Council candidate Steve Novick has some questions for the bike community

Steve Novick has been out of Portland politics for eight years, but you wouldn’t know that if you’ve watched him on the campaign trail. Novick, who’s running for one of three seats in City Council District 3 (Southeast), has landed back on the scene and finds himself atop a very competitive race. This week he wrapped up the big trifecta with endorsements from The Willamette Week, The Oregonian and the Portland Mercury.

And last night he walked onto the Gorges Beer Co patio to join us for Bike Happy Hour. In his typically demure style, Novick didn’t announce his presence and he didn’t even tell me he’d be there. But he was prepared and on a mission to find good answers to specific questions about bicycling that could inform his platform and politics going forward.

Before I share his questions, let’s go back in time a bit…

For anyone around during his previous tenure as a city commissioner (between 2012 and 2016), you’ll recall Novick’s relatively solid record on bicycling and transportation. Two weeks after he received the PBOT bureau assignment, Novick made time to stop at Breakfast on the Bridges where he mingled with local bike lovers and advocates. As PBOT commissioner his entire term, Novick was the tip of the spear when it came to pushing the 10-cent local gas tax increase. Novick even earned a Comment of the Week nod here on BikePortland for his acerbic rebuttal of economist Joe Cortright’s concerns about the tax. Portlanders have voted in support of the tax three times since, so it might seem like a no-brainer, but Novick likely sacrificed his re-election by standing up for more local transportation funding. Novick was also in charge when we launched Biketown, and he was an ardent supporter of Better Naito.

The one quibble I recall about Novick is that he didn’t push hard enough to improve bike safety on SW Barbur when the opportunity presented himself. I felt like he deferred too much to Oregon Department of Transportation Region 1 Director Jason Tell. When I learned Novick’s chief of staff Chris Warner (who’d go on to become PBOT director years later) was a close personal friend of Tell’s and it felt like Novick was parroting ODOT’s position on the issue, I emailed Novick to ask about the Warner-Tell relationship. Minutes later, Novick picked up the phone and called me. When I answered, he chewed me out and warned me to never question the integrity of one of his staff again and then hung up before I could respond. I was shocked, but chalked it up to just another interesting day on the job, and moved on.

Here are the questions Novick posed to the crowd last night (I’ve also posted a video of his speech at the end of this post and on Instagram):

“A question I have for the bicycle community is, we have seen this really unfortunate drop off in bicycling as a percentage of trips over the past nine years. We sort of reached a peak in 2015 and we used to have this idea, ‘If we build it, they will come.’ If we keep on improving the bike infrastructure, the bike mode share will increase. And obviously we should do a lot more to improve the infrastructure, but the infrastructure is better and more extensive than it was in 2015 and we still have lower ridership.

So my question is: What should we focus on to get ridership back up? How much of it is simply safety — the fact that drivers went insane during the pandemic and they’ve stayed insane and people are scared to be on the streets? How much of it is enforcement?

How much of it is that… bicycling was like this sort of hot thing that in the mid-2010s every city was competing to have the best bike program. Then it sort of faded as a cause. To what extent can we just say, ‘Hey, this is a critical cause. It’s vital for climate change. It’s vital to reduce people’s spending on transportation. Is vital for health. How much could we recapture by just sort of being more aggressive cheerleaders for bicycling?

How much of it is education? Our primary tool is the greenways, but you have the population changing all the time. To what extent could we do a better job of educating new people who come here where the greenways are?

And to what extent is it improving the infrastructure? Are there some dramatic, disruptive things we could do in certain places where it’s an infrastructure improvement that makes everybody stand up and pay attention? What are some key places where we could do some big things in order to jumpstart things again?”

Then Novick shared a new (to me) plan to boost the share of transportation-specific funding in the Portland Clean Energy Benefits Fund (PCEF) from its current level of about 17% of the $750 million total to a “majority”. Novick said he’s been pushing PCEF leaders to spend more on transportation because it’s the largest source of carbon emissions. Then he shared a related question:

One argument you will run into is [PCEF funding] is supposed to be for reducing carbon emissions, but it’s also to be supposed to be benefiting low-income people and people of color. Does that mean we have to spend all of the money specifically in communities that have a large proportion of low-income people and people of color? Or can we say, ‘You know what, building out the entire bike network is important, even if some of that build-out occurs in places that aren’t particularly concentrated with people of color and low-income people, and that fighting climate change as a whole is important to low-income people and people of color, because they are going to be at the breadth of it. So making investments that reduced carbon emissions wherever they are, is still an environmental justice issue.’

Will people be willing to step up and say, ‘Yes, we think that that’s true’?

Given that Novick speaks from experiences as a commissioner who’s been in the trenches and stands a very good chance of winning a seat on council, it would behoove all of us to think about these questions and have good answers ready as the lobbying of council begins anew in January 2025.

“If I lose my election, answering those questions to me will be utterly irrelevant,” Novick said last night. “But if I win, I’d love to have you come and talk to me.”

— Steve Novick on Rose City Reform Candidates page.