Come join our team in Hood River! We are looking for full-time and part-time Service Techs to start 2/1 or sooner (open to a later start date for the right person). Experience with e-bike is a bonus but not a must. Our shop is fun, welcoming and unpretentious. We don’t care what bikes customers ride, just that they ride! Work 4 days a week on the off-season, PTO, health insurance and retirement benefits. Email us now to chat! amy@oregon-ebikes.com, jodie@oregon-ebikes.com
How to Apply
Email us now to chat! amy@oregon-ebikes.com, jodie@oregon-ebikes.com
Stephens Middle School students (in Salem) rolled on their first-ever bike bus back in May. (Photo: Oregon Department of Transportation)
Oregon has become a national leader walking and biking to school. Our state had the highest rate of school participation out of 48 states in America who participated in International Walk and Roll to School Day on October 7th.
The news comes from from the Oregon Department of Transportation and is based on numbers from the National Center for Safe Routes to School. That organization crunched data from the 2024 event and found that 210 schools registered for the event out of a total of 921 K-8 public schools. That percentage was higher than California, Virginia, Washington D.C., and Massachusetts.
“The enthusiasm for Walk & Roll to School Day across Oregon reflects our shared dedication to building safer, more connected communities,” ODOT Safe Routes to School Program Manager Heidi Manlove said in a statement. The participation number is almost back to what it was prior to the Covid pandemic. In 2020, just 61 schools participated. But in 2019 the number was 263 schools.
Now imagine if ODOT actually funded the Safe Routes to School program at the level it needs.
It’s clear that House Bill 2017 (the previous transportation spending package passed by the Oregon Legislature in 2017) has helped spark more school-based biking and walking programs statewide. That bill carved out $10 million per year starting in 2018 and $15 million per year starting in 2023 from the State Highway Fund for Safe Routes to School. The funds are distributed through a grant program that can be used to build infrastructure projects or for educational and encouragement programs.
While the amount was unprecedented and hailed by advocates at the time, it’s not nearly enough to keep up with demand. On August 21st, ODOT’s own Safe Routes to School Advisory Committee wrote a letter to Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) Chair Julie Brown and ODOT Director Kris Strickler. The purpose of the letter was to push back on ODOT’s low-ball estimate for what the program needs going forward as lawmakers look to pass a new funding bill in 2025.
In a document shared at an October 16th meeting of the Joint Committee on Transportation Public and Active Transit Workgroup, ODOT pegged the annual Safe Routes to School need at $50 million per year. That number was based on the average of all project requests in each grant solicitation cycle since the passage of HB 2017.
Slides shown to Joint Committee on Transportation from Metro (left) and ODOT (right).
But leaders of the ODOT Safe Routes to School Advisory Committee say that’s not enough. They say schools request five times the amount available every two-year cycle. In 2024 there were $138 million worth of grants requested for Oregon’s $30 million in available funds. “With this recent oversubscription, as well as the ongoing issue of cost increases for construction projects that we have had to mitigate for with our existing funds, we believe the investment in Safe Routes to School could benefit from up to $75 million per year over the next 30 years to effectively meet the needs of every school in the state.”
The fact that an ODOT committee is publicly asking for more money than ODOT themselves should raise eyebrows. It speaks to the frustration of having a very impactful and popular program that is starved for cash while ODOT continues to pour money into freeway expansion megaprojects statewide. At a meeting of the OTC last week, commissioners approved another $72 million for the $815 million (current estimate) I-205 Abernethy Bridge project — a project whose cost has risen 228% in recent years.
As insiders and lawmakers survey the political landscape ahead of the 2025 legislative session, the debates about program-level funding are likely to get heated. Governor Tina Kotek has outlined a budget that assumes the legislature will raise at least $1.75 billion to pay for transportation projects and programs like Safe Routes to School. But with ODOT saying they need twice that amount it’s unclear what they’ll sacrifice to get a bill passed.
Safe Routes to School is likely safe, but whether it gets the funding it truly deserves is anyone’s guess.
Welcome to the first Comment of the Week since former writer of this column, Lisa Caballero, bid us all adieu. And boy do I miss her help!
Y’all left 515 comments last week. While I do scan and/or read all of them prior to hitting “approve,” I’m not sure I can really digest entire threads and engage and interact with them to the extent they deserve. (Not sure if it’s clear to everyone reading this but BikePortland is essentially a one-person operation.) That being said, I will continue to try and I’m not ready to give up on COTW just yet.
Going forward, I’ll be even more reliant on your nominations. So pretty please, if you read a comment that you think is insightful, productive, smart, fresh, informative, provocative, etc., please reply with a comment that includes “comment of the week” or “COTW”. That way I can do a search for those terms on Monday morning and see all the best comments.
