Portland — a second look
On my way home from my trip up north I returned to Portland for a second look around.
In Portland they don't have bike shops, they have bike galleries.
And consider it confirmed: this place has been so thoroughly bike-ified that it is no longer recognizable as America. There are bikes, and people riding them, everywhere. Virtually all of the bikes are somewhat customized, well-constructed things, and during my entire visit I saw only one person on a bike that did not fit him. Here in Tucson, by contrast, I find myself constantly wincing in imagined knee pain every time someone rides by on a far-too-small box-store mountain “bike.” Not so in Portland — I only saw a handful of bikes that looked to hail from Wal-Mart, and even they fit properly. Perhaps Portland has a superhero who swoops out of the sky and adjusts people’s seatposts for them. If so, I wish he’d pay a visit to Tucson.
Here's how they handle the trolley track problem in Portland
But the interesting thing about Portland is that other than some conspicuous green paint at dicey corners and a whole lot — really a whole lot — of bike racks, their infrastructure doesn’t seem to be any better than ours.
The difference seems to be that in Portland, more so than here, there are lots and lots of places you would want to go, and that arriving by bike poses no problem. Because those places are distributed everywhere, there are probably a lot of them close to wherever it is you live.
Which is a feature of density and design.
According to the internet, Portland has roughly twice the density of Tucson. In other words, there is twice as much space surrounding each person, on average, in Tucson than in Portland. People are twice as far away from one another in Tucson than they are in Portland. And what do you suppose is in all that extra space? Community gardens and art galleries? Nope, asphalt. Asphalt is what is in that space. Wide swaths of it that let us drive like crazy to get through places rather than to them. And huge parking lots to accommodate us once we at long last and great personal risk arrive at the place we think we want to be.
Portland doesn’t do it that way. Much more than we have, they have filled up their spaces with places to sit down, to walk, to shop, and to eat. And the result of course is that you don’t have to go so damned far to get to a place to do those things, and along the way you don’t have to compete with a thousand other people, in increasingly large SUVs and increasingly foul moods, also trying to get to those places.
Which all of course leads to the depressing realization that Tucson’s bike problem is not solvable by bike infrastructure and the Bike Advisory Committee.
We’ve got a bigger problem.
–Erik Ryberg
Seattle and the World Naked Bike Ride
After my visit to the alternative bike-universe that is Portland, I spent a day in Seattle with friends. I lived in Seattle for a few years in the late ’80s and then again in the mid ’90s, and never found it to be a very good place to ride a bike. It’s hilly and rainy, and there’s no shortage of traffic.
But my friend Janine has lived several years there now car-free, and seems to be doing quite well. Her worst bike incident so far involved an encounter with a raccoon that dove suicidally into her spokes. Her commute takes her on a well-traveled greenway and she takes advantage of a car-sharing program. Although nothing like Portland, I saw quite a few people on bicycles. (Note: it was a beautiful day, the weekend, and one of the first really nice days Seattle had had in a while.)
But maybe most telling of all is that as we were sitting on the grass at Seattle Center, a fairly large group of naked people on bicycles began to assemble nearby. It turns out it was the staging area for one of Seattle’s World Naked Bike Rides!
And as far as I could tell, not a single person batted an eye. No one paid them any attention at all, really, assembling there by a fountain full of children playing in the water.
A sign of cultural advancement and consciousness we have not achieved here in Tucson.
71-year old cyclist attacked by motorists, pushed to the ground
This awful story was on the front page of the paper in the motel I checked into this evening:
Ron Wingerson’s mind blocks out the attack, but his body still feels the pain.
The 71-year-old Lake Tapps man has been hospitalized since Saturday, when three young adults leaned out of a moving car and beat Wingerson until he crashed his bike along a Puyallup road.
He suffered six broken ribs, a fractured pelvis and severe bruises and abrasions on his face and body.
“I wish they hadn’t done it,” Wingerson said Thursday from his bed at Tacoma General Hospital. “I don’t know what their reason is, but I don’t think it’s one I could justify. It’s sad somebody has to take it out on somebody else.”
