Please nominate comments by replying with “comment of the week” or “COTW” so I can more easily find them via search. Thank you.
This week’s COTW is about the benefits of bicycling that aren’t always front-and-center in debates about policy, projects, and politics — and why those benefits don’t change depending on geography and shouldn’t succumb to the whims of what “makes sense” for an elected official. Reader Lois Leveen’s initial comment touched off a lively set of responses and she followed-up with an explanation of why she believes bicycling is important and worthy of support citywide.
I’ve shared her follow-up comment below:
Perhaps my initial comment misled people into thinking that climate crisis is the only measure of public health or public good. It is not. I bike commute 18 miles roundtrip to my job. My workplace is not very easy to get to on public transit and bicycling requires a particular commitment because of our location, even for folks who live closer to our workplace. Yet my colleagues who commute by bike generally describe their commute as one of the best parts of the day. I haven’t heard that from any of those who drive to campus, even though they are the vast majority of my coworkers. Oh, and although it’s anecdotal, I’ve noticed my driving coworkers get sick a lot more than I do. So yes, we need people to understand the emotional, cognitive, psychological, and physical benefits of bicycling and walking. And the social benefits of all of those and of taking public transit. I often interact with friends/acquaintances I happen upon during my commute. I also get to interact pleasantly with strangers just by saying hello as I pass them. Transit riders can have the same social interactions (please spare me the comments about how dangerous public transit is; statistically, drivers of motor vehicles are injuring and killing and threatening way more than people on transit).
And also just a reminder, even with abundant clean energy (which we do not and likely never will have), electric cars, trucks, and SUVs would still pollute, as tires on the road cause devastating pollution and so does the manufacture of electric vehicles. And electric vehicles still injure and kill when driven recklessly; in fact, drivers’ ability to accelerate faster in electric vehicles — even when not driven aggressively — makes them deadlier in collisions. So, um, yeah sorry to disappoint everyone who went sideways in response to my initial comment but public good/public health takes many forms and government should advance rather than undermine it.
They don’t call it the “comedy of the commons”, nor the “romance of the commons”.
I chose this comment because I appreciate when someone stays engaged with a thread and doesn’t just comment-and-run. I also like how Leveen took time to expand on her point and shared her views without going negative on other road users (or readers). As for the contents of her comment, I think given that societal breakdown is the cause of many of our problems, the positive impact of non-driving modes on community (re)building is something that deserves more attention.
There have been some very lively, high-volume comment threads lately. (I’m not sure why.) But with just one moderator (hi!) these days, I am very grateful at how productive and thoughtful almost all of them are. Thanks everyone for helping make BP comments a useful platform and helpful resource.
Remember to reply with “comment of the week” or “COTW” if you want to nominate a comment this coming week.
Thanks for reading.
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I love public transit much more than the next guy, but I think the public health benefits of public transit are not as clear as they would be for biking. In cities with really high ridership, overcrowding is the normal state of operations and there are serious public health downsides to this. Running more buses isn’t always an option either (though it definitely is in Portland). I’ve been on Mission Street on a #14 bus packed to the gills with something like 30 buses per hour serving the route (including the 14R), and there’s BART beneath Mission too. I got a kick out of it, but if it were my daily commute I’d have a hard time imagining it being all that much less stressful than driving.
And in my Portland-based commuting life, I’ve taken the #12 to/from Tigard (with my bike in tow). It was a fine commute, and I preferred it to driving (because I love buses). But the #12 would be inexplicably late, trips would be dropped, and it would be generally frustrating. I much preferred to bike home, though would only do that in the summer months.
Anyways, I do think there are very tangible benefits to biking for public health, and that public transit is better than driving. But that biking has those benefits basically no matter what, and that transit is much more contextualized to the specifics of your transit commute. I like my current one (the #14 to downtown, then a walk to PSU), but I would feel differently if I lived in Brentwood-Darlington and relied on the #19 or the #71 to get places. I don’t mean to rain on the parade of this comment though – I think it’s well thought out and basically right. I just think we should be willing to state the public health benefits of biking without having to bring in public transit, which has benefits over driving but which are different than biking.
