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 Former Portland Bicycle Coordinator and Joyride: Pedaling Toward a Healthier Planet author Mia Birk is visiting Fort Collins June 9 and 10 for a bicycle planning workshop with regional planners. When Birk arrived in Portland in 1993, the city had 65 miles of bikeways, mostly unconnected, and several of which were a dirt road on the side of a hill in Forest Park (a great ride, but not very useful for commuting). When she left in 1999, there were 215 miles of mostly interconnected bikeways. In 2003, Portland was awarded the first Platinum Bicycle Friendly Community rating from the League of American Bicyclists. Today, Portland has the highest bike commuter rate of any big city in America.
Birk was instrumental in changing the attitudes of hundreds of planners, engineers, citizens, authorities, and commuters concerning cyclists. She got bike parking codified into Portland’s Planning and Zoning Code. She offloaded Bike to Work Day on a nonprofit organization so she could focus her time on the Bicycle Master Plan and create a system of bikeways. She helped to get most of the bridges accessible by bike. She played a major role in getting colored bike lanes installed on tricky or dangerous streets. She was involved in getting “sharrow” bike street markings approved and installed.
These days, Birk is the President of Alta Planning + Design - a bike-centric consulting firm - and spends much of her time traveling across North America working on bike planning with advocates and governments and working on bike plans. She’s also an Adjunct Professor at Portland State University, where she co-founded the Initiative for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation in the College of Urban Studies.
These successes and many more are recounted in Birk’s new book. But the book’s most relevant message for the world outside Portlandia is that Portland is not any different from any other American city. Portland was built for cars. And with a little work, a little support from the right politicians and insiders, some good leadership, and a little money, Anywheresville, USA can become just as bicycle-friendly as Portland, if not considerably more friendly.
Fort Collins is already extremely bike-friendly. We’re third in the nation in per-capita bike commuters (9.9% compared to larger Portland’s 5.8%); a Gold rated Bicycle Friendly Community; and have one of the highest rates of bike lanes per capita in the nation. So what do we have to learn from Mia Birk and Portland? Fort Collins Bicycle Coordinator Dave Kemp has already learned a few lessons. “In August of last year, I attended the IBPI workshop hosted by Portland State University,” Kemp said,
“I arrived the weekend before the week-long workshop and met Mia right in front of her house during the Sunday Parkways event. Thousands of Portlanders were out riding and walking throughout the network of closed streets. It was a celebration of our streets, a reclaiming of streets to inspire livability, neighborhood vitality, and sensible modes of transportation and walking. The subsequent IBPI course that week was amazing and extremely valuable to me. We toured the City and discussed innovative facility improvements to make cycling more conducive: shared lane markings, bike boxes, buffered bike lanes, bike trails, traffic lights specific to cyclists, bike boulevards. My visit to Portland and the intensive workshop inspired me to include these infrastructure improvements as recommendations in the City's Bicycle Safety Education Plan, which was adopted by City Council on March 1, 2011. Since then, we've installed shared lane markings along Mountain Avenue through downtown. We'll also be installing our City's first bike box at the intersection of Shields and Plum (adjacent to CSU).”
Birk wouldn’t elaborate on her recommendations for Fort Collins before seeing it for herself.
Birk will be at New Belgium Brewery for a speaking event and to sign copies of her new book on Thursday, June 9. She will be facilitating a bicycle planning workshop for municipal and county staff and elected officials on Friday, June 10. This is part of a Northern Colorado regional bike program called Bike Wise. Friday afternoon, The Bike Wise posse will take Birk for a public ride through Fort Collins, followed by a dinner with local cycling advocates and planners.
“I hope Mia's visit to Fort Collins re-inspires our community leaders to focus on bicycle transportation, recreation, and tourist destination opportunities,” Kemp said, “my role as Bicycle Coordinator is to maintain and propel the momentum the Fort Collins cycling community has created. Mia's visit will surely help these efforts and, yes, we are very excited.”
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