The City of Portland is laying groundwork for a marketing campaign that aims to spur a cycling renaissance. Hoping to put an end to years of declining and/or flat cycling growth and harken back to a decade ago when Portland was last seen as a global leader for cycling culture, the Portland Bureau of Transportation has released a survey that tests seven different pro-cycling messages.
“Whether you bike or not, the City of Portland wants to understand what messages could make it easier for you and your fellow Portlanders to say yes to biking around the city,” reads a new PBOT website. The survey will, “help us shape our city’s transportation future and how best to reach more community members,” the site reads.
The anonymous survey first asks how the respondent feels about riding bicycles and why they feel that way. Then the survey proposes seven different taglines intended to increase bicycling in Portland. Survey takers are asked how they feel about each tagline and then they’re asked to rank their top three based on whether or not it would encourage them to ride more. Here are the seven taglines (parentheticals taken directly from PBOT):
- See your city in a new way. Bike. Explore. Portland.
- Biking – a gateway to better community. (This tagline would be accompanied by an image of a big group of people riding bicycles together.)
- Want to help reduce air pollution? It’s as easy as riding a bike.
- Want to be healthier? It’s as easy as riding a bike.
- What kind of family-time do you want? (This tagline would be accompanied by a juxtaposed image of a chaotic family car scene with a scene of a happy family bicycling.)
- Want to have more cash in your pocket? It’s as easy as riding a bike.
- A healthier, happier you. For $0.00 a gallon. Ride a bike.
I haven’t heard back from PBOT about this survey, and I don’t think it’s had an official public launch yet (or if it will get one). However, it is likely part of a marketing effort BikePortland reported about late last year. In November 2024, PBOT Bicycle Coordinator Roger Geller unveiled a plan to get Portland cycling again. By his estimation, a major factor needed to create a resurgence of cycling in Portland is to simply make it more popular via peer pressure and good, old-fashioned marketing. “We don’t have time to wait to build protected bike lanes on every roadway where we want them,” Geller told a meeting of PBOT’s Bicycle Advisory Committee as he made his pitch for more mass bike rides and compelling advertisements.
Geller isn’t wrong; but the devil is in the details. One reason driving has such a strong hold on Portlanders is because automakers spend billions on persuasive, inescapable marketing campaigns. It’s unclear how much PBOT will spend on this campaign and where its taglines will ultimately end up. On the survey website, PBOT hints that, “you may see [the taglines] in the future in print, on billboards, online in banner ads, or on radio/TV.”
Do any of these speak to you? Do you think these are compelling enough to break through to the masses and significantly grow the size of the pedaling pie?
Don’t forget to take the survey yourself and let PBOT know. It will be up through Sunday, June 15th.
Thanks for reading.
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I can’t say any of these is particularly good.
That’s because none of them are particularly good. There are actually people who write good copy; it’s a skill, just like traffic engineering. It does not seem to have been engaged here.
My brother’s bike shop (RIP OlyBikes) used to sell stickers that said, “I enjoy my commute, do you?” But alas no one at PBOT has considered “Enjoy your commute!” as a way to promote bicycling. I guess because a three-word slogan would be to snappy and memorable, so they decided to possibly go with a fifteen-word slogan, one that references “cash in your pocket” even though relatively few people even carry cash anymore.
WHY WHY WHY do they do stuff like this????? Is there really nobody there who understands how to engage the public???????
Stuck in traffic? You are the traffic! Ride yer bike
“We don’t have time to wait to build protected bike lanes on every roadway where we want them” – Roger Geller
I am all for more people biking! And I took the survey. But, I am a bit disappointed to see pbot planning to spend who know how much money in a pr campaign. The world has changed in the last five years. We can’t focus on returning to a pre-pandemic lifestyle. Instead, we need to adapt as a city. Part of that is acknowledging that for most residents, biking doesn’t feel safe enough in most parts of the city.