I think your views and Lois’s are closer than you may realize. Lois wrote,
So the only benefit Lois mentioned in regard to public transit was the social benefit, not the others that were mentioned for biking and walking.
Hate to be the “show me your sources” person for this, but please do. Outside of ’80’s Tokyo levels of overcrowding (which has largely been fixed there, through–surprise, surprise–even more transit provision), there aren’t any documented downsides of overcrowding that aren’t about comfort more than actual health. Even during peak covid era, there were lots of ways lots of places with very high transit ridership (and population density) managed the situation better than car-dependent, sprawling U.S. cities.
Overcrowding is something that people can get used to, and is itself ultimately subjective, based on expected amounts of personal space (surprisingly, often objectively defined more generously in places like Tokyo and Seoul than in, e..g, NYC). If you grow up in a dense place with lots of people sharing little space, that becomes your normal. The converse is opposite as well, I admit, but one of these allows for more people to live in a place, and the other doesn’t is therefore inherently exclusionary.
And the spontaneity of interactions enabled by transit and transit-friendly environments is important. Learning to be comfortable with a certain level of discomfort is an essential social adaptation, whose loss I think we are starting to feel in a really disconcerting big-picture way.
Using that definition, everything is exclusionary. You exclude people from your housing, as do I, as does the guy in who set up a tent on sidewalk who is excluding others from sleeping there. We could all make room for one more.
“Exclusionary” is one of those terms, like “NIMBY” that is just something to lob at things you don’t like but that doesn’t really mean anything specific.
Fine, pedant. Inherently more exclusionary. Suburban and rural spaces have proportionately more developed private spaces than public ones. By contrast, urban spaces have proportionately more public space–or, to avoid further pedantry, proportionately more spaces whose primary users are not sole or primary owners of the spaces they’re using (offices, restauarants, shops, etc.).
In terms of buildings, one can also phrase it as, “sharing one or more, but specifically not all, walls of a building with other people”.
In other words, to you, exclusionary means “not dense”.
The fewer people that can practically live in a place due to its design and construction, the more people can’t live there. This feels like a fairly intuitive concept, no?
To me, exclusionary housing is that that excludes certain classes of people, such as families or folks with low incomes. By that metric, much of the new housing Portland has been building is exclusionary.
Every single housing unit “excludes” people who don’t live there. So what?
….So build more housing units? Especially in places that don’t functionally impose the cost of car ownership on their residents? And build enough units that price escalation trails incomes and thereby becomes more affordable? “The market will never do this”; fine, build public housing. “We can’t build public housing”; well…maybe, by whatever means make it so we can?
I feel like this is at least schematically pretty simple. In practice, more complicated, sure, but whadyagonnado.
Certainly build more family housing, with a focus on subsidized below-market rentals and ownership opportunities, yes.
I’m fine with public housing if we can find a way to ensure it remains safe and maintained over the years. All the YIMBY beloved exclusionary housing isn’t really helping the people who most need it. In a lot of places, people are finding more diverse and inclusive options in the suburbs.
https://www.npr.org/2022/11/08/1135190346/suburbs-are-now-the-most-diverse-areas-in-america
No, they’re finding cheaper options in suburbs. Don’t confuse the two; they’re not inherently synonymous, and conversely, the fact that “suburban” and “cheaper” coincide is a reflection of how dramatically underbuilt our urban areas are relative to demand.
This is obviously a complex problem with lots of variables to deal with, but the end-of is that American cities–not necessarily their suburbs, but core cities in metro areas–have dramatically underbuilt for decades, offloading all the responsibility for meeting housing demand to suburban areas where housing is, ceteris paribus, more resource-intensive and therefore expensive.
That’s why I harp on the underbuilding in major cities so consistently; the scale of the shortfall is truly staggering, and the system-wide up-shift in costs is something we’re all so used to that we don’t even recognize it for what it is.
Looks like you were intending to reply to blumdrew
Having lived in NYC for a bit before moving to DC (and kind of assuming they were similar) I was horrified to ride the Metro for a year. It was… so dull. I don’t know if it’s the percentage of people who ride transit (NYC is >50%) or the demographic, or some other variable that makes a significant cultural difference in who rides (maybe it’s just DC), but I even miss some of the bad parts of being on the MTA. I can’t remember much of the Metro.
