Cycling News & Blog Articles

There’s a new candidate for Portland City Council’s District 2 (N/NE) and you might have already heard his name. Or should say, seen his name on the side of cider cans in stores and gatherings throughout our city. After 12 years building his Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider business from his basement to his garage in the Woodlawn neighborhood, and then to stores and refrigerators all across the globe, Nat West wants to make change at City Hall.

West rolled over to The Shed a few hours ago on his beefy Radwagon cargo bike and we had a wide-ranging conversation that gives you an excellent introduction to this interesting candidate. I wasn’t around when former pub owner Bud Clark made a surprising run for mayor and became a local folk hero, but I’ve started to think of West as this election’s Bud Clark. Don’t expect him to do a bunch of media interviews, to sound like a politician when he speaks, or to attend all the obligatory campaign events. He won’t run a typical campaign and he plans to spend his time meeting people at small gatherings and happy hours around the city — as well as continue his new day job as a TriMet bus driver.

In our interview today (listen below), after sharing a list of the bikes he’s owned throughout his life and the story about how he started his cider business by collecting apples from trees citywide by bike, West told me how the 2020 George Floyd protests and a public fight with the City of Portland lit his fire for political activism.

West was on the front lines of the protests and he and his teenage kid suffered serious injuries from munitions fired by federal police officers. I asked West how the protests have impacted his positions on issues like policing and racism, and if he has any regrets about showing up on the streets week after week (he doesn’t). Other topics we covered include:

Here are a few excerpts:

Mingus Mapp on April 21st, 2023. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

Portland Transportation Commissioner Mingus Mapps wants to make one thing clear about the revenue generated from the local gas tax: it will not be spent on bike lanes. Unless you’re a bicycle rider who loves bike lanes. Then in that case, yes, revenue from the Fixing Our Streets program will definitely fund bike lanes.

Over the course of the last week, Mapps told different audiences different things about the renewal of the Fixing Our Streets program (FOS) that Portlanders will vote on May 21st.

At a meeting this past Tuesday with Laborers’ Local 483 (a chapter of LiUNA, Laborers’ International Union of North America, the union that represents about 280 maintenance and operations employees at the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT)), Mapps showed up in hopes of earning the group’s support for the measure. “I’ve come here today to ask you for your support… Ultimately, I sure hope that we can get LiUNA’s endorsement on this,” he said.

After telling a hybrid online and in-person audience that the failure of the ballot measure would, “Be bad for PBOT, bad for the people of Portland, and an outcome we very much need to avoid,” Mapps opened up the floor to questions.

Hosts Rick Potestio (center) and Jonathan Konkol (right) with the low-density building table in the foreground. (Lisa Caballero/BikePortland)

Game on!

Armed with only a bag of legos and a table-sized map of district properties, you and your team have a couple hours to insert 600 new residences into Portland’s historic Irvington neighborhood.

The group which gathered last Saturday at the Broadway McMenamins seemed up to the task and happy to spend a rainy afternoon talking about density and zoning. Their hosts were urban designer Jonathan Konkol and architect Rick Potestio, and the event was a dry run of the duo’s Dynamic Density process, a new method of accommodating growth which empowers neighborhoods.

I bet you think you know where this is headed.

Bike traffic on North Williams Avenue: May 4th, 2016. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

When City of Portland Transportation Planner Sean Doyle presented the 2023 PBOT bike counts at a meeting last week, he pointed to one figure in particular he feels is, “an important indicator of the quality of our bike network.” That figure was the number of women who ride.

Now, BikeLoud PDX is sharing a Women Biking in Portland survey that aims to learn more about women and cycling with an aim to achieve gender parity.

While a 50/50 split of men and women riding is the goal, Portland has never come close to that. When PBOT first began counting bicycle riders in the 1990s, the number of women on bikes was estimated to be about 20%. The number grew steadily, and between 2003 and 2021, PBOT found that about 31-32% of all riders were women.

But for the past two years, the number has dropped several percentage points and is now at around 29%, its lowest point since 2006. East of I-205, PBOT’s latest counts found that only 17% of bicycle riders are women. “Since the start of the pandemic, the gender split in people biking widened,” states the PBOT report.

One proposed change would carve out a different class for cargo bikes to allow them to have larger motors. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

The debate around electric bikes at the Oregon Legislature is heating up ahead of a work session and possible votes on Friday. 

As BikePortland reported last week, House Bill 4103 has split opinions among cycling advocates. Now the debate has escalated to a national level as industry group People for Bikes has entered the fray. 

PFB has written a letter to leaders of the Joint Committee on Transportation urging lawmakers to make several key changes to the bill. The letter, dated Wednesday 2/21, was written by PFB’s Electric Bicycle Policy & Campaign Director Ash Lovell, Ph.D. The letter had been co-signed by Portland-based nonprofits The Street Trust, BikeLoud PDX and No More Freeways. National bike advocacy group the League of American Bicyclists has also signed on. 

