Pedal Bike Tours Blog

Great article in Yes! magazine.  I'm not familiar with it, but its sections include:

• PEACE & JUSTICE
• PLANET
• NEW ECONOMY
• PEOPLE POWER
• HAPPINESS

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Tour of Pedal Bike Tours (more...)

Here's a note we received from Myriam who took our Wine Country tour.  As you can see, even the French love Oregon!

Here are a few pictures I took on July 24 when I was biking with Pedal Bike! I keep a very good memory of this tour among the vineyards.

The French people to whom I showed the pictures here were impressed at seeing such nice and orderly vineyards. But I would add that not only the landscape was nice in Oregon but the people very friendly.

Myriam from France

I rode into downtown today in the early morning fog. It was pretty cold, with the wind I stirred up as I pedaled downhill trying to cut through my clothes. Good morning for a heavy coat, scarf and long johns. The fog hung in the air like gray silt, translucent yet giving the same city as yesterday a new dimension. Riding into the fog felt like riding into a wall of blankets, but which gave no resistance as I battered it. On my cheeks was that same chilly sting of cold air, so bracing and energizing in the winter. As I passed over the Broadway bridge the reflection of the grain merchants building in the river was just obscured enough to look like a phantom level under the water. The sky above was the slightest tint of blue in the slowly dawning light, presaging another brilliantly sunny day.

By the time I had come out of my appointment in a windowless room, the sun was up, the fog was gone. But I remembered my ride and cherished the fog all the more for its fragile nature.

Going by car wouldn't have been the same.

I just saw a great little article applauding Portland's bicycle friendliness in the January issue of National Geographic.

It's a short article in the "Technology" section but it highly praises Portland's bicycle infrastructure and how tolerant people are towards bicyclists here. The article cites our 171 miles of bike lanes, bike boxes (which allows bikes to be visible to cars at stop lights) and bike-only traffic signals.

A bar graph on the side shows the increase in bikes being put on bus racks in various US cities, with Houston increasing 235%!

The article concludes other cities could become as bike friendly as Portland simply by repainting street to include bike lanes. As interior decorators say, paint is cheap! It's a little more complicated than that, many bicyclists in Portland prefer to ride on low traffic streets. This is an ever cheaper solution, since it costs nothing to simply choose to ride on quiet streets with few cars. However, it's Portland's conscious effort to promote bicycling as an alternative to cars and commitment to improving bikes' access to streets which has given so many people the confidence to ride around the city.

Thanks for the recognition National Geographic!

Everyone comes out to ride Portland's bridges once a year.

It has been an interesting year a watershed in fact. Oil prices rising, the housing crisis deepening and widening, eventually overtaking the nation's and the world's banking system, talk of the country's aging infrastructure collapsing. As unfortunate as these developments are for many individuals and families throughout the nation and the world, I can't help but think how good it will ultimately be for our communities.

For a long time now, as I watch football on tv and therefore commercials for big trucks, I've wondered (usually out loud) when the big three are going to wake up and realize they're betting very heavily on the wrong horse. I knew the era of everyone buying trucks would end sooner or later and to my utter amazement it came to pass over one week in May. As gas prices approached, and quickly broke through the $4 mark, US auto companies changed their tune on a dime, crowing on Monday about the F150 being the world's most popular vehicle to announcing on Friday they were radically cutting back on truck manufacturing and turning to small cars; of course, this move was going to take them several years and hundreds of millions of dollars. Better late than never, except that it looks like it might actually be too late for them, with GM possibly running out of cash in a year. Time will tell, serves them right. Of course the Japanese were feeding at the same trough, but only enough to get some of the sweet, fat profits. Their real bread and butter is the small energy-efficient cars Ford and GM now have to spend years figuring out how to build.

As a fan of city density, public transportation, walkable cities and bicycles, its hard not to gloat and rejoice, so I give in and do it anyway. On that week in May I made a conscious effort to mark this turning point in history and the myriad of changes it will bring.

Sure enough, news came just in time for summer here in Portland, and our already red hot bike environment got hotter. There are just so many issues and events in Portland, I just can't name them all here, however that is the point of this column, to bring issues up and maybe have a little to say about them.

Pedalpalooza fired people up with its dozens of bike-oriented events, then the International Car Free conference came to town. It was capped off by the first Sunday Parkways event in North America: a 6 mile neighborhood loop was closed to vehicles, allowing people to ride, walk, skate and skip car-free. It's modeled after Bogota Columbia where they close several streets to cars once a month. It was a smashing success, the street was jammed with happy crowds of people, from couples and families with kids to older people, all not driving. I could feel the excitement, everyone wanted to know when it was going to happen again. It was at that moment I knew Portland had a chance to really increase its active biking population.

It all depends on getting people to feel comfortable riding around the city amongst the cars and trucks. Portland has made great strides in that direction and I am thrilled to be able to be here to help it move forward in the future.