(Photo by J.Maus/BikePortland)
Its users are belittled, harassed and ignored, but people keep doing it because it’s practical, affordable and fun — and Portland is leading the nation in thinking about it as a useful form of transportation.
It’s skateboarding, and the new episode of BikePortland’s half-hour monthly podcast asks whether it’s following in biking’s trail.
In celebration of OMSI’s new skateboarding exhibit and Portland’s increasingly sophisticated skateboard advocacy movement, we invited two smart advocates to join us and talk about the parallels between skating and biking and the future of skating in the first major U.S. city to make skateboards street legal (that’d be ours).
I especially like the part where each of us shares an example of something skateboarding can do that no other form of transportation can — and, as usual, the song producer Lillian Karabaic found to introduce our show.
Thanks to our guests, Cory Poole of the NW Skate Coalition and Tessa Walker, a Portland State University scholar whose study of skateboard transportation is available online. (She actually gave the wrong URL during our taping.)
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