of PBOT bike/walk map.
The Bureau of Transportation’s SmartTrips program just got a lot smarter. The focus of the program, which resides in PBOT’s Transportation Options division, is to encourage people to bike, walk, and take transit. Today PBOT announced that their popular series of biking and walking maps are now available in five new languages: Burmese, Nepali, Somali, Russian and Arabic.
SmartTrips employees visited the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization today to pass out the new maps. PBOT’s Marni Glick says that for people new to our city, getting around can be “a monumental task, especially if English isn’t a first language.”
SmartTrips’ marketing approach has already proven successful, but it’s hard to know your transportation options if they’re not available in your language. “Handing out walk/bike maps in other languages,” Glick adds, “shows those new to our area that low-cost and free transportation choices are right around the corner.”
PBOT has separate biking and walking maps for every section of the city. The maps are currently available in English and Spanish and the new languages were added “cost-effectively” by placing stickers on the map legends of existing maps.
Check out PBOT’s Bike/Walk maps webpage for more.
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ممتاز. وظيفة جيدة.
Russian should be good, there seem to be a lot of them around lately…
Also, the Bike Safety Tips printed on each of our bike maps are available as separate sheets in each of the 5 languages. You can download them from the page linked in the article.
Thanks for getting the word out Jonathan!
Burmese, Nepali,: Intriguing: What is the % of population that fall into this category in Greater Portland area? I know I can do the research, but if it’s patently obvious with census data on mother tongue, Portlanders should be able to snap off this figure more quickly than I ever could.
I guarantee for Metro Toronto and Metro Vancouver, the biggest % would be Punjabi, Chinese for recent immigrants. This has proven in Statistics Canada census data since 2006 onward. And reflected in linguistic based local community services.
I don’t know the numbers, but there is a hearty Burmese and Karen diaspora in the Portland region. Friday afternoon’s class at IRCO had maybe 45-50 people, all of whom were Burmese or Karen. We had some extra time at the end of class, so we took out the maps, and everyone was able to find their home and circle it in pen for future reference. Thanks to PBOT! Next up, Karen and Chinese maps? Even better, TriMet adding translated pages on Trip Planner in Nepali, Somali, Burmese, and Arabic? That would be the cat’s pajamas!
This guy would not approve:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEPh_KlTyII
I don’t know the citywide numbers, but I can say that four coworkers in my department speak Burmese as their primary language. This is awesome that the city is able to expand this service to languages outside of English and Spanish.
Is this the same map that considers NW 13th a bike route with stop signs every block? colorful and multilingual junk info.
It’s a tough job to create one map for the preferences of each of Portland’s 50,000+ regular cyclists. (And the thousands more who visit from elsewhere.)
For the record, green lines on the map represent lower-speed, lower-traffic streets. For a speedier ride stick to the blue lines: bike lanes, usually installed on higher-traffic streets.
As we like to say at my work – you have options!
日本語 would be a good choice to- especially if we’re going to start pushing bike tourism from Japan.
oops. ->too<-