This article is the eighteenth in a series profiling the varied and amazing nominees for the 2009 Alice B. Toeclips Awards, which will be presented to five winners at the Alice Awards & Auction on March 7th. We won’t be able to profile everyone, so read the nominees’ descriptions online. This profile and interview was written by BTA correspondent John McLaren.
Roger Geller, Portland’s Bicycle Coordinator since 2000, has been an effective champion for cycling interests. A committed recreational and transportation cyclist for all his adult life, he has worked hard to make bicycling a preferred option for people who otherwise might not bother, by pursuing a vision of safe and pleasant bike routes that my cycling irresistible.
In the ongoing debate over how big a slice of the transportation pie ought to be invested in bicycling, he notes that the “investment we’ve made over time to create Portland’s entire bicycle network barely adds up to the cost of one freeway interchange.”
He is currently working on a multitude of transportation projects, new technical designs for bikeways, bicycle parking, and an update to the city’s Bicycle Master Plan. In addition to locally funded projects, Geller has recently raised more than $2 million for bikeway projects through outside grant sources. And he has collected data on the numbers and types of people bicycling in Portland that is unrivaled around the country.
Geller, who has been nominated for an Alice Award, took part in a Question and Answer session with the BTA:
1. After 14 years in the Office of Transportation, what are your new or continuing goals?
There are very immediate goals I have associated with the day-to-day management of my job, and they haven’t changed much since I first began with the city: find additional funding for bicycle projects, continue to press for the best possible designs for bikeways, look for opportunities to experiment with the new designs we know we need, get more people within the various city agencies to think about and do a better job designing for people on bicycles.
A more recent goal is to help deliver an updated bicycle master plan for Portland that helps to make the case for bicycling as a preferred means of transportation for Portlanders. I want bicycling to be a part of daily life for all Portlanders. My goal is to make bicycling so comfortable, so safe, and so attractive that it essentially becomes irresistible to not just the self-identified “cyclist,” but more importantly to the average person living in Portland.
Another important goal is to make bicycling visible in Portland. I believe it is the visibility of bicycling that has helped spur the exponential growth we’ve seen over the past four years.
Visibility comes in all shapes and sizes. One form of visibility is just in the infrastructure itself. Bicycle lanes on busy streets was one of the first things we did in building the city’s network. Having prominent designs is also helpful in raising the profile of bicycling and attracting more riders.
Things like the bike boxes and the bikeway through the Rose Quarter Transit Center, our bikeway network signing and the bicycle signals we have in town all help to make people begin to see bicycling as a means of transportation and to see the cyclists using the system.
Of course, all the bike fun efforts around town have contributed fantastically to the visibility of bicycling too, as has BikePortland.org.
2. What is your proudest accomplishment as bike coordinator, and are you set in that post for the foreseeable future?
I have helped to introduce a lot of great designs into Portland and I am proud of that, because while their introduction was a struggle, their success has meant that they are now being seen as standard elements in our toolkit.
It’s now important to win the hearts and minds of the people who can make decisions about what type of city we want to be in the future and how to invest our transportation dollars now and in the long run.
It has become accepted (and not just in Portland, but in many places around the country) that we want to attract the “interested but concerned” cyclist, because they comprise the majority of the population. We are not designing for “cyclists.”
People are also now talking about providing for a cyclists’ comfort, as distinct from their safety.
Also, because of our great count data and the manner in which it’s been presented, I rarely, if ever hear people complain that our interment in bicycling is wasteful because “nobody ever rides, anyhow.” I feel very proud and gratified when I see so many people bicycling around town and knowing that I’ve played a role in creating the conditions resulting in that.
Being Bicycle Coordinator in Portland is a wonderful opportunity and I love doing it. I am looking forward to being able to work with an updated bicycle master plan and new sources of funding to build a true world-class bicycling city. If I really get the opportunity to do that–to dig in deep to projects and continue to advance the bicycle as the best urban vehicle, then I see no reason to leave anytime soon.
3. What’s the status of the update to the Bicycling Master Plan?
We see the work on the plan as an unprecedented and rare opportunity to truly set the stage for great advances in bicycling. We are looking at all city policies that may have any relation to bicycling and analyzing how they help or hinder. We are looking around the world to identify the best policies, schemes for establishing a bicycle network, and, of course, designs for bikeways.
The plan is now moving along nicely. We will be holding open houses in May and intend to go to Council to seek approval for the update in the fall.
4. How will impending budget cuts affect bicycling programs?
Money has always been a challenge for us and the recession is creating more difficult times for almost everybody. My agency is going to be laying off 19 people. However, even in the absence of these type of budget cuts, the amount of funding we’ve been able to raise locally through our traditional funding sources has never and is never going to be sufficient to build the type of system and run the type of programs we want.
We have been working for a couple of years at the national level with the League of American Bicyclists and the Rails to Trails Conservancy on an effort to secure more funding through the upcoming re-authorization of the federal highway bill. We’ve done a very rough estimate of the value of the investment we’ve made over time to create Portland’s entire bicycle network and it barely adds up to the cost of one freeway interchange.
5. Is it true, as has been reported, that you work 60-hour weeks?
You know, I have a really great job and because of that in some ways I am always working–always thinking about how to improve things, about the next project, the next presentation, the next grant. It’s hard not to. That said, I rarely work 60-hour weeks where I’m on the clock all that time. I have two kids and that type of work schedule is not really conducive to a healthy home life. But, my son does tell me that I work too much…