PBOT continues to put sharrows down and unprotected bike lanes and pretend this is bike infrastructure. The time is now for PBOT to commit to only building protected lanes moving forward that accommodate people 8-80 in feeling safe while using the lanes.
IMHO this survey is a waste of money and the campaign is a waste of time. I’d rather see pbot put it’s limited funds toward building effective bike infrastructure, which will increase bike ridership.
Hey Liz, I’m sure you’re not the only one who feels this way.
Technically, PBOT did commit to this back during the days of Leah Treat in 2016. Who knows what happened to that.
I have a few questions:
1) What is the intention of these signs? Is it to increase mode share? If so what is the evidence that signs will have any effect?
“We don’t have time to wait to build protected bike lanes on every roadway where we want them” – Roger Geller
2) This statement is both nonsensical as well as a truism, depending on how you see it. AKA, the problem is so big it’s unsolvable. It’s widely known we have very little money to build PBLs and divertors. But that is not the elephant in the room. The problem is political will. Are the signs then meant to build political will? Would they not be better directed at the mayor and council members?
3) What would be a functional (measurable) objective that PBOT can do instead that would have a potential effect on mode share? Pairing Sunday parkways with the Bike Bus is a fantastic first step to admitting there is a solvable problem (i.e., there is no separated network outside downtown). Take the next step PBOT. Use whatever funds to separate X# of intersections on those routes starting from downtown.
Not building all the protected bike lanes on every roadway is an equation for the overwhelmed and defeated. Relying on marketing is just lying to ourselves more. Expanding what exists is a measurable and workable solution that can have immediate effects.
COTW!
This is truly a question and not an argument. Is safety the reason people don’t bike? I’m not trying to say everything is safe and we don’t need to improve anything, but safety concerns are just not something I hear from my friends. I recognize this is all anecdotal, and in the end it’s probably a combination of things, but I know people that live next to easy, good routes and will still drive short distances instead of bike. I have a theory that people just find it inconvenient and above all else are impatient.
I know someone who used to bike a lot, and lives just off Clinton and works downtown. He basically has a dedicated bikeway all the way to work. He drives. My collection of anecdotes (this being one) also don’t suggest safety is the primary issue.
If PBOT had been building protected bike lanes for the past 10-20 years, there would now be a safe(r) bike network that would be more appealing than traffic-choked busy streets. Then, people would choose to bike instead of drive, as it is finally _more_ convenient. Instead PBOT hasn’t done enough, the streets are more dangerous than ever, and people still drive.
Your post assumes that safety is the primary consideration regarding mode choice, an assumption that Eric was explicitly challenging.
Why do you think bike riding rates are primarily determined by safety rather than the other factors people might consider when choosing how to get some place? If safety isn’t paramount, then building protected bike lanes would not change ridership levels much. Why have we observed rates of riding falling in Portland even as we have built more and safer bike infrastructure (even if it isn’t protected bike lanes)?
their emphasis was more on convenience & travel times.
Today’s network is just as fast and convenient as a protected network would be. Perhaps more so if that protected network involved two-part turns and separate green phases. The real difference would be safety, or, at least, the illusion of it.
Safety is the reason I bike a lot less now than I used to. Between the increase in unsafe driving and the total lack of safe bicycle parking, it’s easier on my nerves to just walk or take the bus.
I think safety is a key reason, along with inadequate infrastructure. Even the “good routes” have poor connections and bad design. PBOT compromises bike and pedestrian design to support faster and more direct driving experiences- even their “bike” projects like the Blumenauer Bridge or the Flanders Bridge fail to provide simple, safe, direct routes. Combine the lack of good planning and design with a lack of maintenance, terrible wayfinding, and hugely inadequate lighting and you have a bike network that is a barrier to many. Add the vulnerability to riding through camps and through groups of people suffering from untreated mental health issues or drug addiction and you have another barrier. Add the vulnerability cause by drivers who are more reckless, more distracted, and more likely to be drunk or stoned than ever before in the recent past and you can start to understand why Geller’s sloganeering is a total waste of time and money. PBOT is so arrogant- they refuse to take any ownership of their role in in our failed system and they assume they can do their own marketing. They need to come terms with their own shortcomings, and get some help planning, designing, and marketing.
