Today’s New York Times is running a quick excerpt of a new report that ranks Portland as tops in the nation for sustainability, and image their editors chose to represent Portland was that of a local cyclist, from their story of last winter that focused on our bike-friendly culture.
This marks the fourth year in a row we’ve earned the number one ranking among the nation’s 50 largest cities from SustainLane.
What kind of validity do all these sustainability rankings have? Grist takes their stab at the conversation here.
For me, I think this kind of praise can help us elevate our sense of expectations to that of being a world class city, but the risk is that too many will assume that we’re already there.
So I’ll ask you, what do you think Portland needs to be world-class, in terms of its sustainability generally speaking, or more specifically in terms of being bike-friendly?
I think in terms of being bike-friendly, one of the biggest things is just developing bike-friendly infrastructure around the city to accommodate bikes and cars being on the road together as safely and conveniently as possible around the city.
I think education from both the point of view of a motorist and a cyclist on what it’s like driving on the road with each other and how to best do so safely would be great.
Also, I think bicycle advertising promoting cycling for small trips for just average, everyday people would be great. If we could encourage people to go get groceries or take their kids to daycare or even commute to work (within reasonable distances) – just everyday kinds of short-trip activities that can be done in normal clothes by normal people on normal bikes and don’t require any kind of aggressive athletic motivation or special equipment or whatever – I think more people might get interested. I think because folks in the northwest tend to be so outdoorsy and athletic focused, a lot of the people you see riding around the city are in full bike gear with racing or mountain bike style bikes and while that is just fine, I think it would be cool to promote “cycling for the average person” in a sense.
The more people we get on cycles, the more push we have for education and infrastructure changes, and the safer things will get for both bicycles and cars which are on the road together.
These are tough questions to answer… My 2 cents is that Portland – and the larger Metro area – need to become more bold in creating a vision and long-term plan that effectively puts sustainable development and livability before everything else.
Our biggest challenges will probably be how to constantly adjust this plan to cope with a rapidly growing population and that we’ll be forced to plan even more things on a regional level. Like every large city, Portland will have to come to terms that it is not an island, and that its green credentials will depend largely on how various objectives are achieved across its ever-expanding surrounding area.
A good reading on the type of challenges that we might face are outlined in the excellent article “The Road to Curitiba” that ran in NYT Magazine last year (http://tinyurl.com/54zabp).
As far as being a world-class bike-friendly city, our elected officials will have to embrace cycling as a preferred mode of transportation (and recreation) and translate that in various policies (from traffic laws, road infrastructure and urban developement, to law enforcement and education). Again not just at the city level, but at all levels that affect the metro area.
And finally, a much stronger push to develop car-free zones within our urban centers would be a great way to show that we’re serious about all this.