

I zoom downhill to the Hawthorne Bridge – recently widened to accommodate bike traffic – where SHIFT, Portland’s bike-fun-advocacy group, is serving free breakfast to bike commuters. Because we ride, we get free coffee and donuts on a somewhat random schedule. The Shifties are festive but somewhat bleary-eyed – we’re in the second week of Pedalpalooza, Portland’s annual bike-fun festival, and it appears some of us have been celebrating a bit too hard. I ask one Shiftie what’s on the Pedalpalooza menu today, and she rolls her eyes – what isn’t? Let’s see: there’s a gelato ride, a taco ride, a bike-in movie in the park, rumours of a bicycle dance party in a traffic circle somewhere... just ride your bike and you’ll find something, is the advice I get. Just follow the pack of laughing cyclists.

Biking in Portland is a social thing – you run into people you know all over town, maybe take a detour with them so you can talk a bit. There’s a plethora of bike clubs and regular monthly fun-rides. Biking gets you out of glass boxes and puts you into the world – we all know that – and in Portland the world is smooth, flat and smells like fresh rain. It is also full of front-yard gardens and old wooden houses, street art, bridges, waterways, and nice people who’ll talk to you.

Fast forward: It’s 2 pm and I’m folding up my laptop at the Stumptown coffee shop, favourite hangout of messengers and bike hipsters. The speed limit downtown is only 15 miles per hour and riding on sidewalks is forbidden. So, even though riding is not really difficult, doing so downtown scares a lot of recreational cyclists and has become home to a harder-core element. A twice-weekly noontime ride takes off from Pioneer Square, sometimes climbing the west hills, sometimes taking off down one of Portland’s many bike paths, trails, or boulevards. But me, I head home for lunch, crossing the river on the three-year-old Steel Bridge bike/pedestrian path, then using Portland’s first dedicated bicycle crosswalk to connect from the eastside bike/pedestrian esplanade to the new Northeast Portland bike boulevards.