Portland! I miss you. For the month or two at a time that I’ve spent at home in the past year (probably adding up to about half the year, more or less), I’ve been happy. (So has my cat.) Sure, in these staccato bursts of time, I’ve watched you change. I’ve watched fortress-like condominiums pop […]
What happened to Portland’s bike scene? Maybe first it would help to envision what it used to be. There was this booming, diverse, vibrant DIY bike activist and bike fun scene that transformed this city, from Critical Mass to Shift to any number of wild initiatives popping up. Any night of the week, there was […]
When I first saw the ShockTwat on its inaugural journey, I marveled at it for two minutes straight and then snapped a photo with my phone at the last moment before it rolled away. When the time came to launch the Kickstarter campaign for Our Bodies, Our Bikes, I looked through my photos for a […]
If a political candidate had a habit of walking into crowded places twirling a gun around with the safety off, would that be considered worth mentioning to voters? Or would it be passed off as a personal foible, something to be grown out of and regretted? If nobody was ever hurt, would it matter at […]
People who go to the bar by bicycle spend more overall, but look like cheapskates. That and other economic lessons can be gleaned from the preliminary results of a research team at Portland State University (funded by the same folks who recently discovered that less driving doesn’t hurt the economy). The bulk of the paper […]
Can you bike to your local airport? In a few hours, Meghan Sinnott and I are leading our second annual bike ride to and from Portland’s international airport (PDX) as part of the Pedalpalooza bike fun festival. Last year’s ride was a blast, featuring a tour of the Port of Portland’s bike-friendly airport facilities, including […]
Do we need all this traffic to keep our economy afloat? Are lots of cars essential to the economy? It is a common assumption that they are, and this is one reason that huge subsidies for cars, roads, and fuel persist through tough economic times and ferocious advocacy for reduced government spending. New research out […]
Some new stickers just arrived at Taking the Lane Omnimedia world headquarters. I want to share them here partly to say “look, stickers!” but mostly to tell you about the artists who drew them. Update: You can now get your Proud BikeSexual stickers right here. One day a year or so ago I mentioned to […]
Here’s a new kind of Bikenomics – What if we could increase bicycle ridership not through general encouragement or infrastructure or culture change, but through strategic, targeted tweaks aimed at identifying potential bicycling demographics and tipping them? Or, to put it inversely, what if we could quantify barriers to bicycling and use that data to […]
This is a guest post by Rex Burkholder, who represents parts of Portland on the council of Metro, our area’s regional government. He is one of the founders of Oregon’s statewide bike advocacy organization, the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, and served as the organization’s first policy director. After reading my Bikenomics zine, in which I discuss […]
ABC’s Community Bike Educator training.(Photo: Cristina Mihaescu, courtesy of the CCC) Exciting news in Portland’s bike advocacy landscape – there’s a new organization and they’re on a roll. Yesterday, the Community Cycling Center, a Portland bicycle advocacy and education nonprofit, announced their partnership with a new organization, Andando en Bicicletas en Cully (ABC) – the […]
This guest post is by Sarah Gilbert, a Portland writer and blogger. She’s also the mom whose story of being turned away from a local burger joint with her three young kids led to the chain retooling their drive-thru policy and signage to actively welcome people on bikes. Even in dreamy Portland, carfree parenting isn’t […]
When biking – or, particularly, driving – about our daily lives, we pass through many spaces that are meant only to be passed through on the way to someplace else. Stopping to watch for a while is often enlightening. The video below was taken by a volunteer bike counter at the intersection of a busy […]
Being a (mostly) carfree person in (relatively) freeway-lite inner southeast Portland, my encounters with freeways are limited. Whenever I do spend time on or near them it’s an occasion, like visiting the ocean, and I try to take photos. Here are a few of the freeways I’ve met in the last few years: On a […]