One big difference I find biking in the US vs elsewhere: often times in the US it’s difficult to ride causally with friends because the space is so limited, or you’re required to ride more alertly or with cars. That social benefit of riding with people is huge and so underestimated. Combining public health with social benefits really makes casual social biking one of my favorite things, and something that still happens in the US but is limited more to events.
Can’t say a lot of love coming from me.
3-4 weeks ago at Parkrose TC a bus shelter had a window broken out. TriMet staff couldn’t even be bothered to sweep up the broken glass (there was still a bunch today on the ground).
All they did was put up some caution tape which has been destroyed by the wind.
And yes, it is still hasn’t been fixed.
It would be nice to love public transit, if only TriMet would actually deserve it. The manager(s) responsible for clean-up and repair of bus shelters should be fired immediately and replacement(s) found that will actually do the job needed so that we can “love” public transit again. As it is, they consistently fail at just doing the most basic of jobs, fixing a bus shelter in a reasonable amount of time.
I rode the FX2 bus on New Year’s Eve… the display at the stop that told me a bus was coming in 3 minutes lied (it was a ghost bus that simply disappeared, and, running late, I rode a scooter instead). On the return trip, the bus I was on sounded and vibrated just like the ancient, rumbly, creaky (literally) diesel buses I grew up with. The FX buses are still new by TriMet standards, and it struck me how little our bus technology has advanced over the past decades.
Most of my TriMet trips involve something going wrong* — it always surprises me when someone argues this is the future we should be striving for.
*By comparison, very few of my bike trips have problems, and essentially none of my car trips do, despite the fact they’re usually long and complex.
I feel like this has to be some amount of confirmation bias. I ride TriMet a lot – something like 400 times in 2024 – and had something go notably wrong on maybe 5 of those trips (so 1.3%). Maybe I have a stronger appetite for bad transit service, or live in a location where it’s a bit easier/more convenient to catch a bus but I just have a hard time squaring your experience with mine
I’m sure this is part of it — I didn’t intend my comment to be a valid dataset, just my reaction to a string of bad experiences. I should note that I have recent, and quite positive, experience on transit elsewhere, so it’s not that I hate transit (I use it sometimes) and I recognize that some people, like you, find the service to be quite acceptable.
In fact, that positive experience elsewhere may be part of why I find transit in Portland so disappointing.
But regardless, TriMet should not be telling me a bus on it’s premier service is coming in 3 minutes when it knows good and well it isn’t — bad information is worse than no information at all. (I’ll admit it is theoretically possible the bus broke down close to the stop where I was waiting, though given the age of the FX vehicles, that would speak poorly of TriMet as well.)
Definitely. I find that ghost buses are rare on TriMet (though I have definitely experienced them), but also that tracking data can be better or worse depending on which app you use. I tend to just use Apple Maps, but sometimes the live GTFS isn’t as accurate as TriMet’s own website (or more transit oriented apps like the Transit app). So I end up checking multiple sources if there seems to be an issue. The live displays at stops are really not reliable in general in my experience (which is bad of course, but I tend to not have issues working around this).
I’m glad you’ve developed some defenses, but the fact you should have to “work around” the bad information TriMet gives you at its stops is a sign of some real dysfunction. 2 of my last 4 TriMet trips have involved ghost vehicles (FX bus and Blue Line train), and it’s hard to accept the representations of others that their service is reliable when my direct experience so clearly shows that it is not.
My bike doesn’t lie to me.
Like you, I’m an occasional trimet rider. I use an app on my phone (“PDX Bus”) that predicts when the bus will arrive, similar to the information on the trimet website trip planner. In my anecdotal observations, I have not seen any significant failure (in ~50 uses over the last two years). When I test against the displays in the kiosks downtown, my phone app and the display give the same information (I assume it’s from the same source, and I’ve never observed a discrepancy). The routes I use the most are 4, 6, 44, and yellow line. Do you think the system is more reliable in my neighborhood (or the times I ride) than your circumstances or that our different experiences are due to fluctuations (so that repeated measurements would lead our failure rate estimates to converge)?
Agree that my bike doesn’t lie, but it sometimes has flat tires.
