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BY ALAN PITTMAN
Retraining the Humans
A top bike planner offers lessons, inspiration for Eugene
M
ia Birk, one of the nation’s leading bike planners,
spoke to a packed room in Eugene last week as
part of her book tour for Joyride: Pedaling Toward
a Healthier Planet.
Birk’s Portland fi rm Alta Planning is one of the consultants
on a new Eugene bike plan now under way. “It’s not just the
story of me or Alta, it’s the story of our whole country,” she
said of her book to a standing-room-only crowd of more than
100 at the Oregon Electric Station.
Birk, in a skirt and with her biker legs in tall boots,
fl ashed an embarrassing slide of herself as a “chubster” teen
in Texas during her talk. “We would drive across to the street
to the grocery store,” she said of her auto-centric upbringing.
“I was overweight and pretty depressed.”
Birk described how she got hooked on biking and
lost weight in graduate school studying international
transportation and energy issues and wound up in Portland
as the city’s bike coordinator from 1993 to 1999. When
she started, Portland was being sued by bike advocates for
violating the state bike bill requiring bike lanes. “Bureaucratic
staff were exclusively trained in moving people and goods by
the city had backed off a new bike parking code to make
the code voluntary. “I am just screaming,” she says of her
meeting with the responsible planning director.
A city commissioner backs her in disbelief that the school
district has opposed bike parking for kids, and the City
Council overrules the Planning Commission, according to
Birk.
But then she has to fi ght hard to get the city bureaucracy
to include the required bike parking in a City Hall remodel,
she said. “It’s not enough to add a plan a code, you have to
retrain every human.”
Birk said the city later had a waiting list of 200 businesses
wanting to remove a parking space for a 20-bike, on-street
parking corral.
Birk said her daughter’s school now has 50 percent
biking and walking. Biking offers a “win, win solution for
our complex environmental, livability and health problems,”
she said.
Citywide, Portland counts have shown bike ridership
grow from 1 percent to 8 percent, with some neighborhoods
reaching 28 percent, she said, noting the importance of
Birk chronicles the citizen ravings at public meetings and back-room obstinance
of entrenched bureaucrats that must be overcome for cities to evolve.
cars,” she said. “The media routinely slammed our efforts” to
increase biking.
Birk loaded a bike cart with her slides and made suburban
presentations to recruit more people to her cause. She often
felt like an “alien,” she said. “They would feel for their car
keys.” At each meeting, “Eighteen or 19 would run for their
cars, but two or three would stay and talk to me,” she said.
“That’s actually pretty good.”
When the city quickly re-striped a four-lane road over a
weekend to dedicate a lane for bikes, “businesses kind of
went into shock,” she said. But in the end, the businesses
calmed down, she said. “Sometimes it’s better to ask for
forgiveness” than permission, Birk said. “Life goes on,
change is hard and people freak out, but it’s working.”
Birk tells of the determination of Portland’s bike facility
planners. One colleague cornered an ODOT staffer in a
bathroom to get him to sign a vital permit for Portland’s
fl oating riverfront bike path, she said.
An Oregonian editorial ridiculed the fl oating path as a
waste that no one will use. But the paper soon admitted it
was wrong about what’s now one of the city’s most popular
attractions, according to Birk.
Birk said she helped the city grow from 70 bikeway miles
to 300 in 15 years.
In 1996 she toured 18 European cities on a grant to learn
cutting-edge bike design. But when she returned, she found
documenting biking success.
Portland helped spur success with a fun encouragement
program, Birk said. “It was like come over here, this is where
the party is.”
After adding bridge bike lanes, “we’ve got an entire four-
lane bridge in bike and pedestrian traffi c.” With increased
cycling and improvements, “safety is improving radically,”
Birk said. Bike projects cost a tiny fraction of city road
projects, “there is no better bang for the buck.”
Cities like Portland and Eugene have some of the highest
bike commuting rates in the U.S., Birk said. “But on the
international scale we are not that good,” she said. “We’ve
just scratched the surface of what we can become.”
One key may be more separate cycle tracks to protect
bikes from car traffi c like a recent downtown project in
Vancouver, B.C., she said.
“At some point we’re going to have to grapple with the
cost of driving being heavily subsidized,” she said, noting
the carrot and stick approach in Europe. “The stick is making
it really hard to drive and expensive.”
Birk said a key to her success in Portland was the backing
of the city’s traffi c engineer. “Without him,” she said, the
successes “wouldn’t have been possible.”
Determination also helped. Birk said she hired a
private contractor to install colored bike lanes when a city
maintenance manager balked. The city was also “spurred
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by tragedy” to install bike boxes at intersections after a fatal
“right-hook” accident.
After federal bureaucrats put up “unbelievable”
opposition to endorsing bike innovations in their offi cial
manual, Birk said she formed Cities for Cycling to push for
reforms.
Even Dallas, Texas, now wants bike facilities, she said.
Birk was wary when the city hired her as a consultant, but
businesses there offered, “how can we help you; do you need
some of our property; can we give you some money?”
Biking is good for business, according to Birk. She
points to her study showing 1,500 jobs from Portland’s $100
million bike industry; a study showing the local economy
saves $1 billion a year by driving less; research showing the
importance of biking to attracting a “creative class” vital for
city economies; and a recent Maryland study showing that
bike projects create twice as many jobs as road projects.
As for Birk’s book Joyride, she’s sharing the profi ts
with bike advocacy groups. Other books have talked about
the environmental, livability and health benefi ts of biking,
but Birk’s book, written with the help of bike author Joe
Kurmaskie, shows what it’s like to actually make change
happen in the trenches.
She chronicles the citizen ravings at public meetings and
back-room obstinance of entrenched bureaucrats that must
be overcome for cities to evolve. Birk pulls few punches and
provides a rare, look at how local government really works.
She provides some forceful arguments such as, “the
burden of safety must be squarely placed on the more
dangerous vehicle operator.” And she takes on a vocal
“fringe” of vehicular cycling advocates who oppose bike
lanes as somehow less safe than bravely “taking” a car lane
with their bikes. She says that approach will leave the 60
percent who would consider biking if they felt safer in their
cars, and “retain cycling as an elite sport of a privileged
group of adrenaline junkies.”
Eugene’s UO-fueled bike commute rate is almost double
that in larger Portland, but Birk and her book still offer a lot
of inspiration and lessons for here.
Where Eugene’s bike bureaucrats have often appeared
meek, Birk was a hard-driving go-getter not afraid to be
a “pain in the tush” to her bureaucratic colleagues. At one
point, she wrote she “surreptitiously” distributed hundreds
of complaint cards to local bike shops to push the city into
action.
Eugene volunteers have struggled for years to close
streets for a major bike event in Eugene, but Birk and her
colleagues jumped onboard, helping create, subsidize and
remove obstacles for the Portland Bridge Pedal and Sunday
Parkways events that have brought tens of thousands of
riders, even closing lanes on a towering I-5 bridge to cars.
Where Eugene planners balk at removing car lanes or
parking spaces to make safe space for bikes, Portland has
often charged ahead.
Where Eugene’s city manager system of government has
often left entrenched, car-oriented bureaucrats in charge,
Portland has responsive elected offi cials with real power to
hire and back up innovators for quick change.
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10 JANUARY 20, 2011 EUGENE WEEKLY
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