As May is National Bike Month, we at Oregon Walks wanted to take time to highlight BikeLoud PDX and their work, and also show how the work of advocating for people riding bikes and pedestrians has more in common than not. We sat down with BikeLoud’s board chair Aaron Kuehn and our own board chair Claire Vlach to discuss the work. Please note, our conversation lasted over an hour and has been condensed and edited for ease of reading. To Read Part Two of this interview, check out BikeLoud's newsletter Mid May! (When published, we will link it here!)
Q: Since May is National Bike Month, Aaron we will start with you. Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself, your work as BikeLoud’s board chair, and about BikeLoud in general?
Aaron Kuehn: I am a typographic artist and have a special interest in action-oriented people-centered planning and organizing. I'm now the chair of BikeLoud, and my only official task as chair is to run the meetings. That sounds pretty easy, but it ends up being a lot more work. There's 16 of us on our volunteer working-board, and we've got almost 400 general members that stay pretty active. There are 20-30 pots in the fire right now and all of them are valid and important. There is a lot of need in the city for safer and better spaces for walking and biking.
BikeLoud started in 2014, so we're coming up on our ten year anniversary. We did a successful campaign back then to have traffic-calming diverters installed on Clinton, Portland’s most traveled Neighborhood Greenway, that's when I first heard about BikeLoud. We became an official 501(c)(3) 2 years ago. When Sarah Pliner was killed at the 26th crossing of Powell Blvd, it resonated with advocates because we protested the removal of bike lanes there years earlier, and felt the City and State were complicit in her death. We organized a human-protected bike lane and were able to get the painted bike lanes put back, and that built some momentum. When the city tried to remove bike lanes on Broadway last summer we were already activated and able to mobilize quickly. We were successful in keeping those important protected bike lanes in place Downtown, but we often go from responding to one crisis to another.
Q: Thanks for waiting, Claire. Same question. Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself, your work for Oregon Walks as our board chair and what Oregon Walks board does in general.
Claire Vlach: Professionally, I'm an urban planner and designer, so my volunteer work at Oregon Walks is related. I joined Oregon Walks in 2016 at a Sunday Walkways event where Oregon Walks was tabling. I had been looking for volunteer opportunities, and a staff member said “you would be great for our Plans and Projects Committee!” I did that until last year when I finally agreed to join the board. As chair, my work is similar to Aaron's in that my primary duty is also to run meetings, but Oregon Walks is different since we have paid staff, so the work of the board is less about responding to what's happening in the streets and more about running the organization.
A big component of that is fundraising, so we’ve been planning the Walkstars which are coming up on June 22nd. We also look at who we want the organization to be going forward, and what sorts of things we want to focus on. There are so many things that we need to work on in the realm of pedestrian advocacy. We could work on things at the legislative or state level, at the Metro level, at the city level. We can work on policy, looking at things like no turn on red or clearing the corners. We can look at getting physical infrastructure built, things like crossings and more sidewalks. So the board needs to prioritize what we want to be working on as an organization.
Q: How do you explain your advocacy work to friends, colleagues, neighbors, associates who don't generally see themselves as cyclists or pedestrians? Or another way of saying it is, how do you win over folks who use cars as their main form of transportation and who may not have the passion for the work?
Claire: Even if they drive, they still have to get out of their car and walk to the door of wherever they're going. If you're ever going downtown or to one of our commercial streets like Hawthorne, you're probably going to have to cross the street. If you want that crossing to be safe, that's something that we are going to be working on that can benefit you.The other thing is that a lot of improvements that make things safer for pedestrians also make things safer for drivers. Clearing the corners makes things safer for everyone. Same with speed, speeding is dangerous for drivers, too.
Aaron: I totally agree. BikeLoud has a goal to get ¼ of transportation trips in the city done by bicycle. But instead of ¼ of the people making all of their trips by bike, we hope almost all people can make just one of their daily trips by bike. We still understand the utility of the car. It's useful. It has its place, and it has places that it's not really useful and it's not the best choice.Where I live, I can choose to walk, bike, take transit, or drive for most trips. But not everyone lives somewhere like that. BikeLoud is trying to create conditions where all people have choices and options, so anyone can choose to ride a bike for one of their trips.
Claire: In terms of winning over folks there’s that question of “why should you walk?” People already know what some of the benefits are: it's healthy, you get to be in your community, meet neighbors, see the flowers, hear the birds. But just because it can be pleasant doesn't mean it always is when you're in town and there are cars all around you. So I think it's about making it a safer and more pleasant activity that people will want to do.
Q: Where do you both see the needs of people riding bikes and pedestrians intersecting, generally and specifically in the Portland metropolitan area?
Claire: I think a lot of it comes down to safety. Anything that slows down traffic, makes crossings safer, and separates cars from people who are more vulnerable because they're not in a giant protective metal box. Those are things that apply anywhere, not just in Portland. Specific to the metro area, we’re talking about making our state orphan highways and the Vision Zero Network safer. It’s about making sure that our most dangerous streets are tamed so that people aren't dying out there.
Aaron: I like to look at the city from a civic space perspective and so what happens in cities which are quite dense or proximal is that things should happen at a human scale. Things are at eye level. We're mammals that need constant stimulation for our brains to work properly so a walkable city is fun. It's a city where communities connect together. As our cities were remade for the car that proximal city goes away and now you have communities where people are disconnected from each other. It's difficult to find connection and human contact when everyone is driving at high speed.
So in the work that we're doing I see a sort of accentuating and connecting the segments of the city that are most able to create what it is that we want, which is that connection with other people. And so we see that in street plazas, in walkable and bikeable places, and we see that in good street design in general, with sidewalks and car-free paths and activation.
Claire: There's a finite amount of space on the street. Bikes and pedestrians and transit should not be fighting each other for this space, we should all be working together to get the space that we need from the car space, right? Because there is so much more car space than there is of any other space. It doesn't matter if this extra foot goes to the sidewalk or to the bike lane, we should not be fighting over those scraps. We need the whole extra 10 or 11 feet from a car lane, and then we get much better infrastructure for everyone.
That wraps up Part One of the interview. Part Two will be coming out in BikeLoud's Newsletter mid-May, so please keep an eye out for it.