The letter says Oregon is at risk of falling out of alignment with federal regulations if the bill does not include language in its definition of “electric bicycle” that clearly stipulates a maximum motor size of 750 watts and the presence of pedals.

(Jonathan Maus)

Hi everyone. I’ve been out of town for the past two days, so I apologize for the tardiness of this post about tonight’s Bike Happy Hour (BHH).

I don’t think we’ll have any local political candidates in the room tonight, but you never know who might show up. What I do know is that we’ll save some time on the mic to highlight the great work of our friends at BikeLoud PDX. This scrappy-yet-mighty nonprofit has come a long way since their first meeting in August 2014 and I’ve never felt more confident in their trajectory.

Let’s come together and let BikeLoud know how much we appreciate their work!

If you’ve been to Bike Happy Hour there’s a good chance you’ve met a BikeLoud member or one of their leaders. They’ve supported the event since the start and I’ve really appreciated the ways we’ve leaned on each other to make our community stronger.

A bike rider enters NE 72nd Drive at Tillamook, where they’ll be able to ride without worrying about drivers buzzing by. (Michael Mann)

Location of Jersey barriers. See close-up of section circled in white below. (BikePortland)

After incidents of extreme vandalism last month, Portland Bureau of Transportation crews returned to Rose City Golf Course over the weekend. They wanted to send a clear message that drivers are no longer allowed to drive northbound on Northeast 72nd Drive between Tillamook and Sacramento. And this time, they were not messing around.

In a bid to prioritize bicycling and walking on this section of the street that’s considered a lynchpin of the 70s Neighborhood Greenway, PBOT installed signs and poles late last month. But anti-PBOT local residents repeatedly destroyed the infrastructure and used power tools to saw off heavy-gauge traffic poles and signs.

PBOT spent weeks planning the new approach that was installed over the weekend, and the new infrastructure has significantly hardened the changes. There are now four concrete Jersey barriers at the site — one in northbound lane of 72nd at Tillamook, another about 300 feet north adjacent to the cafe and golf shop, and two more at the northeast corner of the golf course parking lot (to prevent drivers from exiting the lot onto 72nd, a movement that would endanger southbound bicycle riders). The signs are adorned with “Do Not Enter”, and “Road Closed: Except Bicycles” signs.

With my usual co-host Eva Frazier on vacation (hope Italy is amazing Eva!), I welcomed a special guest into the shed this week: Stephen Green! Stephen is a multi-talented business advocate and community builder you should probably know about if you care about the future of Portland. Why?

For starters, Stephen is executive director of Business for a Better Portland, the nonprofit organization founded in 2017 as an antidote to the Portland Metro Chamber. In his role at BBPDX, Stephen helps 400 member businesses navigate everything from city politics to building social capital. Pitch Black, now in its eighth year, is an annual event that connects BIPOC entrepreneurs with funders. “It’s Shark Tank meets America’s Funniest Home Videos,” is how Stephen describes it. He also sits on all types of important advisory committees and boards, including the Governor’s Central City Task Force.

Stephen’s superpower is connecting people to information and resources and using his knowledge and experience to help others. That’s my kind of guy! We haven’t spent a lot of time together over the years, but I feel like we’ve both known about each other for a long time. I’ve watched him from afar with respect and knew that eventually our circles would cross. Now they have!

In this episode, Stephen and I chat about all sorts of stuff; but mostly local business and politics (especially our new form of government). He tells stories about Portland’s Black history (did you know “the Pearl” district was named after a Black woman?), we dish on what we think makes Portland tick, why bike riders tend to love Portland so much, how to talk to business owners about bicycling and transportation reform, and much more.

Thanks to Brock Dittus of Sprocket Podcast fame for our fantastic theme music.

Hi everyone, I’m starting the week being with family in Grants Pass (southern Oregon) today and tomorrow so this roundup will be a bit quick and short. I won’t be back in the Shed until Tuesday night, so please adjust your expectations as we settle into the week.

Here are the most notable items our community came across in the past seven days:

Pedestrian-less in Seattle: ” If I paid attention to drivers as well as they paid attention to me, I’d be dead by now.” (Seattle Times Opinion)

Feeling validated: I’ve long pointed to how the decline in cycling in Portland has tracked with the increase in road fatalities. Now there’s research that might back that up. It shows that in cities with high cycling rates, traffic safety for all users is generally better. (Journal of Cycling and Micromobility Research)

As two bills addressing e-bike regulation wind their way through the Oregon legislature, BikePortland readers responded with a slew of strong comments to last week’s article which focussed on one of them, House Bill 4103

Comments came in with a wide variety of opinion, commenter Eric even remarked, “I find it fascinating that I kind of agree with every perspective voiced so far in this comment thread.”

