Cities

Portland’s bike culture is beyond varied. CHUNK 666’s flaming choppers of the apocalypse still joust yearly, a decade after pushing off. The monthly Midnight Mystery Ride is hundreds strong, as is the annual Filmed by Bike festival. Zoobomb has spun off its own grassroots scene, including two mini bike dance troupes and the Mini Bike Winter festival that takes place each February.

New affinities are turning up everywhere. The Bicycle Business League unites people who ply their wares by bike. The Community Cycling Center has reworked its mission to reach out to the communities of color that Portland has heretofore had a reputation of ignoring. Some new group, scheme, ride or committee is constantly forming, as people cross between multiple worlds and teach each other how to get things done.

Some events bring everyone together around common threads of openness, empowerment and fun – punks and planners alike converge for important testimonies at city hall, doff their clothes for the World Naked Bike Ride and come out to enjoy their neighborhood during the Sunday Parkways Ciclovias in summer. And then there’s BikePortland.org, the blog that brings the entire cacophonous diaspora together to debate each other under one digital roof.

If we needed a poster child, consensus would likely elevate the image of a parent with kids and groceries strapped to an Xtracycle pausing their conversation with a friend as they chug up the Alameda Ridge.

Portland’s largest advocacy group, the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, has invested itself heavily in this vision, with nearly half of its operations devoted to teaching kids to ride through the Safe Routes to School program. Similarly, the bike shop Clever Cycles has so successfully banked on the appetite of Portland’s would-be car-free families for imported cargo bikes that other shops are scrambling to catch up.

You may have two kids and an office job and have only been riding for a couple of months, but you can still go everywhere by bike, join a cheerful parade of short-shorts clad riders in Scandinavian garb during Pedalpalooza and learn to be a world-class advocate in the city university’s free Traffic and Transportation class.

Maybe it’s the plethora of possibilities, or maybe it’s all the exercise, but Portlanders, when not completely overwhelmed, seem happy. Whatever missteps we make – complacency is a common one and a fear of advocating bold ideas is another – it’s never, ever boring.

With the next generation growing up on two wheels and with civic involvement in their bloodstream, there’s no reason it can’t stay that way.