Cities

Photography: Jonathan Maus, www.bikeportland.org and Shawn Granton

Bicycling in Portland, Oregon – if all goes as planned – is doomed to become as mundane as vacuuming your house. Or so the experts would have you believe.

As more Portlanders climb on their two-wheeled steeds for their everyday travel around North America’s most bicycle-friendly city, fewer would identify themselves as “bicyclists.” Portland is becoming that rare place where cycling is taken for granted and this evolutionary stage could portend the future face of cycling in other cities.

That future is anything but boring. The politics, engineering and wild and woolly grassroots culture have become deeply interwoven into Portland’s surprisingly dynamic and participatory scene. If Portland could speak, its message to the world might well be: “If you’re going to get serious about bicycling, you may as well have fun doing it.”

Infrastructure

If anything is bigger than Portland’s bike scene, it’s the hype about Portland’s bike scene.

There’s truth to the buzz. Under the leadership of a bike-friendly mayor, an idealistic crew of planners and engineers are rapidly reshaping the city: green bike boxes proliferate and business owners race to replace their street parking with bike racks.

Creative, determined citizen activists spout off statutes and the Highway Code just like pros. The bicycle economy is booming to the tune of $80 million USD each year.

Meanwhile, federal policies and funding are looking better for bikes day by day. As a bicycling revolution sweeps the nation, other cities are looking to Portland as an example to aspire to – and in the eyes of some, there’s a competitive gleam.

By now, whole swathes of the city embody this idyllic reputation. In Inner Southeast, you can sail along idyllic bike routes with few cars, few stop signs and seamless crossings. Entire cycling families wave and ring their bells as you pass by.

It isn’t all so dreamy everywhere. In some corridors, often the poorer parts of town, bike lanes and sidewalks are limited, dead-end streets shoot you onto large, fast, unfriendly arterials and giant freeway interchanges block your path. Night shift workers ride unlit streets against traffic, encountering snarling roadies in Lycra.

Fierce debates rage over infrastructure – do we invest in a network of fully separated bike paths so that people can cross town without ever encountering a car or do we focus first on completing the network of low-traffic neighborhood bike boulevards? Or should we throw our energy into sharrows, lower speeds and safety so that every street can be a bikeway?

The one thing everybody can agree on is that there’s plenty of room to improve as new iterations of paint and concrete crop up year round, like crocuses, every time the rain pauses.

Roger Geller, the city bicycle coordinator, tells everyone who will listen about how bicycle-specific infrastructure is directly correlated with ridership. And he likes to add that the price tag for the past 25 years of work on Portland’s now famed bike infrastructure would barely pay for a quarter mile of freeway – a good example of how about $65 million-worth of funding goes a long way, especially when you consider that it’s spent mostly on paint.