The Portland Bureau of Transportation isn’t sitting idly by while their once-heralded bike ridership numbers head in the wrong direction.
As we’ve reported, a recent report from PBOT found that bicycling in Portland dropped by 34.9% between 2019 and 2022. The news was not a surprise, but finally having the data (since it was the first bike count report the city released since 2014) to back up our hunches has crystallized the issue and adds urgency to calls to reverse the trend. For our part, we have hosted conversations about what’s behind the drop and have read hundreds of your comments and emails.
Despite behavior changes due to the Covid-19 pandemic, so far the City of Portland hasn’t offered any official rationale about what might be behind the numbers. A PBOT staffer shared some of his views at a recent Bicycle Advisory Committee meeting, but it was based solely on only well-informed speculation and anecdotal evidence.
Now PBOT wants more direct input about what might be going on.
PBOT Communications Director Hannah Schafer shared with us last week that one step they have already taken is to contract with a well-known pollster to find out more. “We’re working with the Oregon Values and Beliefs Center to put a poll into the field soon,” Schafer wrote in an email to BikePortland. “It will include a couple open-ended questions as well as a few yes/no questions that are designed to determine what Portlanders at this time freely associate with “bicycling,” the number of bicyclists for any purpose, and the reasons why bicyclists are riding less than in the past.”
The Oregon Values and Beliefs Center is a nonprofit that describes their work as, “accurate, inclusive opinion research” that is, “independent and nonpartisan; representative of rural Oregon and communities of color; valid and statistically reliable; and quantitative and qualitative.”
It will be interesting to see what OVBC comes up with. One thing we’ve learned is that there are myriad overlapping reasons behind the decline. Socio-political changes, the rise of tele-commuting, dangerous drivers, vast public safety concerns, and a lack of traffic enforcement are just some of the concerns we’ve heard about most.
Once the poll is completed, OVBC will process the data and provide a report to PBOT. “Once we have that information,” Schafer says. “We’ll use it to inform future steps.”
We’ll get another chance to hear from PBOT about the decline on April 18th. According to the agenda for the Bicycle Advisory Committee that was just released, PBOT Bicycle Coordinator Roger Geller will present on the 2022 counts report and then, “present some thoughts on factors contributing to the decline.”