Pierce County sheriff’s deputies are searching for a woman and two men who were inside the four-door sedan when it approached Wingerson from behind in the 12800 block of Pioneer Way East just before 3 p.m. Saturday.
Tacoma-Pierce County Crime Stoppers is offering up to $1,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and charges of the suspects.
”
It’s nice to see the authorities taking it seriously. I started my so-called “bike law” practice after growing frustrated with the lack of attention paid by the Tucson Police Department to assaults on cyclists. My first foray into bike law in fact was helping a friend get the police to cite a man who had first assaulted her friend (by throwing a drink at him) and then knocked her out of the way and drove over her bike when she tried to stop him. Despite many witnesses to this scene, the police simply ignored her until I showed up. We finally got the man cited, but alas, the police refused to show up at his trial and the prosecutor ended up cutting him a very sweet deal. It was quite depressing.
Things have gotten better in Tucson though, and I believe TPD has made impressive progress. I like to think they would react to an event like this just as the Pierce County authorities have done.
My thoughts go out to Mr. Wingerson and his family. I too have been knocked to the ground by thugs in a car (though thankfully I was not badly hurt) and I know how deeply psychologically scarring it can be to be attacked like that.
–Erik Ryberg
The Oregon Coast Bike Route
About thirty years ago, when I was still in high school, I took a bike trip from Astoria, Oregon to my hometown, Ashland, with my boss Pat Super, who cofounded United Bicycle Tool Supply and whose husband at the time founded United Bicycle Institute.
It was the worst bike tour I had ever been on. Traffic was terrible, there was little in the way of a shoulder, and frankly the scenery wasn’t that great either, as the highway spent a lot of time far enough away from the ocean that you couldn’t see the coast at all. I remember a lot of depressing little towns that appeared to rely for their economic well-being entirely on kite sales and, to a lesser extent, driftwood baubles and wind chimes. Why anybody ever thought that would be a good bike ride was totally beyond me. The wind, the tiny shoulder, the log trucks, and the constant traffic made it dangerous and unpleasant.
It’s nice to see that in this normally shifty, uncertain world some things still say the same. I traveled the Oregon Coast Route again this week–this time by car–and saw lots of cyclists hugging that very same shoulder and looking miserable as a billion cars a day passed them at 60 miles per hour. I felt sorry for them, duped no doubt, the same as I was, by an aggressive tourism campaign. At least the beaches are nice and the camping is good.
I don’t know that I will ever bike tour again, at least not on roads that also permit cars. It just doesn’t seem like much fun. Although I didn’t enjoy my bike tour down the Oregon Coast, I took many others around the Pacific Northwest and California back in the 1980s that were great fun. But there was quite a bit less traffic back then, and what there was went more slowly.
–Erik Ryberg
Portland — is it real?
I am on a pilgrimage this week to a special tucsonbikelawyer holy site: the Tillamook Cheese Factory. But Portland is on the way there so I spent a few days looking around. I’ll say this much: Portland really has us beat when it comes to the sheer numbers of people on bikes. There is no way that Tucson should be in the same League of American Bicyclists “bike friendly” category as Portland — it would demean the category. If Tucson were to make Platinum then Portland would have to be upgraded to Kryptozirconium or something.
Everywhere you turn in that town there’s somebody riding by on a bicycle, surrounded by a crowd of motorists scrambling to slow down, move over, and let the cyclist pass. There are bikes and bike racks and bikey things everywhere. Good grief, there is even a Park Tool stand mounted in the airport for assembling your bike!! Advertisements throughout town picture cyclists.
It all seems pretty great at first, to be sitting there sipping cappuccino and watching the bicycles go by, but after awhile I started wondering, is it real? Am I in a real place? For one thing, every single person in town seems to be young, beautiful, rich, white, and eerily happy. They are all riding very hip bikes or driving brand new Mini Coopers. Even the ones smoking cigarettes look healthy in a suspicious kind of way, and it seemed like everyone’s clothes fit them better than ours do in Tucson. I started feeling kind of nervous and began having paranoid thoughts about how maybe there is some kind of army that comes out and clears away all the regular people, and how maybe I wouldn’t make the cut and should clear out of there while I still could. So I did.
