Portland bike history in the air

While I toil away in the gray halls of the bureaucracy, there are people working on transportation history. In the last several weeks I've seen a handful of articles and fielded calls about Portland's bike past.

I was queried (I think "interview" would be too strong a word) by Outside magazine about the Portland's bike development for an article in the May edition. I'm not entirely sure of the article's full scope, but they were definitely interested in bicycle history in Portland. We'll see how the article turns out, but I give them credit for trying to get the facts straight - I received a follow up call after our initial conversation to make sure I was quoted correctly. Who says the blogosphere killed journalism?

More locally, Nick Bjork from the website "Neighborhood Notes", wrote an article on the Portland Bureau of Transportation's signature transportation demand management project, "SmartTrips." (Full disclosure: I work for PBOT and my main project is SmartTrips.) Transportation demand management is the bureaucratic term for getting people who drive alone to choose other modes like transit, carpooling, and/or bicycling through education and outreach. SmartTrips is the City of Portland's homegrown version, based primarily on Social Data's Travel Smart model. Bjork's article does a great job of telling how SmartTrips works and a little about its history. Keep up the great work, Nick!

And of course there is the prolific Jeff Mapes, author of Pedaling Revolution, political reporter for the Oregonian, and intrepid bike commuter. Momentum Magazine just published a Mapes article, "A Modern Bicycling Advocacy Timeline." It's not Portland-centric by any means, but all of Portland's bike history is directly tied in to the events Mapes' chronicles. It's worth reading.