TriMet maintains a publicly accessible feed of real-time bus locations, which is what all the apps read from. I’m less sure how the stops get their information — streaming a feed to all of them might not make sense.
My ghost-vehicle rate over the past year is 50%. I am positive this is not generally representative of the system as a whole, and I am entirely convinced it’s just bad luck.
I don’t fly often, but I’ve had two get-to-the-airport transit failures (one in Portland, one elsewhere) that forced me to bail mid-trip and take an Uber.
These failures are much more vivid than any string of successes, and when it comes to deciding how to go somewhere, my experience of TriMet’s reliability (and all the unpleasant conditions I’ve encountered) obviously factors into my decision.
It’s interesting that my bike requires more maintenance than my car. If I had an EV, that difference would likely be much greater yet.
I’ve wondered the same thing for years. Most of my bike failures have been flats. When I lived in E. WA, goatheads were always a problem. Here my biggest problem seems to be glass shards. I’ve tried a few preventatives (goo, plastic liners inside the tires). I’ve heard tubeless tires flat much less frequently … maybe I’ll try it someday.
FWIW I’ve had good luck with Schwalbe Marathon tires. Not perfect and spendy, and heavy, but they seem to be pretty good for riding around town (and longer trips as well).
It’s been decades since I got a flat in a car tire.
I live near the bus stops around 82nd and Powell, almost weekly at least one is broken out. Most are covered in trash and usually there’s someone passed out with a fentanyl straw hanging out of their lips.
My wife and I rode the #12 bus last night for the first time in a long time. Sure enough there was a dude acting all erratic, talking to himself, hanging his gross bare feet across the aisle and creating problems as people tried to pass.
Reason I’m telling this story is because I don’t really like riding transit. I’ve been on maybe five buses in the last five years and this is exactly why. We both agreed to take a Lyft next time.
The positive: the bus was very clean, the driver was nice, it was on time and our trip took exactly what it said it would from the Trimet website.
It’s not transit that sucks, it’s the people.
Lois’s comment is actually also the Comment of the Year.
And, potentially, the Comment of the Latter Half Of The 2020s.
Aw, shucks.
Wait a minute, the year is only a week old. So by definition, the comment of this week is thus far the comment of the year.
Health benefits of biking in Oregon (well the Shire)
https://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/Programs/ResearchDocuments/Bicycle%20Count%20Data%20What%20is%20it%20Good%20For%20-%20Research%20Note.pdf
Public health in America is schizophrenic; when it comes to drug addiction and obesity its about meeting people where they are–Suboxone, Ozempic, free needles.
But comments like this are more “meet me where I’M at”.
“Pull yourself up by the bootstraps!–Get healthy–bike across town, just like I do!”
People in America do not look after their health by making lifestyle changes–look around!! Not everyone is as mentally balanced/successful/organized as some of the people on this blog.
They work so many hours, there’s so many bills and accounts we keep track of and our matchstick houses require more and more work as climate BS gets worse.
The only hope is to make those options MORE CONVENIENT, SAFER, MORE RELIABLE. And yes, Max is often scary, as are the MUPs. Believe it.
I will add that bike and pedestrian centric media plus the advocate class send too many mixed messages.
On Monday, you get “Biking and walking great for your health and the planet! We should all be biking and walking more for stronger bodies, minds, and communities!!!”
Tuesday brings, “Biking and walking are DANGEROUS! Car drivers are all homicidal maniacs with no regard for laws or life!”
Wednesday greets us with, “Transit is more affordable and lower stress than driving! Use public transit more!”
Thursday? “Violence and weirdness up on Tri-Met in 2024! Too many addicts and mentally unstable homeless congregate near transit stops. Be very careful!”
Friday finishes the week with either sermonizing for alternatives, lamenting the lack of funding/political will for improvements, demonizing some party for their ways or their lack of action, or advertising some form of weekend bike recreation.
It’s much like consuming regular media. After a time, half of us become smug know-it-alls convinced of our righteousness and zealotry while the other half is so anxious that they just decide that the car life is safer and far more pleasant than the alternatives. I’m not sure how this changes without going full doom/scold or Pollyanna? In any event, rising fuel and insurance prices, crowded and crumbling roads, and e-bikes are not stopping the downward slide of alternative transportation use from pre-pandemic levels.