This week I’ve chosen a comment from qqq. It was in response to my opinion piece about one of the reasons the City of Portland is having a difficult time reducing traffic deaths. qqq was clearly annoyed at the police crash statement about a recent fatal collision on SE Division, where the Portland Police Bureau (once again) went out of their way to absolve the driver. Here’s the comment:
“… the next thing the police do regularly after saying the driver cooperated, etc. is say the pedestrian or cyclist victim was ‘wearing dark clothing’, ‘was not wearing hi-viz clothing’, ‘had no rear light’, ‘had no helmet’, etc. – all things that aren’t required by law, but that sound like they are because the police are pointing them out.
Yet I’ve never once seen a police statement saying that the driver’s vehicle lacked anything that wasn’t required: ‘The car lacked a backup camera, ABS brakes, traction control…’. I don’t think I’ve ever even seen a report mentioning a legal problem with the car, other than no license plate: “’The car’s headlight was burned out, the tires were bald, the windshield was darkly tinted, the mirror was missing, the side window was obstructed…’).”
And as we learned in this specific case, the driver on SE Division was indeed in the wrong and was cited for careless driving.
qqq makes an excellent and accurate point. It adds fuel to my idea that PPB should adopt a crash statement template; sort of like a Mad Lib-style form where they just fill in key facts and don’t make any subjective statements whatsoever.
Thanks to Fred for the nomination. And thanks for all the great comments last week.
Here are the most notable stories and other items our community flagged from the past seven days.
This week’s sponsor is Vvolt Electric Mobility, a Portland-based company that is rethinking personal transportation.
Hit by a nice driver: A Portlander was hit by a driver while walking on NE Broadway and it turned into an interesting relationship that included free weed and a hug. ((In)Action Substack)
Disrupting driving: Turns out getting people to switch from driving to other modes is really hard because of how our brains are wired, but science has answers about what can help flip the switch. (Slate)
E-bike rebates: California is about to turn on their long-awaiting e-bike rebate program. The good news is folks can receive up to $2,000 to buy a bike. The bad news is there are only 1,500 vouchers to go around. (Electrek)
Federal immunity in Salem: A DEA agent actively working a case was given immunity by an Oregon judge for his role in killing a bicycle rider with his car. (The Oregonian)
How Philadelphia protects cyclists: Always interesting to see what other cities are doing to protect bicycle riders. Of particular note is a bill passed by Philly City Council that increases fines for drivers who park in bike lanes. (The Conversation)
Black cycling revolution: It took too long, but due to a critical mass of riding clubs and community organizers, there’s finally a foundation of cycling culture for Black people across the globe to identify with and plug into. (The Guardian)
Get on the “cycle train”: Love this forgotten history of an event organized by bike shops in the 1940s that carted cyclists from L.A. to San Diego on a train just so folks could enjoy a bike ride in a new city for the day. (Forgottenmadness_la on IG)
Unenforcement: A report found that police officers in New Jersey nearly stopped writing traffic tickets after leadership planned to scrutinize them for racial injustice. (NY Times)
Loser Lane: A brilliant activist created an arcade-style game to make a point about the terrible policies of Toronto’s Doug Ford. (Momentum)
Suburban splendor: There are systemic (and unsurprisingly very partisan) reasons why most Americans say they would prefer to live in sprawled-out suburbs rather than a walkable city. (The Washington Post)
Happy Friday everyone. It sure was nice to have Eva back in The Shed after a few week holiday hiatus. This episode was meaty! Here are a few of the things we talked about:
“How’d She Get There?” segment was Sellwood to Lake Oswego (including some very scary options).
Why Eva is creeped out by lobster-style bike gloves (something about the devil).
Michael Reiss and his amazing leaf sweeping work.
Why I think it’s time for PBOT to privatize bike lane maintenance
I went on a huge rant about all the Vision Zero drama going on with PBOT, the PPB, and so on.
The 82nd Ave Plan that was just adopted at City Council and why some transportation advocates don’t like it.
Why pitting bikes against transit (like PBOT is doing on 82nd) is a no good, very bad idea.
The new Bike Happy Hour location on N Williams Ave.
An all-electric bike shop in southeast Portland is calling it quits. Cynergy E-Bikes on Southeast Powell Blvd and SE 36th had been in business for 10 years changed ownership five years ago.
In an email to customers this week, owner Sami Khawaja said “We are throwing in the towel.” “We simply cannot compete with the internet and Amazon,” Khawaha added. “We have no choice but to move on. We wanted to personally thank you all your support and business over the years.”
This is the fourth bike shop to close its doors so far this year: Gladys Bikes closed in February, Citybikes stopped doing business in September, and Kenton Cycle Repair shut its doors in October.
Electric bike sales have boomed in Portland in recent years. We’ve seen shops increase their inventory of e-bikes, and in the case of River City Bicycles, they decided to dedicate an entire location to battery-powered wonders. This is the first all-electric shop I’m aware of that has stopped doing business.
Khawaja says while the retail shop will close, Cynergy will continue to service bikes of customers. “We will continue to service bikes at our current location until we find a business to sublease our space. At that point we will move to a new smaller and less expensive location.”
The shop is now having an “E-Commerce E-Screwed Cynergy E bikes” sale and everything is being discounted 20-50%. The sale includes e-bikes, helmets, apparel, locks, tires, and so on.
