Pedaling past a reclaimed intersection.
Culture creates the conditions to develop carfree spaces, and the bicyclist culture in Portland is rich and varied, running from the grungy Zoobombers to bike geeks like Mia Birk, all of whom were on vivid display Friday for a scorching Summer Solstice.
The Towards Carfree Cities conference wrapped up with a choice of mobile workshops around town, including the Transportation Geeks Bike Ride put on by Birk’s company, Alta Planning & Design. We pedaled down special bicycle boulevards, past bike traffic signals, colored lanes, bike boxes (which Clarence Eckerson with Streetfilms was very excited about), contra-flow lanes, and other traffic engineering feats before ending where all journeys here seem to, at a brewpub.
But for all the traffic improvements, we were still faced with many car-clogged roadways and dangerous intersections, although made a bit less so by the tendency of most Portland motorists to yield to bicyclists with a friendly wave and smile.
As the shortest night of the year began, colorful cyclists seemed to take over the streets, pedaling in small groups and huge, slow-moving packs. Four different Pedalpalooza rides all started around 9 o’clock in the hip southeast section of the city: Sexy Cyclist Karaoke 2 Karaoke, Dropout Bike Club’s monthly ride, Bowie vs. Prince Mobile Dance Party, and Solstice Ride.
The rides converged into one as they ascended volcanic Mt. Tabor just after midnight, still several hundred strong and acting as if they owned the night, which they really seemed to. But not everyone agrees with that pecking order, as we learned when a motorist threw a box of tacks into the street, flattening several bike tires.
Bike geeks at the Steel Bridge, a railroad bridge with added bike path.
I’ve been listening to transportation geekspeak for the last week, and not just in the conference sessions. People such as Dave Snyder – the longtime San Francisco Bicycle Coalition director who then started Transportation for Livable City before landing at SPUR – and many others on this trip live and breathe this stuff, with even some drunken late night conversations descending into topics like LOS reform, separate bike lanes vs. simple lines, federal ISTEA laws, and the state of the political movement pushing these issues.
So the late night bike rides with young, carefree, carfree Portlanders was a welcome chance to just pedal, dance, and enjoy the city. Some of this is not about struggle, but about love. Atop Mt. Tabor, the Solstice Ride celebrated a couple of Portland crunchies who had met on this ride two years ago and gotten married on it a year ago was renewing their vows this year. Punks can be cute, too.
But the Dropout kids weren’t really having much of that, instead sectioned off for a photo shoot that involved the women being topless and many of the guys with pants down – with many of the private bits already adorned with painted messages and designs. It seems to be a thing here. Earlier in the week at the Mt. Tabor Saloon’s weekly tricycle races, there was also a young crowd of bike punks, with the winner of the races – beautiful young Lady G, who had also been on the more earnest Depaving Ride a few hours earlier – completing some of her laps sans shirt.
Portland doesn’t have the same level nightlife of San Francisco, so they tend to make their own fun here, and the result seems to be a large community of bicyclists that has become very engaged with the struggle for street equity. And there are enough of them to cover multiple events and fronts.
Today, even though much of the community is focused on the Ciclovia, which consists of a six-mile loop of roadways closed to cars, there’s also a Zoobomb Century ride, a tweak on the normal Sunday Zoobomb (in which groups of people bomb down the hill from the Zoo on little kids bikes, which they lock into big clunks) involving repeated trek up the light rail then down the mountain until they reach 100 miles.
Yeah, that’s just Portland.
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