Please remember the comment Jonathan has raised up was a reply to replies to an earlier comment I made on another piece … all of which was about how *city government* or electeds more generally should approach public health. So guess what, if transit were free, convenient, and well maintained, and streets were designed to emphasize the safe passage of people rather than of motor vehicles, etc. it wouldn’t be “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps,” it would be healthy, unpolluted water raises all boats. This isn’t “bike and pedestrian centric” it’s health and sustainability and stewardship-centric. But first government needs to recognize that car culture is antithetical to health, sustainability, and stewardship.
When PBOT caves when a few people complain about “equity” and remove some safety (for all of us) striping for bikes lanes, I think it’s going to be very hard to get our government to stop playing woke politics, and look at helping all, regardless of skin color or gender affiliation.
Safety works for all, not just a minority of people.
I think most people expect streets to be “transportation-centric”. This means an orientation towards functionality rather than impacts like “health” and “good stewardship”. In 2025 American society, for most people, transportation means cars, but if TriMet could magically work a whole lot better for more folks, it could perhaps escape the “alternative” designation and elevate to become a first-class player in the public mind.
I think bikes are permanently consigned to the lowly “alternative” bucket, but I like them anyway.
This bears repeating. And clarifying that this also applies to electric cars (for those who think those simply “solve” some hard decisions for us – they don’t).
EVs do in fact help with several difficult issues, most notably climate change and urban pollution. There are also many problems they don’t solve. This isn’t just my opinion, but that of many eminent scientific bodies.
EV denialism is almost as baffling to me as it’s twin, climate denialism. I honestly don’t get it.
Needle exchanges exist to prevent transmission of infectious disease such as HIV and hepatitis. Not to treat addiction. Equating harm reduction programs to a fat-loss drug being sold to rich celebrities is moronic.
The public health approach with needles and Ozempic is similar in that it does not rely on preaching at people to prevent the harm. Preventing HIV not by stopping drugs, but by providing a fresh needle. With Ozempic its not about eating less but providing a pill.
There are about 5 million people on semaglutides in the USA, there are at most a few thousand celebrities. Ozempic is huge.
And just like your comment, the tenor of this blog veers more toward taking the moral high ground then it does toward the harm reduction approaches so in vogue on the West Coast. I”m just pointing out that irony.
Try getting from Milwaukie to work in Hillsboro by bike when you get a new job. Or maybe one is supposed to sell your house, pay real estate agents $40,000 and change your kid’s school district. People on this blog rarely seem to aknowledge the lives that people live in this metro area. They rarely acknowledge that there even is a metro area with jobs sprawled across the region.
Biking is going nowhere in this city and frankly, I think most people in Portland think its just desserts. Who needs allies when you can preach! Preach! Can I get an A-men?!!
Please tell me more about why Portland taxpayers should subsidize commuters from Milwaukie. Kthxbye
How do we do that?
By funding a city transportation bureau that continues to prioritize the movement of cars over walkability and mass transit, natch.
How much of your property taxes pay for that?
I said taxpayers, not property owners. Conflating the two is not logically sound.
Ok, for my logic-challenged mind, which Portland taxes are you thinking of?
Local gas tax, parking fees, and system development charges.
Lois’s follow-up comment was valuable for the last line alone – about “the romance of the commons.”
I think often about the tragedy of the commons, but generally Portland has been an exception – it was one of the reasons I moved here many years ago. I’d say that people in my area of SW Portland still mostly care for the place and take care of the place, but the care does seem to be fading and the place is getting crappier, which maybe happens to every place as the population grows and new people care less or can’t be bothered to care. A few years ago, a new neighbor moved in and asked, “Who takes care of this street?” My reply: “WE DO!” But he never seems to leave his house and takes care of nothing – not even his own yard (hires a yard-care company). That seems to be the way with many new arrivals.
Yup, trash sits on my street for days until I pick it up, it’s always me.
At my sons’ preschool, when someone dumps along the building, it’s me that cleans it up, always.
I did get a group together through Solve and we picked up a section of Powell a couple months ago. You can’t tell now unfortunately, but there was many hands.