We need stronger leadership out of this mess. (Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)
The last two days have been a stark illustration of the quagmire the City of Portland finds itself in when it comes to the war on traffic deaths.
On Wednesday as I packed for a Portland Police Bureau press conference about the disturbingly high number of fatal crashes so far this year, we received word of yet another person who was killed while walking on our streets. 67 deaths so far, the PPB says, and the 24th person who was on foot when it happened.
75-year-old Hong Huynh was walking southbound across SE Division at 109th when he was hit and killed by a driver. Huynh was in a crosswalk and had made it across three of the four general traffic lanes. As Huynh approached a median on the southern side of the intersection — a median installed in 2022 with the expressed purpose of making people like him safer — a driver slammed into him. I looked beyond yellow police tape in news photos and saw Huynh’s shoes and winter gloves lying in the street.
Driver’s view of the crossing at SE Division and 109th. A man was hit and killed just before reaching the median island on the right.
At the press conference held just four hours later, a PBOT spokesperson and the leader of the PPB’s Traffic Division tried to convince the assembled press corps that they care deeply about safety and are doing everything they can to prevent deaths and serious injuries.
For their part, PBOT can say they did do a lot to prevent this latest death on Division. They spent $11 million in 2022 on the Outer Division Safety Project, which (in tandem with TriMet’s FX2 transit investments) aimed to improve safety on one of the most notorious arterials in the city. Huynh crossed at a location with a center median island and two yellow caution signs warning drivers of the presence of pedestrians. The robust center median filled in what used to be a center turn lane.
But it wasn’t enough.
Huynh also crossed at a location without a marked crosswalk or signa. And he had to cross four driving lanes, the same number that existed before PBOT’s “safety” project. And with a posted speed limit of 30 mph, the driver would have had to begin braking nearly half a block away to avoid killing Huynh. According to PBOT traffic data, 73% of people at driving eastbound on SE Division at 109th drive over the speed limit (image, right). That’s over 20,000 speeding drivers every day.
Yesterday I heard from Scott Kocher, a Portland-based lawyer and advocate who specializes in traffic law. “Recent PBOT projects on this stretch of outer Division did not address high speeds, doubled car lanes, and missing crosswalks,” Kocher shared. He said Division’s long straightaways and high number of speeders means it still has too many unsafe crossings and its design was “predictably deficient.”
“Division is nowhere near a Vision Zero facility,” Kocher added. (It’s also notable that Huynh was hit just a few yards from where PBOT removed a section of the center median one year ago in order to restore a center turn lane after an adjacent business owner complained.)
PPB Sergeant Ty Engstrom mentioned the SE Division collision at the press conference Wednesday. And even though Sgt. Engstrom knew very little about what happened out on that road a few hours earlier, he went out of his way to absolve the driver of responsibility. “The driver of the vehicle did not appear to be going… uh, speed did not appear to be a factor. They stayed [at the scene]. They were cooperative. No impairment appeared to be a factor in this particular case.”
No one asked Sgt. Engstrom about the crash or the driver who hit Huynh. He offered those details unsolicited.
When I got back to work from the press conference and watched video footage of the crash shared by KATU-TV Wednesday afternoon, I saw the driver plow into Huynh with what appeared to be very little to no braking and at a relatively high rate of speed. I immediately thought of how Engstrom’s comments at the press conference painted a much different picture.
And it turns out the driver wasn’t as innocent as Engstrom made them out to be. Yesterday the PPB said the driver, 38-year-old April Oneal, has been cited for careless driving.
Less than 24 hours after Huynh was violently killed by a careless driver, PBOT posted a video on social media reminding walkers to look both ways before crossing the street. The video is set to throbbing music and features two people dancing to the rhythm. It’s done in the cute style of trendy online content. This blame-the-victim framing flies in the face of the “Safe Systems” approach to traffic safety PBOT claims they adhere to. That alone would be offensive and inappropriate. But given what happened to Mr. Huynh, comments made at this week’s press conference, and words PBOT’s lead Vision Zero staffer shared at the World Day of Remembrance event last month — it’s unfathomable why PBOT uploaded that video.
(Screenshot of PBOT video)
What’s even harder to believe is that even given all those factors— and the dozens of people who’ve expressed concerns about it via social media comments — the video remains up as of this morning.
With the daunting task of eliminating deaths and serious injuries on our roads staring them in the face like never before, PBOT and the PPB have taken refuge in deflecting responsibility away from their organizations — and away from the most dangerous users of the road. Both agencies say they could achieve Vision Zero with more funding and both agencies say a fatality-free future depends on a “culture change” and people taking responsibility for their actions.
But as Mr. Huynh’s tragic death shows, the City’s business as usual response, means people will continue to die as usual.
PBOT and the PPB do a lot and it still isn’t enough. I see two lines on a graph where one line for our car-centric system, dangerous driving and all its consequences spikes way up — and the other line for the City’s incremental improvements ticks up just slightly. The gap between the two is where people are killed. We must close that gap. Putting a hand out for more funding and pointing fingers doesn’t meet the moment.