Yeah MaxD, agreed. We don’t really need to speculate. The consensus is safety is the largest barrier to cycling, based on nearly every piece of research I’ve found (please LMK if there’s other research out there that suggests otherwise). Transalt just released their bike blueprint (amazing report), which unsurprisingly found the same, and I hope will both inform bikeloud and spur them on to emulate them as much as possible. Transalt has been extremely successful to get both financial support and political buy-in to dramatically transform streets in NYC.
The most basic idea accepted by Transalt as well as a lot of DOTs outside the US, is that providing low-stress (low car), separated space is the largest contributor to increasing cycling, and replacing car trips (see section 4 of the report or this). Prioritizing the major connections to downtown, which are the most effective means to increase mode share, is still a foreign concept to PBOT.
All respect to Geller, when he says we can’t wait to build PBLs on every road, he is both admitting we don’t have the political will, as well as showing how every street appears to be prioritized the same. Building separated space on SE Ankeny and 7th, will have dramatically different effects, for example, as building on SE 136th. And as Lois said, we can certainly have low-stress separated space if someone who has political power is willing to severely limit cars on just one road. It’s kind of true. We just need one council member to get this.
While I don’t mind it, the impression I get is that the 6 – 7 months of rain we get is a major deterrent for many folks and keeps them from building the year-round habit.
A general rule, people simply don’t won’t to be out in the weather. They also probably don’t want to buy or simply don’t like wearing/riding in the kind of gear that makes rain riding tolerable*. The extra prep time on both ends of a commute is a significant mental hurdle to riding into their 8 – 10 hr/day office job. Now add all of that to quick trips to the grocery store, getting kids (kids rain gear!) off to their friends’ houses, practice, etc. Unfortunately, infrastructure doesn’t fix that.
* Full Disclosure: I absolutely loathe wearing rain pants. Now that we’re in a post-global pandemic world and I’m lucky enough have the option to work from home whenever I want, I often delay my commute until the worst of the rain has passed.
You can add the “where can I safely park my bike out of the rain”, “it’s dark by the time I leave work — I need to manage and monitor my lights (remember to keep them charged, carry them with me, don’t leave them on the bike, etc.)” and “why is everything so slippery/why don’t my rim brakes work?!?” to the list of deterrents to riding in the winter.
If you hate rain pants, try chaps (I know, another item of specialized equipment). They’re great except when there’s a deluge.
It’s the deluges where I’m delaying my commute. 95% of my winter rainy commutes are fine with lightweight tights (I don’t mind getting damp and they dry out by the time to go home). Which brings up another point: I’m very lucky to have always worked in offices with lockers, showers, and secure bike storage (one of your points above). If I worked in, say, a restaurant, small retail store, etc, things would be very different for me.
Right — park at the corner staple, change in the toilet, and store your wet gear in your backpack.
I probably wouldn’t ride either if that’s what I had to deal with.
For our Bike Bus Wayfinding pilot, we didn’t like what PBOT proposed. We spoke up and asked for much more direct signage, that told drivers what to do, instead of wishy-washy language like ‘Look out for kids biking’, ‘Thanks for driving safely’.
So we suggested “Kids Biking, Do Not Pass”, “Use Alternate Route”, etc. They listened, and we got some good signs out of it!
If you don’t like these taglines (I don’t), I would encourage you to 1) post your own, and 2) tell PBOT why you don’t like what they have.
