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.