I agree we need to remind every Portlander that we are all in this together, but we must not lose sight that “all” includes government. To quote a church sign marquee I’ve seen for years while riding up North Williams Avenue: When it comes to changing culture on our roads, the City of Portland should use a mirror, not a telescope.
Screenshot from video by Michael Reiss shows him towing a sweeper behind his bike. (Watch video below)
Southwest Portland resident Michael Reiss was so tired of leaves piling up in the bike lane, he took things into his own hands. I’m not talking about grabbing a broom and clearing a small section. He bought a high-powered gas sweeper, attached it to his electric recumbent trike, and then made several passes of a major bike route.
The result: A two-mile stretch of SW Multnomah Blvd is now clean and clear of leaves from the outside bike lane stripe to the fog line and hundreds of pounds of leaves are now in a ditch. Reiss’s DIY hack worked well he’s since bought an even larger sweeper.
(Photo: Michael Reiss)
Reiss is part of a longline of resourceful, fed-up Portlanders who take matters into their own hands when it comes to keeping our bike lanes free of debris like leaves, glass, and gravel. Reiss has been sharing his sweeping exploits on the Bike Loud PDX Slack channel. Bike Loud has been testing a bike lane sweeper for over a year now. The group maintains a schedule where volunteers can sign up for shifts to use the trailer. They also created a dedicated Slack channel to talk all things bike lane sweeping. When Reiss uploaded a video of his sweeper in action the other day, I had to talk with him and learn more.
He said his motivation comes from being a nice husband. “My wife bikes to OHSU from where we live just south of the Fred Meyer in Burlingame,” Reiss shared in a video interview today. “In the last couple of weeks, Terwilliger has been basically impassable.”
Reiss said the City of Portland swept the bike lane once, but within days it was full of leaves again. “That’s my wife’s bike route, so this is sort of a honey-do list,” he shared with a laugh.
Anyone who rides in southwest knows that leaf season on a bicycle is especially treacherous. Not only does the hilly area have a lot of massive trees, but there are fewer bike routes overall. So when a major bike thoroughfare like Terwilliger — or Capitol Highway or Multnomah — become essentially closed by leaves, it’s a bigger deal than in some other parts of town that have alternate ways around.
Reiss’ trike with sweeper attached. (Photo: Michael Reiss)
Reiss loves solving problems and this type of project is just the type of thing he said his brain likes to focus on. He and someone else he met through Bike Loud found the used sweeper on Craiglist for $300 and then Reiss fashioned a hitch and tow bar and screwed it on. After a few test runs showed potential, he picked up an even larger unit and continues to tinker with its power settings and configurations.
Beyond the power and electrical considerations, the tricky thing is setting the angle on the brush in a way that pushes the leaves aside while also making sure it pushes down on the pavement hard enough to make progress, but not so hard that it slows down the cycling. Reiss is an expert at modifying electric-bikes, so he’s used his assistive motor to great success. “The sweeper angle is only 15-16 degrees, so you start pulling all that weight and you’ve got to go slow and wait for the sweeper to push it off to the side,” he shared with me today.
Another consideration is that, so far at least, Reiss’ sweeper doesn’t play nice with pedestrians. He’s trying to tweak the angle of the brush and the speed of the brush motor so that the leaves get piled up nicely and don’t get blown on the sidewalk.
All these issues have likely been hammered out by the creators of the Bike Lane Sweeper, so I was glad to hear that Reiss has been in contact with them to share ideas and feedback. He hopes to help Bike Loud purchase one of the new sweeper models in the near future.
In the end, Reiss’ DIY effort illustrates frustration with the city for not keeping up with bike lane maintenance. The Portland Bureau of Transportation has made strides in recent years, but there are still more lane miles then they can tackle in a timely fashion.
Good thing we’ve got gung-ho folks like Reiss and others who take matters like this into their own hands. And I don’t think we’ve seen the end of Reiss and his sweeping experiments. His ultimate plan is to use a cargo trike (like the one ice cream sellers use) and mount the sweeper to the front so it’s easier to control. And future versions will be converted to electric power.
“I’ll pound away at this project until it works,” he shared. “Or until it becomes stupid or somebody else does something that eliminates the need for it — or until I get bored and move onto another project.”
If you see a recumbent pulling a loud sweeper in southwest Portland, steer clear and give Reiss a big thumbs-up!
Dylan Rivera (PBOT) and Ty Engstrom (PPB) take questions from reporters at a press conference Wednesday. (Photos: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)
Portland traffic safety officials held yet another press conference on Wednesday to highlight a disturbingly high number of fatal traffic crashes. And like similar events held recently, those officials pinned some of the blame for deadly streets on cultural issues and the erosion of behavioral norms that began in 2020 with the Covid pandemic and have hung around ever since.
“We’ve adopted this culture where folks feel like they can drive however they want.”