Did the signs work well and was the backstop a big serious bus to back it up? Drivers need more substantial reinforcement, physically there here and now. Once they realize its serious, for real and can’t get away you will have their attention before they can squirt around and dodge away. Anything that allows them to get away or go around is not effective. This is all the normal touchy, feely, suggestion BS. It sounds like we should use, co-opt yours with the school/kids changed to stop, wait, do not pass, use main, alternate route, thoroughfare, etc, etc. No platitudes or anything that lets them do their normal crap without thinking about it.
Its interesting, I live and ride mainly in East county, Mall 205, David Douglas, Glendoveer, Parkrose, Gateway, Maywood park, Rocky Butte, Mount Tabor, Montavilla, Laurelhurst, 205 bike path, Springwater trail and plenty more.
Knock on wood, I have very very few close calls, I do not cut cars any slack but respect them well. I travel like a car and move like one with them when needed, most and even the drivers that you can tell don’t respect anyone else usually respond well when I assert myself, I look them in the eye, use a hand signal if warranted and purposefully make the move, turn, lane change etc with little or no drama. I do almost always ride alone, wear a helmet and mirror with 3 lights and cameras both front and rear, 24/7, 365, period.
So I don’t really know what it takes overall, closer to town is of course more of a challenge, especially in traffic but I do mostly the same with maybe a bit more vigilance but take the lane more, give more direct stern looks and become a hard to hit moving target when it makes sense.
Tangential question, what camera do you use?
And I ride without a helment, mirror, lights, or cameras in the more challenging “closer to town” but I still believe that effective cycling is a recipe for 0.1% mode share and that protected infrastructure is essential to increasing mode share in a society that has normalized homicidal driving.
You didn’t happen to have a close call with a pedestrian last night, around midnight, did you?
I guess you don’t remember the post where I was just about the only one who suggested that people biking always have an obligation to stop for “jaywalking” peds — despite fear of being hit from behind. To be blunt I view walking as a far more virtuous transportation mode than cycling and this entirely colors my view of the transportation heirarchy: ped > transit >>> bike/scooter >>>>>>>>>>> murderous mega-mobiles.
I got buzzed by a lightless bicycle that night, which I didn’t interpret as malicious indifference to pedestrians, but just the fact that I doubt the rider even saw me (nor I him) until he was feet away due to his lightless state and the general darkness of where I was walking.
If you value pedestrian safety, and you ride at night, please use a light!
Hell yes and please start a petition as you have strength here and great leadership qualities and a network in this regard
Welcome to Portland.
Please ditch the car.
I like mine better: Welcome to Portland, Now Get on your Bike!
Or the ever jolly “This bike is a pipe bomb.” I never understood that one, but it sounded fun!
PS If you have to tell someone something is sexy… it’s not.
Ha! I have never disagreed with you more strongly about anything Watts. Cycling is so sexy. Some folks just don’t think of it that way at first. That sticker was very popular BTW!
Perhaps so, in which case it should be self-evident.
That was a band, I believe from Florida, in the early 2000s
Love that last one, “If you were riding, you’d be happy now.”
I was never happy on Trimet or car commuting and even motorcycling commuting wasn’t fun, but the times I worked someplace I could take my bike on the MAX which let me cut out the bus connections I was actually happy while biking and I enjoyed talking to other people at work about cycling when they saw my bike in the corner. FWIW I think this is something to emphasize a lot as I suspect none of the other car or trimet commuters are happy commuting that way.
Thanks Jake9 (and others). That last one was inspired by signs outside condos and apartment buildings I would always see off freeways growing up in Orange County, California: “If you lived here, you’d be home by now.”
Last one is my fave.
If you were riding, you’d be happy by now is outstanding. IMO
The city should listen to Jonathan! I also love the last one and think it’s way better than any of the slogans in the survey.
