About thirty people showed up — by bus, bike, and on foot — to the first Portland Car-free Happy Hour on Thursday.
Some highlights for me included:
– Standing outside on a sunny March day, talking about bike commute routes, long distance train travel, streetcars, and more.
– Meeting a good number of people who are not already regulars at bike-related events. We had local business owners (Joe Bike, Clever Cycles, Portland Design Works), transportation/land use professionals like Peter Koonce of Kittelson & Associates, Caleb Winter of Metro, and Peter Mason of PBOT, and a number of just regular folks who mainly get around without a car.
– Chris Smith sharing his new mantra: “Carbon-free central city mobility.”
– Talking with Brad of Shift, Courtney the new-ish bike commuter, and Ryan the professional GIS guy about ways to use online mapping tools to connect people who want commute buddies — like the Bikepooling thread here on the BikePortland Forums, but more user friendly. This may come to something…
– Meeting Courtney and her husband, who had met up at Roots for dinner and a beer, overheard our conversation, and eventually put on nametags and joined us.
The event arose after I met up with Aaron Antrim, a recent transplant to Portland. Antrim runs a small business, Trillium Solutions, through which he helps municipalities make their transit data available to Google Transit.
Antrim recently moved to Portland and has been trying to meet a lot of folks in the general transportation and livability field. I had just returned from the east coast and was waxing on about the ubiquitous networking happy hours in Washington, DC. Antrim told me about a monthly Car-free Happy Hour in the San Francisco bay area, and we decided to start one up in Portland.
From Antrim’s event description: “Car-free happy hour is an informal venue to mingle and participate in a social exchange of information, ideas, and connections.”
The happy hour will be on the second Thursday of each month from here on out, 5 – 7pm at Roots Organic Brewing Company on SE 7th Ave just south of Hawthorne. Next month it’s April 9th!
Here are some photos:
The group has a Facebook group, and there is a Google Group for monthly reminders.
Roots is where a certain highly pro-car Mayor announced his campaign not that long ago.
Move a bit around the corner to the hyper-bikey Lab and I’ll show.
Fixies rule!
Hey, Jim,
a) Please don’t blame Roots Organic Brewery for our Mayor’s policy decisions. I’m sure the good folks at Roots have only limited influence over how the Mayor makes up his mind. (And if you boycott every place that Sam Adams has ever visited, you might as well move out of Portland, because you won’t be going anywhere in public.)
b) While not all of us agree with Sam Adam’s recent vote on the CRC, etc., I think his overall, long-term record clearly shows some pro-bike tendencies. Calling him “highly pro-car” is a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?
also roots sponsers a bike team! team beer! and we actually race our fixies at the track! maybe we will see you and your fixie at the track!! roots supports the bike people!! cross crusade opening party, bike craft fair, the bike swap meet, a couple of bikeportland events! if you are a hater stay at the lucky lab!!
john howe team beer spokesmodel
gentlemen please. lets not quibble and divide ourselves along brewpub lines. The beauty is you can drink at both places, in the same night. Lord knows I did.
Last time at Roots JH of TB caught me as I stumbled through the door;
Also Chris Smith–the Mayor is likely to run CRC at 104 fever–patronizes the place;
It can’t be all that bad.
But the Lab is much more spacious and laid back. More bike parking too.
Yellow fixies rule!
Lucky Lab = vicious headache.
better beer trumps all.
Fairly certain that this is not about beer OR about our mayor, so you guys should think about beeradvocate.com or some other forum devoted to all things anti car/Sam.
I will try to make it to the next one, I generally have Thursdays off, but the 6th of April is my birthday and the 9th is my wife’s, so that might be out of the question!
“Lucky Lab = vicious headache.”
I second that. What is in that stuff anyway?
Also, the link to Joe Bike has the wrong URL. It’s http://www.joe-bike.com/
Thanks, Jon, I fixed the link.
If all you debaters show up on the 9th there’s no reason we can’t have a brewpub showdown.
I’m all about brewpub showdowns. Let the beer do the talking.
BEER!!!