Late update: I see now that what was meant to be facetious in this post actually comes off as kind of negative. Let me be clear that I think Portland would actually be a pretty good place to live if it weren’t for the near total lack of winter sunshine and Sonoran hot dogs. –EBR
–Erik Ryberg
I want his bike lights
EBR
1912 Tucson bike tour
It wasn’t easy to go bike touring in June in Tucson in 1912, but it could be done.
Pair took arduous, 101-mile bike ride
June 11, 1912
With two well-punctured and badly battered bicycles, F.E.A. Kimball and Walter Lovejoy, themselves nearly exhausted after 25 hours of almost continuous travel, returned to Tucson Sunday night after having ridden … and walked from Tucson to Greaterville and back.It was a trip of 101 miles over desert and mountain roads which so far as is known have never before been negotiated by bicyclists.
As a matter of fact, Kimball and Lovejoy found some of the mountain stretches more than the wheels could stand and where they couldn’t ride, they were forced to walk. They rode 76 miles going and coming and walked 25.
The two men left Tucson Saturday afternoon at 3 o’clock. At 9 o’clock they (undecipherable) for the night, but having thoughtlessly left Tucson without their coats, they shivered around a big campfire in the cold of the hills until shortly after midnight and then took to the road again in self defense.After a number of mishaps and losing much time through taking wrong roads at the un-signboarded junctions of two or more roads, they arrived in Greaterville late Sunday morning.
- Tucson Citizen
–Erik Ryberg
ADOT
A couple of years ago I had a case in Sells that required me to travel there with maddening frequency.
During my many visits, I got to watch ADOT complete the drainage project portrayed in the photo above. It runs alongside Highway 86, which bisects town in a long, hot swath. I remember thinking how it might be fun to ride a bmx bike into that drainage ditch, if only I owned or knew how to ride a bmx bike.
But crossing that drainage structure on anything but a bmx bike seemed a little daunting. And it’s not like there are many available spots to do so — it’s a long walk between road crossings.
So what I have been puzzling over for some time now is, what were the ADOT planners thinking when they designed this? Did it not occur to anyone that people have to cross this highway to get from the north side of Sells, where many people live, to the south side, where many of the tribe’s services and the stores are? (Satellite image of Sells here.)
Did the ADOT planners ever go to Sells? Did they build a model of this drainage system and look at it? Because it seems like if they had done so, it would have been really obvious that some pedestrian facilities should maybe be included.
I don’t know how much was spent on this thing and I don’t know how bad the problem was that it was designed to solve (I am hoping it was designed to solve an actual problem). But I do know that it shouldn’t take a wild-eyed, university-educated, free-thinking, bike-riding vegetarian pedestrian activist to notice that people in Sells might like to be able to walk across the high-speed highway that goes right through the middle of their town.
It makes you wonder if the Fourth Avenue Underpass debacle, whose awful design has been the subject of mitigation studies and the site of one fatality, was so unusual.
Wouldn’t it be nice if the traffic engineers could find a way to make sure these things stop happening?
–Erik Ryberg
Fifteen tickets later, 22 year-old driver finally kills a bicyclist
Amine Britel, above, was killed while cycling in Newport Beach, CA on February 21.
What should it take to lose your driver’s license? From the Orange County Weekly:
Danae Marie Miller, 22, of Newport Beach, is accused of killing bicyclist Amine Britel on San Joaquin Hills Road with her car. Miller was allegedly drunk; since 2005, when she was 17, she has racked up 15 to 17 traffic tickets for various infractions. Her driver’s license was not suspended because she clears her record at traffic school.
Mr. Britel’s memorial site is here. Although dated, more information about his considerable athletic achievements can be found here.
–Erik Ryberg
Don’t forget the GABA Bike Swap
The GABA Bike Swap is my third-favorite bike event every year after the BICAS Art Auction and Cyclovia. Tucson Bike-Realtor Greg Yares puts a lot of work into organizing the bike swap and it shows — it’s a wonderful event that you really kind of need to attend if you haven’t been before. Take advantage of the El Gruppo bike valet because the crowds are big and wheeling a bike through them can be kind of annoying for everyone.
Also, below is a picture of what I am going to buy at the swap this year:
–EBR