I took the survey and got slightly different taglines that the ones above. Interesting that they’re already adjusting them. Overall, though, I agree that this was probably a waste of money that would’ve been better spent on infrastructure or staff salary. Secondly, the best PR governments do are usually from clever/funny/witty young people who want to hone their marketing skills and get some good portfolio material (I’m thinking about the Oklahoma Dept of Wildlife’s twitter/x feed). That would be a better use of the funds used on this survey: hire a young person who loves biking to make some cute social media posts. I watched a tiktok video the other day from a person who lives here using the “propaganda I’m not falling for this year” format and one of them was BIKING! I died a little!
Put the taglines on some actual hard infrastructure, steel bollards, concrete barriers and planters, stuff in the street that physically excludes cars from bikeways. It’s not like we haven’t seen Paris JFDI.
I’m really glad PBOT is doing this; what cycling in Portland really needs is a good tagline, especially one that reeks of smug.
PS Claude suggested “Bike: Because adulting is hard enough without finding parking” (the best from a long list of awful).
What a waste of money! PBOT can’t afford to sweep the bike lanes yet has $$ to spend on PR? Ridiculous.
“Marketing seen as key to our return to glory.”
There’s still a lot of good stuff in Portland but it’s gonna take a LOT more than marketing for Portland to return to glory.
And there you have described two opposing camps. Some people think its all just a PR problem.
The “Say nice things about Portland” crowd are the absolute worst.
It’s the not-nice things that we need to talk about.
“On the survey website, PBOT hints that, “you may see [the taglines] in the future in print, on billboards, online in banner ads, or on radio/TV.”
But not on the roadways? Instead of the money spent on this survey and the money spent on this insignificant PR, I think a better allocation of funds would be to expand the “Bikes May Use Full Lane” signage to all neighborhood greenways.
It would be a small action, but it would create a cohesive, system-wide understanding of the greenways as a place which genuinely prioritizes bike users on these roadways.
PBOT’s own language defines neighborhood greenways as “streets that prioritize people walking, bicycling, and rolling.”
Separately, I’ve become less enamored with bike-exclusive campaigns by PBOT. As the greenways definition states, those streets prioritize a coalition of distinct travelers.
If bike users, pedestrians, and those that roll are regularly split into camps, it feels like the messaging becomes unnecessarily splayed and these groups can be unintentionally seen or treated (perhaps unintentionally) as rivals.
Generally, I think those walking, bicycling, and rolling in a city the size of Portland share the same sentiment that they would like to walk, bike, and roll in a safer environment. It also seems logical that an urban area which wishes to seriously promote non-auto modes of travel would improve infrastructure and conditions for all of these groups concurrently.
So this Matt. Thank you. This should be the main argument used for separated bike lanes as well. Call them “slow lanes” or whatever. It’s not necessarily for bikes. It’s for everyone going slow relative to cars. People aren’t “cyclists” or “drivers.” Most people just want to get where they are going in a safe, reasonable and comfortable way. Separating those spaces is as easy as putting a big rock and some paint in the road. It’s not a lack of funding.
I’d wager the large majority of motorist driving on a greenway don’t know or care what a greenway is.
Cars are the top prioritized mode of transportation on almost every single street in Portland, outside of a few section of greenway where PBOT has mustered the political will to mildly inconvenience motorists with traffic diverters.
Motorists respond to hard infrastructure only. “Greenways” will only genuinely prioritize non-motorists when PBOT installs traffic diverters to keep motorists from using greenways as through streets.
Speed bumps with cutouts for cars in the middle and signs don’t do a thing.
Big agree.
Honestly, I see people arguing for more protected bike lanes and I don’t understand it at all – if given the choice between a greenway with regular diverters (like Lincoln in SE) and a protected lane on a major street. I’ll take the greenway any day. It tends to be a much quieter and more relaxed ride, not to mention air quality.