In her statement to BikePortland, Sarah Iannarone, director of The Street Trust, introduced the issue of transportation independence, “we have seen time and again how the transportation needs of teens in particular are regarded as a nuisance…”

Expanding on that thought, commenter Al Dimond got to the heart of what is really at stake — how auto-mobility has restricted the freedom and independence of teenagers. What you think is normal, or how things should be, is “both about when we grew up and where.”

Headlines this week from Willamette Week and KATU.

A truism I come back to often as I navigate frequent debates online and off is that multiple things — often conflicting things — can be true at the same time. In today’s world where public discussions are too often binary, having simultaneous multiple truths can be difficult for folks to accept.

Case in point: the Portland Bureau of Transportation is amazing. It has a proud legacy of national leadership, excellent programs, and is full of dedicated staff who want to do the rights things — even when it requires pushing back against bureaucratic inertia. At the same time, PBOT is failing miserably on its main job: to provide the basic service of safe streets for all Portlanders.

We all know the traffic death toll has scaled new heights in recent years. But from a street-level perspective, two stories in the local media this week stand as examples of PBOT’s failure, and they both involve unsafe conditions on the same street, less than two miles apart. In both cases, PBOT is well-aware of dangers drivers pose, yet they’ve failed to adequately address it. The result has been stress, repeated trauma, property damage, and even loss of life.

Remember the s-curves on Southeast Woodstock and 60th I reported on a year ago? Folks who live there reached out to me after drivers repeatedly failed to negotiate the curve. They shared several examples of drivers and their cars flying through front yards, slamming into porches, and careening into fences. The problem had been going on for years, and neighbors felt like PBOT wasn’t doing enough.

Bike Polo is a time-honored tradition at Alberta Park. Get over there and check it out. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

It’s Friday! Time to plan your weekend.

Here are some fun things to do for bike lovers this weekend…

Sorella Forte Intermediate Road Ride – 9:00 am at River City Bicycles (SE)
The Sorellas are a respected local bike club that offers an encouraging environment for women who love to pedal fast. Their intermediate rides average about 15-16 mph and Saturday’s route will be a flat one out to Gresham. More info here.

Participatory Budgeting Summit – 9:30 to 5:30 pm at PSU (SW)
Learn and get involved with a Participatory Budgeting Oregon, a group that’s working to, “shift the who and how of public budgeting and the allocation of public resources.” The folks behind this are legit, thoughtful, smart, dedicated advocates on the crest of a transformation in Oregon democracy. They just need you to make it happen. More info here.

Keith Wilson, a candidate for Portland mayor, speaking at Bike Happy Hour on February 14th. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

As I listened to Keith Wilson give a speech at Bike Happy Hour last night it occurred to me his life has been sort of like Forrest Gump. He’s got an interesting and diverse background and set of life experiences you’d never expect from a trucking company CEO. If you knew that his company, Titan Freight Systems, runs and all-electric fleet and that just before coming to the event last night he gave invited testimony on decarbonization in the freight industry to the State of Washington Transportation Commission, or that he was once so poor he spent nights in LaGuardia Airport, or that he takes 12 at-risk Black youth camping once a year, you might begin to understand what I mean.

Wilson spoke to a rapt crowd last night about growing up poor in north Portland and being the first person in his family to go to college (Portland Community College), then moving from home to take a job as a sales intern at NBC in Manhattan. When he didn’t land a job, he ran out of money and spent nights in LaGuardia Airport. “I thought to myself, if you’re homeless, where do you go? You go to the place with carpet, because Newark Airport had tile.”

These days Wilson divides his time between his company and his nonprofit, Shelter Now PDX. He said he found himself pulled toward the homelessness problem because — despite building Titan Freight into a success and being named national “Innovator of the Year” two years in a row — “Six, seven years ago, I started looking around and I didn’t recognize my city anymore,” he shared last night. “If I’m operating in the backdrop of a community where my neighbors can’t live, where livability is compromised, we’ve got a problem.”

What streets can look like. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

What do Better Naito, the Southwest 3rd and Ankeny plaza, Steel Bridge Skatepark, bus priority lanes, and several other important bits of non-car infrastructure around Portland have in common? They all started as tactical urbanism and pop-up demonstration projects through Portland State University’s partnership with Better Block.

Since 2016, the nonprofit Better Block has cemented their collaboration with Portland State to bring amazing ideas for better streets and public spaces from dream into reality. For everyday activists, or anyone with an idea, Better Block gives you a pathway to the brilliant planners and engineers-in-training at PSU. And now that PSU and the Portland Bureau of Transportation have worked successfully together on several projects, the route from your idea to your infrastructure has never been more direct.

Each year, the Better Block PSU program launches a citywide search for the best ideas. The ones they select, get vetted, designed, planned — and maybe even funded and implemented!

Consider the Steel Bridge Skatepark and the big announcement that it has received $15 million to be constructed. A team of PSU students played a huge role in making that happen. They provided the planning data and analysis that helped make the case at City Hall and ultimately convince local elected officials and policymakers that the project was worth investing in.