Michael Anderson of bikeportland.org thinks 2015 will be a good year:
For a slumping cycling city, there are reasons for optimism in 2015
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If this was the year Portland came to terms with the fact that it’s no longer leading the country in improving biking, it was also the year that gave the city its clearest signs ever of the cultural changes that bike-friendliness can make possible.
- Our retailers are building business models around biking
- Our real estate developers have entered an ever-escalating battle for bike-friendliness
- Our activists are back, and they’re badass
- Our bureaucracy is an all-star team of bike believers
- We killed the Columbia River Crossing
The missing piece of Portland’s puzzle?
Here’s the story we’ve forgotten how to tell: Portland can and must become a city where it’s easy and comfortable to get around without a car.
It’s not a story about cars being bad. It’s a story about life being good.
Those 18 words aren’t the whole story, of course, just the heart of it. Different cities embrace biking and low-car life for different reasons. …
Whatever a city’s reason is for wanting to make bike transportation mainstream, it can’t succeed without making hard choices: choices that create winners and losers. And a city can’t make choices like that without a story that explains why they’re necessary, and how we’ll all become winners in the long run.
Details here.
