Ted Wheeler crosses Tilikum Crossing during Sunday Parkways in September 2015.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland

Portland’s next mayor is a Multnomah County commissioner turned state treasurer who embraced protected bike lanes and more neighborhood greenway traffic diverters from almost the start of his run for office.

Ted Wheeler was drawing 58 percent of Portland’s primary vote Tuesday night, easily defeating opponents Jules Bailey and Sarah Iannarone, among others.

Wheeler also set himself apart on transportation issues by endorsing a local gas tax to improve Portland streets on the day he announced his campaign — a position that rapidly became conventional wisdom among local politicians and won a narrow victory Tuesday night.

[Read more…]

Wheeler, Bailey, Iannarone.
(Photos: BikePortland)

Since many of you will probably spend some part of this weekend reading your voter’s pamphlet and/or filling out your ballot, here’s a quick way to compare how the three most prominent mayoral candidates are thinking about bike safey.

[Read more…]

Mayoral candidates Ted Wheeler, left, and Bim Ditson.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

Street Roots, Portland’s first-rate paper about homelessness and housing issues, sometimes asks questions about the closely related subject of transportation.

A questionnaire distributed to the mayoral candidates and published last week includes a quick window into the ways different candidates think about mobility issues.

The question:

Please place the following items in order of priority as mayor.

• Increase parking
• Bike infrastructure
• Low­ or no-fare public transit

Here’s what they said:[Read more…]

Portland mayoral candidate Ted Wheeler.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

Portland mayoral candidate and seeming frontrunner Ted Wheeler could imagine using decongestion charging to unclog Portland roads but isn’t ready to back a dedicated bus lane on Powell or Division.

He’s also a fan of dedicated bike signal phases and supports “rationing” auto parking as long as it’s done in conjunction with improved transit and biking options, but isn’t willing to specify how that rationing might take place.

Those were the takeaways from a blog post Wheeler put up Monday in response to questions that BikePortland and the advocacy group Oregon Walks relayed to him on Twitter after he was among the candidates to miss a mayoral candidates’ forum about transportation issues last week.

Here’s the full text of Wheeler’s responses. Some of the questions seem to have been paraphrased a bit, but not so much that their meaning was changed.

[Read more…]

David Schor in the BikePortland office March 24. He’s pushing for a government that offers more or better services, starting with affordable housing, and charges higher taxes to provide them.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

Every mayoral candidate talks about helping low-income renters. But only David Schor has a plan for raising enough money to do so in a major way.

[Read more…]

Voters: Kristin Sweeney, Charlie Tso, Laura Krull.
(Photos: M.Andersen/BikePortland)

Six Portland mayoral candidates sounded off on transportation issues Monday night in the first (and possibly the only) event of the 2016 election season to focus exclusively on transportation.

Hosted by the Portland chapter of Young Professionals in Transportation, the event drew candidates Deborah Harris, Jules Bailey, Jessie Sponberg, Sean Davis, David Schor and Bim Ditson.

[Read more…]

We sat down with Sarah Iannarone to discuss her candidacy in Portland’s May 17 mayoral primary.
(Photo: M.Andersen/BikePortland)

No candidate for mayor is thinking bigger than Sarah Iannarone.

[Read more…]

Sarah Iannarone
(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

A political action committee that bills itself as “the political voice for Oregonians who bike, walk, or take transit,” has thrown their weight behind Sarah Iannarone in the Portland mayoral race.

That’s one of eight endorsements Bike Walk Vote PAC has just released for the 2016 election cycle. After laying low following the 2012 election, Bike Walk Vote has rebuilt its board and hopes to become a significant player in the education and influence of regional voters who care about transportation reform.

To make their decisions, members of Bike Walk Vote gave each candidate written questionnaires, reviewed public documents and forums, leaned on existing personal knowledge and experience, and conducting in-person interviews.

In choosing Sarah Iannarone over the other 15 candidates — including the much more well-known Ted Wheeler and Jules Bailey — Bike Walk Vote credited her “depth of knowledge about the intersection between the built environment and public policy.” Iannarone has learned about this subject over the past eight years as assistant director of First Stop Portland, a program at Portland State University that shows off Portland’s transportation innovations (among other things) to officials from around the world.

Here’s more from Bike Walk Vote’s endorsement:[Read more…]

Wheeler in our office earlier this month.
(Photo: M. Andersen/BikePortland)

Ted Wheeler started changing Portland on the day he started running for mayor.

[Read more…]

Bailey came by our office Wednesday for an in-depth conversation about biking-related issues.
(Photo: M.Andersen/BikePortland)

When Jules Bailey served in the state legislature, he was usually known as one of biking’s best friends in Salem. Now he’s running for mayor.

[Read more…]