Photo by Jurgen Hess
By Melissa Allen. Feb. 20, 2020. Portland is weird. In many ways the cultural offspring of Sacramento and Seattle, we take pride in the stranger, hipper features of our city. (Home to mustaches, man buns, microbreweries and donuts, it seems only natural that the biggest city in Oregon would be dedicated to maintaining the smallest park in the world.)
Many Portlanders are also proud of the city’s vibrant biking culture. Known as the number one city for bike commuting in the United States, our affinity for biking surpasses most other cities in the country.
But why do we bike? Is it the topography? The 365 miles of bike lanes, and the overall accessibility of different neighborhoods to bicycles? Or is it due to the sheer determination of residents, many of whom choose to minimize their impact on the environment regardless of the weather?
Tshombé Brown works at the University of Portland, and he recently started bike commuting again after obtaining a new set of wheels. He says that contributing less carbon to the environment is a big part of why he chooses to bike, but there’s also the convenience factor. Living close to work, he only has a ten to fifteen minute commute, which is pretty light by Portland standards. And for Brown, biking has a number of advantages over driving or taking the Max.
“I found that the Max isn’t particularly fast in town,” he says, “so, a lot of the time, you can get to your location faster on a bike than the Max.”
There are some challenges that he faces, however. For one, the trolley tracks pose a (tire-grabbing) threat that is sometimes unavoidable. There is also the issue of cost. Brown says that every bike he has owned has been a free hand-me-down, but he realizes that inexpensive bikes are hard to find in the city. And he points out that the necessary gear and clothing for year-round riding can also add up.
Biking in the rain down Cesar Chavez Blvd. Photo by Todd Mecklem
Biking for Brown also poses the issue of adequate safety measures. He has a fantastic and well-maintained afro, but like many brown and black people, finding an appropriate, affordable helmet that fits is an issue. For people of color who do not have naturally straight hair, there is a good amount of time that goes into making sure an air of professionalism is emitted every day. Wearing a helmet that is too small not only displaces that professionalism…it also poses a safety risk.
Pat Bognar is a professional photographer who hasn’t driven her own car in years. She tells a story about riding on the South Park Blocks one rainy day when one of her tires got caught in the tracks and she was catapulted over her handlebars. (Brown says he’s had similar experiences.)
But she considers her bike to be a vital tool in her photography kit, and the occasional crash hasn’t kept her from using it to get around town and into places inaccessible by a car.
Bognar says that living abroad taught her to sever her reliance on cars, and that after moving back to the United States from Paris, which she calls “the most walkable city in the world”, Bognar saw Portland from a new perspective.
“If I needed to get from one end of the city to the other, I would hop on the subway! And I’d be there, so [Paris] taught me to not rely on cars. To use alternative methods. And the bike is the best method in Portland,” Bognar says.
Part of her fascination with the bicycle stems from her environmental conscience. “Why create more carbon footprints than necessary?” she asks.
Another benefit is the freedom that biking allows her, and she frequently hops on and off to capture photos with her beloved Mamia 7.
But there are downsides to biking, she says, and one of the challenges she faces is a lack of accessibility in certain parts of town
“We have bike lanes now in important places, but not necessarily where I go,” she explains. “I ride [to the University of Portland] every day from about 21st and Burnside so I gotta go across the Burnside bridge and up that crazy hill, and it takes about an hour.”
When asked if Portland is an ideal biking city, Ben Helgren, the owner of Block Bikes PDX, responded: “Not exactly. If you go around the city, there are multiple layers of signs that sometimes direct you to a bike route that doesn’t exist anymore. Sometimes there are signs that tell you how to get somewhere…then the signs stop as you get going.”
With the rise of smart phones and their GPS systems, the use of physical signs may not be a problem for a lot of people. But does it indicate that the city is no longer participating in furthering the bike culture in Portland?
According to Helgren, “[biking] didn’t start because of road planning, it started because people started riding bikes here because the temperature is mild.” The city has tried many different things to accommodate bikers, but Helgren says they have not seemed to follow through with any one thing to success, leading to constant confusion with bikers and drivers as well.
Another concern for the biking community is Portland’s homeless population. Stacey Daley, who works at River City Bikes, points out that the city’s strategies for dealing with homeless residents could improve — particularly in regards to bike routes and homeless camps, which sometimes interfere with bike right-of-ways, block lanes and sidewalks, and sometimes cause confrontations with bikers
As Delaney explains: “Many places are no longer safe to ride because the city doesn’t know how to deal with the homeless situations: the camps.”
There are clearly improvements to be made to Portland’s biking infrastructure, and the only way that is guaranteed to happen is if the population of bike commuters rises. And while Helgren feels that population has declined in recent years, Daley thinks the amount of commuters has increased drastically. She even jokes that some days are like “traffic on the bike highway.”
Merging on N. Vancouver Ave. Photo by Jonathan Maus
With such an increase of cyclists in certain areas of Portland, many believe the city should be taking further measures to ensure the safety of some of their most vulnerable commuters. The amount of bike lanes should increase, they say, and should be better dispersed throughout the Portland metro area. The consistency of signage and efforts could also improve.
Perhaps one approach to improving Portland’s bike-ability would be to emulate what’s being done in European cities, where bike commuting is even more commonplace — particularly Amsterdam, where all streets are bike streets, and there are separated bike tracks instead of lanes. Their roads are designed for cars and buses to travel slowly because they include speed bumps, narrow streets, and raised intersections. And looking at the Netherlands as a whole, there are over 22,000 miles of bike paths.
Getting back to the Rose City though, statistics show that as of 2017, 6.3 percent of commuters in Portland choose to travel by bike, compared to the 0.5 percent of commuters who travel by bike in other cities.
So why do we bike in Portland? For a lot of us, it is due to convenience and our own environmental awareness. We know we are responsible for the health of the environment, and if that makes us weird, so be it.
Through the rain, slick leaves and trolley tracks, biking is done with determination in the PDX.