I also think more car-free, pedestrianized, or highly-diverted streets would benefit everyone and also would probably be better marketing (pedestrianized streets look so lovely in photo ops) than taking car lanes away for bike lane (for example: as convenient as the protected lanes on NE multnomah are, they’ve done little to make the area feel pleasant to walk around in)
Yikes. Is this what PBOT is spending time and resources on? Peer pressure and marketing campaigns to get folks cycling? This is such an outdated and ineffective approach, that does not seem to understand the true barriers to cycling.
Yeah, couldn’t agree more. PBOT sucks. I mean, Portland is the best North American city in which I’ve ever cycled, but that’s certainly not PBOT’s doing. I mean, just because there are bikeways to every corner of the city (that I ride often), doesn’t mean that PBOT is doing a good job. Yes, I know lowering speed limits all over town and taking away travel lanes has brought speeds down, but you’d can’t credit PBOT with that. After all, what do they know. All those bike lanes and neighborhood greenways. Sheesh. Yeah, PBOT sucks. Now, excuse me. I’m going out to take another thoroughly enjoyable bike ride in this city that’s really good for bicycling despite the last 40 years of concerted effort by the city transportation agency. PBOT sucks.
This makes me so mad. Take that money and get the glass and overgrown vegetation out of the bike lanes and more people may want to bike.
Visual – A cyclist passing stalled traffic
Caption – You’re having more fun than they are
“Biking–its fun and safer than you think, its not just for athletes”
I know thats essentially what my ex used to convince me to start riding a bike as an adult.
But is it safer than you think? I don’t know about that anymore.
There seem to be way more cars on the road than there were before, I don’t know where they all came from but they often don’t seem all that nice, or sober.
Would PR get me to change my mind on that? I mean we can all see the crazies on the road and camping on the bikepaths for ourselves–and all the stolen bikes.
Save money, get excercise, have fun.
I agree with Watts; a lot of these taglines come across as smug at worst and dated at best. PBOT should recruit some of the local food/event social media influencers to promote cycling. TriMet has been doing that and reception has been pretty positive. I think I remember one guy who did ‘bus to brews’ and just did a little tour of breweries around town using transit. Something like that, but for riding a bike. Cycling for fun helped me find good routes around my neighborhood and became a gateway to using the bike for more practical errands, including commuting. Maybe that could be a BikeLoud project? Or BikePortland x Food Influencer collab? Lol.
I also agree with Matt, more “Bikes May Use Full Lane” on greenways and sharrows on common bike routes (eg. SE 24th, SE 21st Clinton->Powell, SE 76th) could go a long way toward making bike routes more visible to drivers and potential riders alike.
Sharrows are the bike-related thing
we spend money on that I have the least faith in, as a rider. That’s a feeling, just one person’s opinion. I don’t like riding over speed bumps but they do slow some drivers, intermittently, a little. They’re annoying and some people might choose to take another route to avoid them.
If anyone has data that support the use of sharrows I’d be interested in that. If we’re going to have sharrows, focus a PR campaign on ‘what are those things on the street?’ because it’s not at all intuitive. I’m sure there’s been messaging somewhere about sharrows but it’s stale. (I see that my phone doesn’t know what sharrows are either.)
Good question Robert. Sharrows seem to be a mixed bag at best. Here’s the perspective of a Dutch engineer. From the research I’ve read, it really depends on where you put them. The “traffic safety perspective” viewed as a given in some other developed countries, isn’t all that accepted in the US (and Portland). We still skew avid cyclist in the US and that tends to make people shy away from physical separation (e.g., “Just take the lane!”), and informs sharrow placement.
In general, placing sharrows on a wide, high traffic road en lieu of a separated bike lane is just asking for people to be hurt (and teaching drivers to ignore those markings). But placing them somewhere that indicates to drivers that there will be a slow (<15mph), shared place such as a pedestrian zone might be a benefit.
One achilles heel I often see in our greenways: width.
In the US people tend to believe in personal decisions leading to biking behavior, and that’s true to some extent. But road design limits choices, and leads to safer outcomes.
