The Willamette Week offered their Revisioning the City That Works, a five-point vision on how to most effectively make Portland a better city. 
Playing off of Mayor Tom Potter’s visioning process, “WW’s admittedly truncated ‘visioning process’” got to the point for us. Their five-point vision included bicycles, bicycle boulevards, congestion pricing, Flexcar, and soccer.
Here are WW’s Portland top five:
> Turn Portland into Soccer City USA
> Create 100 Additional Miles of Bike Boulevards
> Congestion Pricing
> Eliminate the Business Income Tax
> Make Portland Bars Smoke-Free
Read the report.. Email vision@wweek.com to comment on this story.
Bike boulevards are a good thing. Thou 10 years behind schedule. The BTA spend years on bike lanes on high traffic roads. Your web site states “past planning efforts have focused mainly on the needs of expert and intermidiate cyclists”. This is about 5% of portland bike riders. I always thought the BTA should have worked for boulavards first. The biking elite thought different. Over 60% of portlanders say safety was cause for not biking. Marking neighborhood bike lanes and switching stop signs would have been an easy sell to the city. This would have increased the number of people biking and made biking more common in Portland. The biking elite wanted to go fast with the cars. The biking minority won over your everyday bike person. The backlash towards biking would have been less if the BTA would have worked to include the majority of the people. People dont want to ride amongst the cars only the go fast bikers do. Trying to explain that to the city and bike groups over 10 years ago went nowheare. I’m glad times have changed and inclusion of the majority of people who want to bike but are affraid can now participate. People who spent $1000 bikes $1000 bike clothes and donate to bike groups have been the ones to have their needs served first. The majority of us who bye our bike at a garage sale and wear jeans are finaly welcome. Good luck on your project and maybe now I’ll donate to your group. Also I have worked bike issues. I came up with the idea of the Free Yellow Bikes and helped Portland receive national attention. tom