– Ty Engstrom, PPB Traffic Division Sergeant
The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) has tallied 67 deaths on Portland roads so far this year — a pace that puts us on on par with last year’s record-high number. PPB Traffic Division Sergeant Ty Engstrom offered historical context for that number to the group of media outlets assembled in a conference room inside a police facility in northeast Portland yesterday.
“I looked at numbers all the way back to 2000. And the last five years have all been higher than the prior 20 years before that,” Sgt. Engstrom said.
“This is a cultural issue that we need to address,” he continued. “We’ve adopted this culture where folks feel like they can drive however they want. That what is going on in their life is more important than the other people around them, and we need to have a culture change where we here in Portland — whether you live here, work here, commute through here, are visiting here — you respect the life and sanctity of life of everybody around you.”
PPB Sgt. Ty EngstromPBOT PIO Dylan Rivera
Engstrom said the pandemic put Portlanders on a path of driving dysfunction. Here’s more of what he said:
“It created an atmosphere where people felt like they could get away with things. And it has not gone back to way it should be. I think that we have developed this culture where Portland is a playground and there’s no repercussions, and people get away with things here, and you can come here to drive fast speed, race, do donuts, weave in and out of traffic, whatever you choose to do, and there’s no repercussions…
We’re trying to do what we can to change the culture.”
These words felt hollow coming from Sgt. Engstrom, since he played a key role in perpetuating the dangerous behaviors he now laments. In 2021, Engstrom held a press conference with the specific intent to send a message that traffic laws weren’t being enforced in Portland. That dangerous gambit was exposed later as a political stunt to curry political support for a larger PPB budget.
Engstrom’s tactics worked, depending on which side of this cultural dysfunction you are on. Traffic behaviors grew much worse, but in 2023 the PPB was able to re-launch its Traffic Division. Now Engstrom says he’s hopeful police staffing will continue to grow beyond the seven-member team that currently patrols during an afternoon shift.
Engstrom shared at the press conference that PPB currently has a dedicated, seven-member Traffic Division team that patrols the streets seven days a week from 5:00 pm to 3:00 am (there are two teams total who share this shift). That timeframe was chosen because that’s when the PPB sees the vast majority of serious injury and fatal crashes, as well as when intoxicated and impaired drivers tend to be on the road. Engstrom said the current plan is to re-assemble a day shift traffic patrol team “in the future sometime” as bureau staffing levels rise.
Joining Engstrom behind the microphones was Portland Bureau of Transportation Public Information Officer Dylan Rivera. He said the multiple fatalities over the holiday weekend was, “Really shocking and should be alarming to everyone.”
Rivera said PBOT needs to do more, but he also repeated a new mantra that the issue of road safety transcends the transportation bureau. “This is bigger than PBOT. This is bigger than Portland police. This is about our community,” Rivera continued. “This is about public health, behavioral health, substance use disorders, many of the mental health and other behavioral health crises we saw emerging during the pandemic played out on our streets and contributed to traffic deaths that spiked in 2020 and continue to stay high.”
In an interview with BikePortland after the press conference, Rivera said that so far there are no specific proposals on the table for how other agencies like TriMet or Multnomah County can help PBOT achieve their goal of zero traffic deaths (a.k.a. Vision Zero).
How can PBOT and PPB encourage safer driving? Automated enforcement is one solution. Rivera said PBOT has installed 12 new speed and intersection cameras in the past year alone and that by early 2025 there will be 40 total cameras on the streets. While that is progress, Rivera made it clear more cameras are needed. “We need to do a lot more. We need more cameras on more high crash corridors, and so we are working to push our contractor to get more cameras on the streets.”
That view is shared by City Councilor-elect (and former PBOT commissioner) Steve Novick. At an event last month he said he’d support enforcement cameras on “every goddamn intersection in the city.” I shared that quote with Sgt. Engstrom and asked if PPB would support such a massive camera increase.
“That’s a lot of cameras,” Engstrom responded. “That’s a lot of intersections all over the city. And I do know that from behind the scenes, that’s a lot of personnel that it’s going to take in hours to because you have to review all those and you have to approve them, and so that’s a daunting task. But I absolutely support, you know, increased enforcement and education on streets.”
Camera enforcement will only reach its potential if drivers have legible license plates. The lack of visible plates and unpaid vehicle registration fees are symptoms of the sick state of driving culture. Engstrom and Rivera both said the lax enforcement since 2020 is over.
“I’m sure there are people out there that are avoiding putting their license plates on to try and get away from some of those tickets,” Engstrom said. “But that is absolutely illegal. You must have those license plates and registration, and our officers are absolutely able to issue citations for that type of behavior.”
And Rivera admitted that backing off enforcement during the pandemic (a decision that came from the state and federal level, due to pandemic-related issues) had a negative impact on safety and compliance. “What we learned is, when you give people an inch, they take a mile… now we need to get back to normal. We need everyone to understand that we need to get back to the culture of following the vehicle registration rules, displaying plates… It’s not okay to drive around with expired registration.”
Cameras are not a panacea and it will take a much more holistic approach to achieve Vision Zero.
