a taxi while riding on Sixth Ave.
-Watch video below-
U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer went for a ride with bike advocates in New York City over the weekend and Streetfilms was there to capture the action.
Blumenauer rolled down the bike lane on Sixth Ave, calling the experience “pretty grim”. However, when he turned onto the cycle track on Ninth, his feelings “changed completely”.
Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives, shared how far New York City has come in recent years:
“We started years ago aspiring to be Portland, looking to Portland for best practices, now we’re at the point in New York where Portland is actually borrowing from us.”
As he pedals down the streets of mid-town, Blumenauer shares his feelings on the national bike movement, the importance of New York City’s “extraordinarily sophisticated” efforts, and more. It’s inspiring and well worth a view:
Thanks for reading.
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+1 Paul Steely White.
I now look at New York’s facilities with envy. Portland can no longer be at the front of the pack on the cheap. It’s going to take some real money and backbone to do the great stuff New York is doing.
I don’t want to debate bike boulevards versus cycletracks. I’d rather just have both because they’re both great. Make it happen, Sam. Where’s our Janette Sadik-Khan? Where’s our cycletrack to the Broadway Bridge, on MLK/Grand, on Foster, on Burnside/Couch… Let New York be the Soviet Space Program to our NASA in what’s shaping up to be a delightful “bike race.”
Streetfilms is my boyfriend.
Carl,
That’s the right thinking. Most cities should have all kinds of bike facilities. One size does not fit all. We actually want some bike boulevards on lower travelled streets in Queens and Brooklyn, but it is gonna take alot of work to make that happen.
I hope the next time I come out to Portland there is a separated facility on MLK. That road scares the beejeezus out of me.
I like the video but I wished they properly identified Rep. Blumenauer at the 0:44 mark as being from Oregon’s 3rd District rather than Portland, OR since that is the correct identifier.
This is a good reminder for us to log our comments on the Portland Bicycle Plan. November 8th is the deadline
http://www.portlandonline.com/transportation/index.cfm?c=44597&a=265909
A bike lane down MLK would be great… you could get across town North-South in 30 minutes, easy. I did the bridge pedal for the first time this year, and I was amazed at how quickly I got from the Sellwood bridge to St. Johns when I didn’t have to take all sorts of weird routes.
The bike lane on 6th Ave in New York is so awesome!! I wish we have them here in Portland!
We would have so much money for protected cycle tracks if Earl had put his anti war words into action.
He and his democrat friends took impeachment off the table and now we’re bankrupt from the war.
It’s not the little joys like NY cycle tracks we should celebrate, but the major mistakes we will repeat if we forget them.
Ooops, we forgot again. Single payer is off the table because to take profit out of health care is well, too radical.
I’m jealous of all of Rep. Blumenauer’s cool sci-fi helmets.
Politics in France should do something like that.
Well, I guess we shoulda taken him for a ride on some of that worldclass singletrack we USED to be able to ride out near Mt. Hood, USED to, as in his Mt. Hood Wilderness Act CLOSED over 110+ miles of ‘some of the best singletrack in the universe’. Now how bicycle friendly is that? Not very……….
Now, now, RWL1776.
mountainbiking on singletrack in natural habitats is a whole ‘nother kind of bicycling than what the community needs to solve its problems.