Where are Jessica and Scott?
Yesterday (earlier than I care to remember), Scott, Boulevard Intern Tom, and I got on a plane heading South to visit Davis and Berkeley, CA. This is the first in a series of trips we’re taking this summer to check out how other cities are creating low-traffic bicycle facilities.
It’s all part of our Bicycle Boulevard Campaign to create beautiful, safe, attractive low-traffic bicycle streets for cyclists of all ages and abilities.
We’ll be touring facilities and meeting with officials to find out how they planned and built low-traffic bikeways, and what the challenges and successes have been.
We chose Davis because it’s known far and wide as “the bike city.” In fact, their city logo incorporates an old-fashioned highwheel bicycle. Nearly 20% of trips are made by bicycle in Davis (compared to 1-5% in Portland, depending on when and how you measure), and at some bicycle traffic circles they’ve counted up to 1100 bikes in one fifteen minute period. In fact, they’re the first city to win the League of American Bicyclists’ coveted Platinum Bicycle-Friendly Communities award (though we point out that a small college town has something of an unfair edge on a “real” city like Portland).
Berkeley has been working on a Bicycle Boulevard Network for years now. They’re the only city in the US with a complete, marked, official low-traffic network, and we want to see how it works and bring back ideas for Portland. Berkeley’s bicycle planner has agreed to meet with us, bike the boulevards, and discuss bicycle boulevard planning, implementation, and funding, as well as challenges and future plans.
We’ll be sharing what we learn with you during this trip and as we think about what it means for Portland.
Enough typing — it’s time to hit the road!