To end deaths and serious injuries, PBOT’s Rivera said a lot more funding is needed. He says the agency needs “a major investment” from the Oregon Legislature in the 2025 transportation funding package. And lobbying for that effort will come from a new, 12-member Portland City Council. Rivera said PBOT believes the new councilors “understand the urgency and the funding crisis that all of transportation faces.”
That crisis has left PBOT in dire financial straits for years. Budget gaps last year led to the prospect of laying off 100 staffers and the coming budget doesn’t look much better. “We need to go from scarcity to bigger investment, and we believe the legislature, the governor and the city council understand this, understand the serious, seriousness of it, and will take action next year.
Moving the needle on road safety will take more than a larger budget or a culture change among road users. The agencies themselves need a culture change. PPB needs to do more with the budget they have, stop playing politics with their services, and rebuild community trust. And PBOT needs to communicate more urgency to the public about what’s at stake.
Last month, Rivera shared a controversial statement in an interview with a KPTV reporter who did an in-depth story on Vision Zero. Pressed on why deaths continue to rise nearly a decade after declaring a Vision Zero goal, Rivera said, “It’s taken generations to build the streets we have for speed instead of safety. It’s going to take decades, potentially generations, to redesign them.”
That framing frustrated some activists who felt it sent the wrong message to survivors of deadly traffic crashes and everyone who wants safer streets about how long the community should expect to wait to feel safer using Portland roads.
I asked Rivera to clarify what he meant by that statement. Here’s how he responded:
“It was in the context of the transportation funding crisis. That was in the context of facing layoffs among the people who could make our streets safer, and saying, ‘How come traffic safety investments aren’t working well?’ Traffic safety investments aren’t happening! Traffic safety personnel are facing layoffs. Instead of talking about what new projects we can do, we have a budget based on band-aids and borrowed cash.
We have had a rise in traffic deaths on our streets since the onset of the pandemic, we have had a flat to declining public investment in the things we know can reduce the severity of those crashes.”
While PBOT sees more funding as the most important tool to reduce crashes and deaths, PPB says its all about getting more officers on the streets.
Sgt. Engstrom said PPB staffing numbers are at “the bottom of the dip” and that in the next couple of years they’ll have more officers and will be able to increase Traffic Division officers.
One place PPB staffing issues have led to a tangible difference for Portlanders is in handling the growing number of hit-and-run cases. “We used to have full-time officers here and all they did is hit-and-run cases and follow ups. We lost those positions when we lost the Traffic Division and it hasn’t been able to come back yet.”
“There are, unfortunately, a large number of hit-and-run cases that don’t get the follow up that they deserve.”
Rocky Point Trails are only as beautiful as we make them! (Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)
Trails and leaves have dried out thanks to all this sun, so we’ve got prime cycling conditions — as long as you’re ready for the cold. And there’s rain in the forecast for Saturday. So you get 10 more degrees of warmth but it comes with water falling from the sky. Hopefully not a lot!
Have fun out there.
Saturday, December 7th
Plant Trees By Bike – 8:45 am at St. Johns Church (N) Nonprofit Friends of Trees is hosting this community tree planting event and they want folks to pick up and deliver trees by bike. Grab your trailers and head on over. More info here.
Rocky Point Trails Dig Day – 9:30 am at Rocky Point Trails (Scappoose) Grab a shovel or whatever tool suits your fancy and help build new off-road cycling trails with NW Trail Alliance. Earn your turns! More info here.
Marine Drive Trail Clean-up – 10:00 am at Made in Oregon Parking Lot (NE) Join SOLVE for a group effort that will pick up garbage and debris on and around the Marine Drive bike path east of 122nd Ave. More info here.
Adaptive Cycling Ride – 1:00 pm at Portland Saturday Market (Waterfront) Are you in need of a special bike to suit your needs? One that offers more power-assist, better balance, or other features that might be hard-to-find or understand? Nomad Cycles wants to help. Come out and learn more about adaptive mobility and test ride a few different types of bicycles. More info here.
Gaza Sunbirds Solidarity Ride – 2:30 pm at Colonel Summers Park (SE) The Sunbirds are a paracycling club based in Gaza and this ride will join a global movement of solidarity. Expect a protest against Palestinian oppression with fellow bike lovers. More info here.
Light the Night Bike Ride – 4:00 pm at Rockwood Market Hall Plaza (Gresham) The City of Gresham, Bike Works by P:ear and Multnomah County have come together for a special Safe Routes to School event that will mix a safe group ride with holiday cheer. More info here.
Sunday, December 8th
Overlook Neighborhood Ride – 9:30 am at Stacks Coffee (N) Join Nic Cota for a social and meandering roll through the beautiful Overlook neighborhood in north Portland. More info here.
— Did I miss your event? Please let me know by filling out our contact form, or just email me at maus.jonathan@gmail.com.
Oregon has had a $15 tax on all new bike purchases for almost six years now. It passed as part of the House Bill 2017 transportation funding package and went into effect January 1st, 2018. At a meeting on Tuesday that included state lawmakers, Oregon Department of Transportation staff, and leaders from various interest groups, there was an that made it seem like a change in the tax is imminent.
