“By the time I was a teenager, I was really overweight,” Birk said. “Being kind of a short-ish, fat, big-haired Jew wasn’t a great combo in Dallas. And I just didn’t know how to break out of it.”
Until she discovered bicycling.
Lucky for all of us in the bicycle and pedestrian movement, Birk fell in love with her bike while attending graduate school in Washington, DC. That love affair led her to Portland, OR, where she helped to transform the town into the nation’s most bicycle-friendly city. When she left her post as Portland’s Bicycle Coordinator, she took a position at Alta Planning + Design, a bike-ped focused engineering firm that she helped grow from a two-man shop to a multi-office firm with projects around the globe.
Over the past two decades, Birk has been a key player in shifting the North American mindset, convincing politicians, the public and transportation professionals that bicycling is both a legitimate form of travel and a solution to many of our most pressing social problems. But nobody could accuse this vibrant advocate and engineer of resting on her laurels. This fall, Birk added author to her lengthy resume with the release of her first book, Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthy Planet.
In Joyride, Birk takes readers behind-the-scenes of Portland’s bicycle revolution and her efforts in the private sector to mainstream bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure even in cities strangled by sprawl. There are far too many juicy stories to summarize in a single interview. So, when I sat down with Mia Birk at the Pro Walk Pro Bike conference in Chattanooga, we chatted about her passion for storytelling.
Momentum: Raising two kids, teaching at Portland State University, and helping to run a successful, growing engineering firm, you’ve already got a lot on your plate. Why write a book?
Birk: Well, there is no rest for the committed (laugh). But life is short and it’s my belief that we have to get everything out of every day that we have on this planet. It’s been fantastic growing Alta into a much larger firm and growing the industry, too. It’s like a circle: We’re creating more opportunities for people to bike and walk and that creates more desire for our services which create more communities where people bike and walk.
But I wanted to give back and teach what I had learned to students, try to turn out a generation of planners and designers and community activists who understand the lingo and understand what I’ve learned. So we set up this whole program at Portland State University. But my head was still bursting with these stories of what we’ve done. And it’s not just what we did in Portland; it’s not just what I did in Portland. There are all these other great stories of all these other people; stories of people all across North America. So I just had to [write the book]. I was making myself ill because these stories needed to get out!
Latest Comments