Adopt a Block is a positive force and I do believe it’s making a difference, you can get free supplies.
My experience has been that people who are the most socially isolated hold the most negative views about humanity and people they do not know. They are the least interested in supporting or promoting a common good.
Driving and the infrastructure and zoning that go along with it accelerates loneliness and social isolation. Loneliness in itself is strongly correlated with bad health outcomes and premature mortality. It is considered an epidemic, by some like the Surgeon General, in the US.
The self destructive political choices that are so prevalent in the US reflect an unwillingness to foster a cooperative society. There is a common point of view that people who currently enjoy prosperity can band together and force the people in crisis to die off or be locked away. Ultimately, the much needed belief in functional governance is a belief in the human capacity to cooperate and promote a common good. The optimism needed to commit to these ideals requires positive real-life social interactions. Car-based transportation strips this away from society and replaces it with frequent stressful, negative social interactions. It turns the landscape into bad smells, loud disturbing sounds, visual blight and hard abrasive surfaces.
We know that “Using a car for over 50% of out-of-home activities lowers life satisfaction.”
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214367X24002175
It is also likely that using a car for over 50% of activities also lowers the individual desire for others to be happy as well.
But how do we really get people to be healthier?
We can’t get people to stop doing things that aren’t healthy now, drinking alcohol, cigarettes, smoking pot, popping hallucinogenic pills, etc.?
What will it take to get people to stop the bad stuff and embrace the good stuff?
I don’t think this discussion has been about trying to get people to stop unhealthy vices, so much as making healthy options available to everyone. When it’s cheap, convenient, safe and healthy to pursue an alternative, it’s reasonable to assume many people will choose to switch their mode.
It’s also about shifting from individual “choice” to policy and practices that move toward better public health. I remember riding cars as a kid with no seat belt (and my dad wrecked every car he ever owned, so this was no casual matter!) but then seat belts became LEGALLY REQUIRED. Do people still fail to buckle up? Yes, but a lot fewer than did when my sibs and I were practicing “surfing” while our parents drove us around. Same for cigarettes — banning smoking in workplaces, including bars and restaurants, and on transit, including planes, made a huge difference. But Big Tobacco did an end run around public health with e-cigarettes, even promoting vaping as a way to “taper off” smoking conventional tobacco products. That was another of many Big Lies from Big Tobacco, and now we see increasing rates of smoking among young people. But that was a failure of public health policy to not ban e-cigarettes from the start. So it’s not just “making healthy options available”; it’s policy and infrastructure focused on public health. In road safety, we know that narrower streets can slow traffic, as can having more “required” slowing with traffic lights that change at well-time intervals all along a street — so that instead of “hitting the lights” and driving way faster than is safe or legal, drivers are slowed and pedestrians, skate boarders, and bicyclists can cross safely. Oh, and guess what, designing streets to SLOW MOTOR VEHICLES also protects the lives and health of those who are INSIDE the motor vehicles.
By way of a left-handed apology for the annual murder of over 400,000 cigarette users from lung cancer (roughly 10 times the number of stroad traffic deaths), the tobacco companies now offer grants to community-based organizations and nonprofits for various virtuous endeavors. Our Greensboro NC community bike shop was started with seed money from the community foundation of Reynolds Tobacco, who also make Oreo cookies.
We have gotten people to stop smoking.
https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco-trends-brief/overall-smoking-trends
We have gotten people to wear seatbelts and decreased fatalities.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatality-trends/deaths-and-rates/
We have stopped or blunted many public health crises that involved public health interventions, some behavioral-
Cholera, small pox, polio, recently in the news, Guinea worm.
The bottom line for transportation is stop building and subsidizing the harmful system and stop discouraging the healthy choice at a policy level.
I don’t want to detract from Lois’ comment. I think it was great.
I also think dodge’s comment was incredibly important, particularly when race/gender are used as a pretense to silence one’s self. Let’s call it the “Voldemort phenomenon.” We are going to continue to see a lot of this method of “self censorship,” in the name of reverse racism or whatever other false pretenses spur on this behavior, so it is essential it is identified and called out exactly as dodge did.
Here’s the link.