Screenshot from Jonathan’s other blog, circa 2005.

Once upon a time, a bike-industry media consultant named Jonathan Maus observed that “blogs are changing the way people communicate on the web.”

That was 11 years ago, to be precise. And Jonathan’s feeling at the time — blogs are amazing, why doesn’t everyone and everything have one? — has basically come true; these days we just call most of them “Facebook pages.”

The media revolution between 2005 and today has changed a lot of other things, and one of them is biking. In the first episode of the rebooted BikePortland podcast, Jonathan, producer Lillian Karabaic and I talk about the modern bike media.

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Left to right: Michael Andersen, Mychal Tetteh, Noel Mickelberry, William Henderson and Chris Smith.
(Photo © J. Maus/BikePortland)

The BikePortland Podcast has returned with a vengeance.
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The BikePortland Podcast is coming back. With a bang.
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Gresham High School health teacher Kristen Warren
accepting an Alice B. Toeclips advocacy award in 2013.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

One of the five ingredients for building a great biking city is a steady flow of passionate and talented people motivated to shed sweat and tears to make their cities better.

But where do advocates come from?

That’s the question we explore in the latest episode of the BikePortland podcast, which is back after a several-month sabbatical (our volunteer producer, Lillian Karabaic, was busy riding bikes and catching trains in 10 countries, among other things). We’re joined by a native Portlander who thinks about this subject a lot: the cerebral, disarmingly humble executive director of the Community Cycling Center, Mychal Tetteh.

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Some bikey questions are up for debate.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

What do you do when a person in a car yields to you at an intersection for no reason?

How do you have a productive discussion with someone who isn’t excited about biking?

If you could get one bike-friendly person in Portland into public office, who would it be?

For the second year, we’ve dedicated an episode of our monthly podcast to answering questions that were, like these, submitted by readers and listeners. So producer Lillian Karabaic, Joathan and I put 20 minutes on my kitchen timer and answered as many as we could before the bell. The result is rapid-fire and fun.

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Team Podcast: Michael Andersen (L), Lillian Karabaic,
and Jonathan Maus.
(Photo: BikePortland)

It’s the end of the year, and that means the next couple weeks here on BikePortland will be rich with retrospectives and analysis from 2014 and predictions for 2015.

One of those will be part of a new tradition: the annual question show on our podcast. This is a fun endeavor where the three of us — Jonathan, me, and producer Lillian Karabaic — take questions from listeners and others and address as many as we can, on air, in 25 minutes. The only restriction: the questions somehow have to be about either the year past or the year to come.

Last year, we tackled subjects like proper use of crosswalks, the latest improvements to the Springwater Trail and the Nobel Prize for Physics.

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What would happen if every local bridge were tolled?
And other speculative but interesting scenarios.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

We spend all our time on this website writing about things that are true.

So we decided that it’d be fun to spend 40 minutes talking about things that aren’t.

In the latest episode of our monthly podcast, producer Lillian Karabaic, Jonathan and I sat down for a particularly fun game: inspired by this CityLab post, we took turns proposing improbable (but plausible) events that could change the future of Portland transportation and then making educated (though sometimes wacky) guesses about what would happen next.

We considered scenarios like these:
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In our latest episode, we talk about biking’s role in bridging the urban/rural divide.
(Photo by J. Maus/BikePortland)

Can cycling really make a difference to help close the yawning gap that exists between Oregon’s cities and its small, rural towns?
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Just lights to some people, but an
annoyance — and even a health hazard — for others.
(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Why would someone spray paint an angry, profanity-laced message about “epileptic lights” on a bikeway? Well, as the story we posted earlier this month illustrates, there’s a lot more to the topic of bike lights than you might think.

With that in mind Michael Andersen, Lillian Karabaic (our wonderful producer) and I tackled the topic of lights in the most recent episode of the BikePortland Podcast.
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Bike fun comes in many shapes and sizes in Portland, and it’s impact is profound. This is a scene from a 2009 ride led by our podcast producer Lily Karabaic where she shared the history of the “Benson Bubbler” fountains.
(Photos by J. Maus/BikePortland)

With the crazy month of June behind us, our latest edition of the BikePortland Podcast delves into the power of Pedalpalooza and the surprising secrets that make bike fun both a pleasant pastime and a potent pillar of cultural change.[Read more…]