Posts Tagged ‘urban’

While waiting for the Red Line to take us to our hotel, we saw several cyclists; I noticed that many of them--most of them, almost all--were signaling their turns.

Sure, most of them were using that weird, left-arm right-turn signal that kids learn in driver's ed, but they were signaling.

Portland, Oregon is--to a right-coast denizen--bike paradise. I'd heard of the city's amazing bike facilities. (I'm a volunteer copyeditor for the Bicycle Transportation Alliance, and why that's the case is another story.) Actually seeing the bike lanes and transit facilities and the competent riders and drivers who know how to treat them--reading about all this did very little to prepare me for the reality.

We visited the city for a week, and had a great time. We rode on the Steel Bridge, and the bike traffic was inspiring. (We even saw a guy on a welded-together tall bike rounding corners. How do those guys dismount, let alone stay upright?) We rode the west-bank river walk. We visited Powells. (Several times!) We saw City Bikes paint their new mural. We spoke to buskers--and saw them get chased away by the police. And we drank coffee. A lot of coffee.

Let's back up a little bit:

Drivers in my home state of New Jersey have a pretty bad rep. The forums are filled with tales of drivers who scream at cyclists, and stories of idiot high-school seniors in SUVs throwing slushees at bike commuters. After all, bikes in New Jersey are ridden by children and people whose licenses were pulled after a DUI conviction.

To be fair, the cyclists themselves in the Garden State are said to be, almost to a rider, wrong-way cyclists with their saddles too low who run red lights and ride on the sidewalks when they feel like it. Or so the thinking goes. I can't really fault any driver here who thinks that cyclists are scofflaws--because most of us are. But let's get back to Portland:

After a day or so in the city, we rented bikes from the hotel: machines that the hotel called "cruisers" and I called "rattling deathtraps". We had to pump up the tires and raise the saddles, and I did my best to tighten the handbrakes so they actually worked. (It's a shame the city has no proper bike share program.)

When we were riding across the Burnside Bridge into SW Portland, I (stupidly) signaled at the last minute to make a left turn. A car slowed and let me into the lane. Maybe this is normal behavior for the city, but it's nearly unheard of back home. (My wife was smarter than I was, and refrained from making that turn.) I rode more intelligently later in the day, but cars continued to treat me in a similar fashion: like a vehicle who deserved access to the road. Jersey drivers don't even treat other cars this well.

Bikes are everywhere. There's on-street parking for bikes. Businesses have racks as a matter of course, and they're not hidden away where thieves can snip open locks with a reasonable expectation of privacy. (Privacy is a constitutional right, yes?)

This treatment of cyclists as equal road users obviously must feed back in some way. Drivers and cyclists seem to respect each other in a way that's hard to explain to someone that lives where cab drivers won't even let you change lanes.

Later on in our trip, we stayed with cousins in town and they lent us a pair of mountain bikes. When we took those bikes on the MAX, people offered to move out of the way so we could get to the bike hooks (well, they did most of the time), and more than one commuter struck up a conversation with us. Did I mention that Portland's transit is cheap? A seven-day pass for all Portland area transit is exactly the same as a single round-trip ticket on the train from our house to New York City. That's one round-trip ticket = seven days of unlimited riding.

Portlanders, if you don't realize what you have and what the BTA has done, I invite any of you to come to New Jersey and ride with me in Newark or Paramus or Clark. You'll figure it all out--and you'll figure it out quickly--the first time a cab driver accelerates to keep you out of a lane, or a bus driver tries to squeeze you off a road.

Cherish what you have, and know that you have my admiration. (And my envy.) This Jersey boy knows you've done a great job!

(A similar version of this post has been written for the BTA blog.)