From a road safety protest on SE Division in December 2016. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)
I’m still going through the recent bicycle count report published by the Portland Bureau of Transportation this week and there’s something I need to make very clear: The reason more people aren’t biking is not because of some flaw in the idea of bicycling itself or even because of any shortcomings in the network of roads, paths, and lanes that people do it on.
The problem is cars. Too many cars, to be exact. And too many of them driven without regard for others. This isn’t just my opinion, it also happens to be the official stance of the City of Portland.
This problem has always been right in front of our faces but we don’t recognize it as such because it requires us to acknowledge that something we (nearly) all do on a regular basis might actually have negative impacts on our community and our city. Put another way, the problem is us, and that’s the problem. Not only is driving a car something the vast majority of us do and sympathize with, it’s also normalized by trillions of dollars in marketing over the last century as something that is cool, fun, and harmless. When you’re in a car, Big Auto propaganda says, everyone else is the problem. None of that is true of course, but this is America! With enough money and marketing savvy, you can convince people of anything.
But I digress. What I want you take from this post is a clearer understanding of what has happened on Portland streets in the past decade.