🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏
Massachusetts is working overtime to become a bike-friendly state.
In Boston, they’ve gone from “Worst” to “Future Best” Bike City in Bicycling Magazine and former Olympian turned bike czar Nicole Freedman was recently named a “Bostonian of the Year” by the Boston Globe.
With a press release that exclaims, “The Portland “Snowpocalypse” can’t keep us from getting kids on bikes!”, the Community Cycling Center (CCC) has announced plans to hold a sequel to their annual Holiday Bike Drive this weekend.
The event will hope to bring biking’s goodness to more than 350 kids who couldn’t attend the original Bike Drive on December 14th, which was cut short by a snow storm. The CCC promises it will be “the same great event, just a little over a month later.”
Back in December, Los Angeleno Ryan Bowen and an energetic band of friends and followers left L.A. for D.C. on their bikes to be a part of the Inaugural event. They dubbed their journey “Biking for Obama” and kept up a great blog about their adventure.
And, showing a bit of hopeful audacity, they didn’t even have tickets to the Inaugural when they left.
Fortunately, D.C.’s highest-profile bike-lover (and Portland resident), Congressman Earl Blumenauer answered their plea for tickets on their website and presented them to Bowen and a friend on behalf of the Congressional Bike Caucus and Bowen’s hometown Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.).
During his campaign, Obama got us all excited when he mentioned how Portland’s bike lanes should be an example for the rest of the country.
Now that he’s in office, I’m sure I join a lot of other people involved with biking who are eager for any sign that he’ll continue to publicly support bikeways.
Tipped off by a friend on Twitter, I browsed over to WhiteHouse.gov the other day. Turns out, as Obama was taking the Oath of Office, his web team was hitting the upload button on the newly updated website.
Excited to see if there was any mention of bicycling, I entered it into the search bar. I found one result.
If Mayor Sam Adams hoped for progress overnight in his effort to save his reputation and his political life, it seems things have only gotten worse.
This morning I awoke to both of our local daily newspapers — The Oregonian and the Portland Tribune — calling for him to resign immediately.