Wheel-life conflict

• Bikes vs. boards: Can parks handle both?

By Amanda Pennelly

The Portland Tribune, Jul 15, 2005, Updated Oct 30, 2009

After years of committee meetings and public debate, City Council members are expected to approve the proposed sites of 19 future Portland Parks & Recreation skate parks at their July 20 meeting.

It’s a victory worth celebrating for both skateboarders and BMX bikers, the two largest local skate-park user groups. But the general sense of triumph could be trumped by a potentially bigger struggle ahead: deciding who exactly gets to use the parks and how.

Many skateboard advocates want exclusive access to the new facilities, while most BMX riders want shared, equal access.

It’s a conflict city managers will have to address before anyone starts pouring concrete, said Parks & Recreation project manager Rod Wojtanik, who has been in charge of the skate-park project since voters approved a 2002 parks operating levy that allocated $500,000 to future public skate-park projects.

“Besides identifying locations, user access is probably the most difficult issue a city faces when building these parks,” he said.

It’s a decision made especially difficult in Portland, where skateboarding has one of the largest and strongest constituencies in the nation. This swelling user group then must squeeze with bikers (also a growing user group) into the only two skate parks in Portland proper: Burnside and Pier Park.

With about 27,000 skaters in the area, according to Wojtanik, multiple nonprofits dedicated solely to building local skate parks and a few high-profile advocates, skateboarders have an organizational edge not found in other cities.

Local skating advocates like Tom Miller, chief of staff for city Commissioner Sam Adams, for example, have worked to raise $192,000 to redevelop Pier Park Ñ a St. Johns neighborhood skate park Ñ through private grants and grass-roots fundraising.

“Skateboarders have very strong advocates right now,” said Sam Beebe, who runs a skateboarding resource Web site called SkateOregon. “Several skateboarding advocates are media- and politically savvy, and they are well-versed in the issues Ñ from fundraising to community dialogue to construction. In a sense, it’s their time.”

BMXers get rolling

While skateboarders have been applauded for advocating for skate parks, BMX advocates have been criticized for their lack of participation in the planning process, said Ryan Manner, a skater and BMX advocate who works for the Bike Gallery.

The BMX community is much smaller, about 2,200 riders according to Wojtanik, and nowhere near as politically organized. And most local advocates for BMXers’ use of the parks are people like Shad Johnson, a bike shop owner and photographer who never planned to rally the local biking community, let alone spearhead a potentially multimillion-dollar fundraising campaign.

“Honestly, I’m just a guy trying to ride my bike,” Johnson said. “I didn’t want to be a major leader in this, but somehow I fell into it, which is fine. But the process has been frustrating.”

Johnson, Manner and Miller are members of the SkatePark Leadership Advisory Team, or SPLAT, a citizens committee that finalized the list of 19 proposed skate-park sites that will be under review at next week’s council meeting.

But Johnson was the only designated advocate for BMX users on the 22-member SPLAT committee, which was put together via invitation by Wojtanik.

“If someone (from the skateboarding advocacy) missed a meeting, no one would bat an eye. But when I missed a meeting it meant that the whole BMX community was slacking off,” said Johnson, who believes more equal representation on the initial SPLAT potentially would have helped alleviate some of the user access issues that have surfaced between Portland skaters and BMXers.

Wojtanik said he would have liked to have seen more representation of BMXers on SPLAT, but that it was hard to rally interest from the smaller user group.

“I called three or four people from the BMX community, but they were reluctant to get involved because they weren’t sure their efforts would help get them more park access in the end,” he said.

The disagreements between the two user groups seem to surface at every level of the debate.

“It’s like trying to negotiate peace in the Middle East,” Manner said. “You have two cultures with so much common history, and they are both competing for scarce resources.”

Skaters, historically hassled throughout their journey toward their sport’s legitimacy, are entitled to exclusive use of the skate parks, said Miller, who co-founded the nonprofit Skaters for Portland Skateparks with fellow skater and Nike Inc. graphic designer Sonny Robertson.

He also argues that skaters and BMX bikers should have separate facilities according to their population numbers Ñ 13 skaters for every biker. “There are more of us,” he said, “and we raised all the funding; this is a more than fair scenario.”

Most collisions go untallied

Many skateboard advocates, such as Kent Dahlgren, local skater and executive director of Skaters for Public Skateparks, believe that it is dangerous for skaters and BMX riders to share space at skate parks.

“It’s a simple matter of physics: Skateboard wheels average about 55 millimeters, while bikes average about 16 inches. In a collision with skaters, bikers have the upper hand. We’re just appealing to people’s common sense,” Dahlgren said.

He also added that bikers move much faster and more quietly than skaters do, and they ride different lines (or routes) within a skatepark. “Separation between bikers and skaters makes sense for the same reason we have bike lanes instead of bicycles on sidewalks.”

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