Portland is once again received major national press coverage for being bike-friendly. A ‘Cover Story’ (front page, below-the-fold) in yesterday’s edition of USA Today — the paper with the second largest circulation in America — gave major props to Portland as a place where “bikes rule the road.” The story has also been picked up in smaller papers nationwide. On USAToday.com, the story was accompanied by a video that features the head of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BTA) Rob Sadowsky and Portland State University researcher Jennifer Dill.
The framing of the story is that Portland is on the leading edge of a push across the country to “rethink… the automobile”. This story comes just a day after The Economist magazine proclaimed, “A cycling renaissance is taking place in America.” While this coverage is exciting, it comes with pitfalls we should be aware of.
Here’s the lede from the USA Today…
America spent 50 years and billions of dollars after World War II redesigning itself so that cars could move people across this vast country more quickly.
Now, with many cities in gridlock, one-third of the population obese and climate change forcing innovators to look beyond the internal combustion engine, cities are beginning to rethink that push toward the automobile.
Perhaps no place has thought about it more than Portland,