The research isn’t all that robust, but one study out of Chicago compared bike lanes and sharrows:
But again, it really depends on where DOTs decide to put sharrows.
Maybe a slogan could be “Bikes Belong” or “Bike Priority” or something with and image of the sharrow symbol. PBOT likes to trumpet the number of miles of greenways, but they are basically invisible- the routes are terrible, the lighting is inadequate, the wayfinding is terrible, most of the crossings are inadequate, the intersections are dangerous because cars and RVs are parked right up to the corner blocking stop signs for cross traffic, they won’t even paint stop bars for cross streets. Basically, you are lucky if you can find greenway, its a miracle if you can stay on it, and when you are on it, you might be the only one who know what it is even is.
Any PBOT or City of Portland sign should speak as if that agency is using its voice.
Message that contain persuasive arguments disembody the message so that it sounds like it could be coming from anyone.
A huge obstacle for many people who are starting to bike or who rarely bike is that they feel awkward or out of place often when they are biking.
I would like to see a simple message from PBOT directly saying that they, the entire agency and city, want people to bike and support them, now and forever.
The message could be as simple as “Biking is Better” with a big PBOT logo on the sign.
“Biking is Better” is one of the few slogans here that doesn’t seem either smarmy or just plain dumb.
+1!
These are all depressingly bad, seems no one with knowledge of marketing or persuasion was involved in their formation.
A tagline expressing that Portland has solved both rampant bike theft, and the usage of our bike lanes as gravel/glass/refuse containment, along with the policies to back these claims up, would go a long way towards people getting into the saddle.
“We don’t have time to wait to build protected bike lanes on every roadway where we want them.” I am so tired of hearing about how there isn’t money or time to “build infrastructure” that would save lives. Because, as PBOT might figure out if their priority was the health and wellbeing of humans, we actually don’t need to build protected bike lanes. We can just need to bar motor vehicles from existing streets. Any street without motor vehicles is way safer for bicyclists, pedestrians, skaters, and wheelchair users. And these streets already exist! No time needed to add them! Say it with me, PBOT, “let’s devote roadways to human safety and not to speeding vehicles!”
Hey Lois, yes. Or in practical terms, allow cheap divertors every block on specific streets like inner SE Ankeny which would permit deliveries and make it virtually car-free (as well as increase business income and outside seating. PBLs can be expensive if we’re talking about capital projects. But most cities don’t use concrete and permanent materials for the first iteration. Those two things require political will, not a lot of money:
1) Creating car-free ped/bike zones on existing inner greenways (e.g., SE Ankeny)
2) Using basic planters to separate inner bike lanes (e.g., Hawthorne, Madison, NE Broadway)
Planters cost about $25 bucks. It’s not financial constrictions that keep us from transforming streets.
All of these slogans show a lack of self-awareness by City staff who are writing them. Bikes are expensive to maintain and buy and the clothing is expensive to maintain and buy so you can’t lie but there is $0. There is so much car traffic that interferes with my route to work because City staff don’t have the guts to do what’s happening in other progressive cities. This is a big red flag about lack of action to make an unsafe situation into a safe one and gloss it over with marketing and propaganda
agreed Joe- Geller and PBOT have drunk their own Kool-Aid! They seem to completely believe their own PR about great they are! PBOT needs to take a look at the myriad failures and shortcoming over that last 15 years and acknowledge their role in our loss of bike mode share and maybe actually learn something! They are so convinced they are amazing they keep making terrible mistakes. PR is not the first thing I would recommend for PBOT.
What exactly is PBOT’s role in the reduction of people riding bikes? What did they make worse that might have led people to quit?
Always confused about the clothing thing tbh, I’ve been commuting by bike for a decade and only bought my very first bicycle-specific clothing (a cleverhood poncho) last year. I bike in heels and skirts every day with no real trouble.
“You don’t need bike tights to ride a bike”
“I Like Bike”
JOIN THE SHIFTSHOW!