The Bicycle Excise Tax was a political compromise stuffed into HB 2017 in order to lessen the blow of other taxes targeted toward car owners, buyers, and sellers. It was not strongly opposed by advocacy group The Street Trust, who wanted to pass a bill in order to garner set-aside funding for Safe Routes to School and it hoped it would give cycling and active transportation advocates an answer to the perennial bad faith argument that, “bikes don’t pay their fare share.” The tax raises an average of about $833,000 per year on sales of about 51,000 new bikes purchased in Oregon (or by Oregonians from online sellers). The $5 million raised so far has been put into a grant program that funds off-highway paths.
The tax was discussed at the final meeting of a workgroup convened by the Oregon Legislature’s Joint Committee on Transportation that is setting the groundwork for a new transportation spending package that will be proposed in the coming session. In that meeting, Oregon Department of Revenue Policy Coordinator Xann Culver shared a presentation about the tax to inform the lawmakers and advocates in the workgroup.
In response to Culver’s presentation, Duke Shepard, a workgroup member and senior policy director for Oregon Business & Industry (a nonprofit advocacy group based in Salem) said, “It struck me as puzzling that it’s a $15 fee regardless of the price of the bike.” It’s a good point, given that the tax begins at bikes costing as little as $200. That triggered a conversation about the tax.
House Representative Susan McLain (D-Hillsboro) was one of the architects of HB 2017 and is now a co-chair of the Joint Committee on Transportation. She responded to Shepard by saying that, essentially, there wasn’t enough time to analyze the fairness of the bike tax and $15 was just the number they came up with. “We hadn’t had a bike tax before,” McLain said. “And so the idea of even having a bike tax was a big lift.” McLain added that they wanted a number high enough to make the tax worth it, but not high enough so that it discourages bike use.
Note that some 2023 Q4 receipts are still being tallied. Bike Tax data, 2018-2023. (Graphics by BikePortland)
But what we’ve been left with is a regressive tax that is much higher than a similar tax on new cars that was also passed in HB 2017.
State of Oregon Senior Economic Mazen Malik was also in the meeting. He called the $15 the “least acceptable compromise at the time” and that a 7.5% tax on the retail price of new bikes was also considered. “The idea was primarily to start this process [of a bike tax] and see if it sticks, and then if the progressivity element needs to be injected into this subsequent legislatures would look into that.”
For Oregonians who purchase a $200 bicycle, which is about the cheapest you’ll find even at a big box retailer, the $15 bike tax equates to 7.5% of the total purchase price. By comparison, Oregon’s “vehicle privilege tax” (also passed in 2017) that’s charged to car dealerships, is just .05% of the retail price of a new car. For a $20,000 entry-level car, sellers pay tax of just $100. If they paid at a rate similar to the bike tax they’d pay $1,500.
Put another way, in the current system, the tax rate on an entry-level bicycle is 15 times higher than that of an entry-level new car.
That point was made by Oregon Trails Coalition Executive Director Steph Noll at Tuesday’s meeting. “That $15 tax is such a higher percentage that what our vehicle privilege tax is,” she said. “So if we’re looking at making it more progressive, even if we were to double the current bike tax, it really doesn’t do much towards filling the revenue gaps that we are looking at.”
House Rep (and now Senator-elect) Khan Pham, who was facilitating the meeting, echoed Noll’s sentiment. She said that even if a bike tax raised $1 million per year it would be an almost unrecognizable amount amid the multiple billions Oregon needs to raise. Changing the bike tax is, “Something that we definitely do need to address in the coming up, the upcoming session,” Rep. Pham said. “Because you’re right; those are very different price points, and we want to make sure we’re being equitable.”
Multnomah Falls Lodge in the Columbia River Gorge. (Photo: A.J. Zelada)
A.J. Zelada has seen the future of cycling in the Columbia River Gorge and it looks a lot different than it used to. There will be a lot more bicycle users and most of them will be on electric bikes. With some popular destinations in the Gorge managed by the US Forest Service, which still regulates e-bikes as motor vehicles, Zelada is worried that current policies and a lack of parking spaces will choke off growth of cycling in the “waterfall corridor” just as its popularity soars.
The current ban on e-bikes on the plaza outside of Multnomah Falls Lodge is an illustration of how outdated USFS policies that put e-bikes in the same vehicle category as cars and trucks set up a clash with the Oregon Department of Transportation’s adopted policy goal of making the corridor more transit and bicycle-oriented. Zelada thinks the ban is a bad policy and he’s working hard to change it.
Zelada in the Gorge with disability rights activist Juliette Rizzo in 2023. (Photo: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)
“Cycling has changed. Cycling in the Gorge is no longer men in lycra cycling for health benefits. They want to see waterfalls, not count the speed nor the miles ‘conquered.’… and no different than a vehicle, they want a parking place.”
– A.J. Zelada
Zelada is a long time cyclist and advocate who’s passionate about the Gorge. He was appointed by the Oregon Governor and served eight years on the Oregon Department of Transportation Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee, he’s a board member of the Friends of Historic Columbia River Highway and in 2019 he created the Gorge Pedal bike ride.
