Wanted: More butts on bikes

Portland looks at how to make cycling more attractive to all

By Jennifer Anderson

The Portland Tribune, Jul 20, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (64 Reader comments)

Jim Clark / Portland Tribune

A little morning rain didn’t stop the stream of bike and foot traffic over the Hawthorne Bridge on Tuesday morning. City Hall hopes to get even more people biking by revamping Portland’s master bike plan.

The unexpected downpour this week didn’t throw Eva Frazier for a loop at all.

The 24-year-old snapped on her bike fenders, zipped up her blue jacket and rode her bike over the Hawthorne Bridge into downtown, the route she takes nearly every day.

Thousands of cyclists throughout town also were unfazed by the weather, pedaling furiously in a bike lane or along with cars, trucks and buses in the rush of midmorning traffic.

This is Portland, after all, where there certainly is an abundance of fair-weather riders but also a serious collective of bike commuters who don’t let a little precipitation get in their way.

If the city has its way, that number of regular riders will grow exponentially, building on the momentum that already exists.

“We want to make Portland a world-class cycling city,” says the city’s bicycle coordinator, Roger Geller, who’s leading the effort to update Portland’s 11-year-old Bicycle Master Plan.

“If you look at what other cities have done – the investments they’ve made, the quality of their facilities and way they’ve integrated it into all forms of transportation and land-use planning – we still have a pretty good ways to go.”

A lot of people, however, feel excluded by this line of thought and think the city shouldn’t be in the business of funding bike infrastructure improvements.

“If people want special amenities for bikes, they need to find a way to fund them,” says Craig Flynn, a Parkrose resident who ran for Metro Council in 2002 and speaks around town on transportation and density issues. “If bikes are getting more than their fair share, they need to find a way to fund it through their user fees. We need money for cars.”

Flynn doesn’t support bike lanes or bike boulevards, which are low-traffic side streets marked with “sharrows” to indicate shared use between bikes and other vehicles. Stretches of Southeast Lincoln and Ankeny and Northeast Tillamook streets, for example, are designated as bike boulevards.

He thinks city transportation funds should go toward relieving congestion on freeways and other main roads, specifically adding lanes or building new freeways. Bike lanes, he says, make the vehicle lanes even narrower and take up more space on the crowded roadway.

When he does occasionally ride his bike for fun, Flynn says, he avoids bike lanes because he fears getting hit by car doors. He prefers to stay on neighborhood streets – yet he doesn’t see the point of creating bike boulevards since he says they don’t connect him to where he wants to go.

Surveys point to local streets

Flynn’s sentiments aren’t shared by anyone working on the city’s bike master plan update. Geller now is midway through the process of gathering information to update the plan, which includes holding monthly “bike master plan network rides” to solicit public input on existing conditions and desired routes.

The rides are held the first Tuesday of each month, starting at Terry Schrunk Plaza at 5:15 p.m. They span all parts of the city; next month’s ride heads to Southwest.

According to the Portland Office of Transportation, bike boulevards will go a long way toward attracting the 300,000 or so people (about 60 percent of the city’s population) who are dubbed “interested but concerned” about riding on the city streets.

1 | 2 Next Page >>

Facebook	Digg	Del.icio.us
Newsvine	Stumbleupon	Reddit