Features

Mia Birk, Principal at Alta Planning & Design in Portland, Oregon, is a 42-year-old mother of two who believes she has the best job on the planet. Every day, she gets to work with colleagues and clients to make North America more bicycle and pedestrian friendly.

Birk’s career began when she was hired by the City of Portland as the first Bicycle Coordinator. Birk later shifted gears and was hired by Alta Planning, where she started the Portland office in 1999; she has since turned her office of two into an office of sixty. Over the past 20 years, Birk has witnessed the radical growth of cycling infrastructure and culture in Portland firsthand. Initially, she says, it was an experiment but now no one can deny Portland’s radical transformation over the past two decades: the city is North America’s leader in bicycle-friendliness and numbers of transportation riders.

To Birk, “Biking is a simple solution to a lot of problems.” It has a transformative effect on cities and for societies problems such as stress, caused primarily by sitting in traffic; health issues related to living sedentary lifestyles; environmental and safety problems (the leading cause of death among young children is car crashes), and to economic and political problems such as our dependency on oil which also leads to wars.

Birk’s work at Alta Planning & Design is to plan for a more balanced use of public space where cities allow people to use their own bodies for transportation. As Birk says, “We can’t expect people to bike and walk if we don’t provide them with the infrastructure to do so. Vast amounts of public space in our cities are dedicated to moving motor vehicles, and we need to shift this balance back to prioritizing biking and walking.”

When designing a new facility, Birk adds that the highest priority is creating separate paths for cyclists and pedestrians because the three modes – cars, bicycles and pedestrians – operate differently and need to be treated differently. “So far in North America pedestrians and cyclists have had to share the cookie crumbs of public space, where cities have only allocated three meters for both cyclists and pedestrians. In my experience, this isn’t good enough. In almost every instance of building new infrastructure, upon completion the space is at capacity.”

Although infrastructure is crucial to the growth of biking and walking trips in North America, education and encouragement are also vital to this process: “We need to educate drivers about sharing the road and the best way to do this is to have them start biking too.” Birk offers ideas on how to do this: Drivers Ed classes needs to incorporate sharing the road with bicycles; it has to be tougher for young people to get their drivers licenses; elementary schools should require bike safety education starting in the 4th and 5th Grades. And, Birk adds, “Parents need to realize that the choices they make for their kids affect the whole community – sending kids to private schools far away will change their kids’ behavior forever.”