Zelada has seen the rise of e-bike traffic in the Gorge, especially around Multnomah Falls (Oregon’s top tourist attraction). In summer of 2023 he observed 88 e-bikes arrive at the plaza outside Multnomah Falls Lodge at once. Those bikes overwhelmed the plaza as there were not enough places to park. USFS Recreation Staff Officer Stephen Elgart said in a June meeting of the Historic Columbia River Highway Advisory Committee that the bikes, “generated a safety concern.”
“The useful space in the plaza was impacted as bikes surrounded the planters,” Elgart said. “The USFS considers e-bikes motor vehicles, which are prohibited at the plaza. We are working with our partners to find spaces to put them.”
These concerns spurred the USFS to post a “No E-Bikes on Plaza” sign near the plaza entrance. Zelada thinks that’s a mistake and he wants the ban lifted. He also thinks the USFS should provide more (and better) bike parking and adopt a more bike-friendly stance in general.
“Cycling has changed. Cycling in the Gorge and also our nation is no longer men in lycra cycling for health benefits,” Zelada writes in his bike count report. “They want to see waterfalls, not count the speed nor the miles ‘conquered.’.. and no different than a vehicle, they want a parking place.”
Wanting to get ahead of the issue and gather data to inform policy conversations, Zelada and another volunteer worked with the USFS this past summer to install wildlife cameras and then analyzed the footage to get an accurate count of bikes on the plaza outside the lodge. That footage became the basis of a 19-page report published by Zelada that will present to the Historic Columbia River Highway Advisory Committee at their upcoming meeting on December 12th.
Zelada and his team photographed 10 different days during July, August, and September of this year. When the images came back they counted a total of 567 bicycle users. Of those, 67% were e-bikes. They also noted that a majority (62%) of e-bike riders parked longer than 30 minutes. By comparison, nearly 80% of all “pedal cyclists” (non e-bikes) parked less than 30 minutes and one out of four of them parked for less than 10 minutes. Zelada says this insight suggests non e-bike riders are just stopping for the bathroom and e-bike riders are more likely to be tourists stopping at the gift store and taking in the views of the falls.
(Photos from wildlife cameras installed in the plaza.)
Out of 80,000 total images snapped over the 10 days, Zelada saw just one person riding a bike on the plaza.
The counts make the issue clear: e-bike users need a safe and secure place to park, and the current policy banning them from the plaza makes that very difficult. Zelada says the ban at the lodge is at odds with USFS policy on several fronts.
“US Forest Service policy dictates regulations of e-bikes on USFS roads, trails, and grasslands. It does not have a policy for plazas,” Zelada states in the report. “The plaza is not a road nor a trail nor a grassland; it is a concrete plaza created in 1965.”
Zelada also notes in his report that the USFS encourages their own employees of the lodge to bike to work. “So staff using an e-bike for commuting would not be allowed to park their e-bike on USFS land,” Zelada writes.
“Workers at Multnomah Falls wouldn’t be allowed to use an e-bike to get to work, because e-bikes aren’t allowed on the plaza,” Zelada told me in an interview last month. “So there’s a schism between intention and reality. and upper-level management is being very restrictive about the prohibition on USFS land despite fact that their policy on e-bikes doesn’t really say that.”
To remedy the situation, Zelada wants USFS to lift the ban the e-bikes and create bike parking areas to manage demand.
Zelada believes this sight along a cliff just west of the lodge would be ideal as a bike parking zone.
One area Zelada has in mind is just west of the lodge along a wide shoulder that currently lies behind Jersey barriers. It’s a perfect spot, Zelada says, because it’s close to the plaza and has no other foot traffic. But USFS engineers say it’s too dangerous. “Studies do not indicate we will be able to add bike parking in the areas blocked by jersey barrier after the Eagle Creek Fire anytime soon,” Elgart said back in June.
Zelada believes safety concerns are nearly ubiquitous in the Gorge and that — despite concerns from USFS engineers — the location for a physically protected bike parking zone along the highway and near the plaza that could hold nearly 70 bicycles would be “ideal.”
Overall, Zelada feels like agencies with jurisdiction in the Gorge need to adopt a holistic bike-friendly policy in order to welcome riders into the corridor. The State of Oregon has spent hundreds of millions on the Historic Highway State Trail project in recent years with the specific intent of attracting cyclists. It behooves everyone to be on the same page when it comes to having policies that will allow Oregon to make good on that investment.
Elgart with USFS says they’re still collecting data and monitoring e-bike increases. “We do not have a date for when policies will be revised.”
Meanwhile, Zelada is sharing his report with everyone he can — including top brass at USFS. He’s playing a masterful inside-outside game, just as you’d expect from someone with decades of advocacy experience. When I talked to him last month, Zelada clearly understood the bureaucratic hurdles preventing a simple solution here. But he was still frustrated. “My goal is to get more parking. Come on! Let’s do something!” he exclaimed.
