Bridge Pedal report

Portland's a good place to cycle.

After I took up cycling again a few years ago (with a big break since high school), the first event I took part in was the Portland Bridge Pedal. It's sponsored by the local Providence chain of hospitals, who put us back together after a biking accident a couple of summers ago, so we like them.

Portland has 10 bridges crossing the Willamette River through the heart of town. It's a navigable river, so those are all either draw-bridges of one sort or another, or they're really high off the water. Last Sunday, for the first time since the beginning, none was under construction and all were available for the ride. It was really quite something. (If you want to see that link, don't dilly-dally; after about a week the Oregonian moves its online stories behind a pay-per-view firewall. And forget about photos on the website, although, apparently they invite people to send them in--they just don't publish them online.)

It's fun to be cycling over big interstate bridges where you normally don't have time to rubberneck even in a car, let alone stop and enjoy the skyline. It's also fun to be part of something so big--this year, there were 20,000 participants, some doing the 4-, 6-, or 10-bridge version of the tour, some doing a charity walk.

The event is in danger of becoming a victim of its own success, though. Twenty thousand bicycles is an awful lot. It's a whole lot. It's a shit load. in fact, it's one of the largest public rides on the planet.

At two or three points on the downtown part of the route, traffic bottlenecks had hundreds of riders standing around leaning on their bikes for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. The irony was painful in the extreme.

And the bottlenecks, in turn, made it all less safe, because all the same caffeine achievers who make rush hour traffic dangerous--in the apparent believe that almost causing a wreck just so they can be two car-lengths farther ahead in the lane over is a good idea--also make things like this dangerous when they get out of their SUVs and onto their bikes. Most of the throughways on the route were only blocked off from one direction--e.g., west-bound auto traffic went through, but the bikes had the east-bound lanes to themselves. Traffic cones or wooden barricades marked the layer boundary. With 20,000 riders of all different skill and ability levels, the theory is that the faster riders move left. Mostly that works, but sometimes it doesn't--especially when one of the things the newer riders haven't mastered yet is the principle of the slower riders staying to the right. So the impatient Type A's would zip outside the dotted line on the left--i.e., out of the bike lanes and into car traffic--and then back in again. I almost collided twice with idiots doing that, as they suddenly came merging back into the pack at speed from my left.

When I described all this to a friend of mine who's a runner, she said it sounded like the Bay to Breakers event in San Francisco: "Everyone does it once, it's more of a party than an exercise event and the real runners either skip it, or lower their expectations of performance." Yup.

Congressman and cycling enthusiast Earl Blumenhauer was at the Start line, inviting us to image for a day if bicycles took over Portland. Alas, we didn't have to imagine it, and it was a world of traffic jams. Stuck in traffic is still stuck in traffic. Just having to breathe different fumes. (The good news from Blumenauer was that the recent Transportation bill, which has amazing amounts of pork in it, has a lot of pork just for Oregon cyclists. Oink, oink, I guess. More irony.)

Motorists had to be suffer with some degree of patience all morning--most routes from A to B were either closed off entirely or temporarily one-way, the wrong way. Of course, Portland drivers have long known what they're up against even if some of them refuse to make their peace with it.

Turns out that the downtown street people have their axe to grind with the event, too. Early Sunday morning, the downtown streets are supposed to be theirs--that's the deal, I guess, the implied social contract--and a lot of them clearly resented having 20,000 spandex-wearing yuppie lemmings chasing them off their turf. I passed two or three groups of street people during the morning, none doing much to disguise their unhappiness with the invasion. As I came past Pioneer Square on my way to the Start line, a really seedy looking character (although who knows--he could have been wearing his Sunday best) was shouting "I hope you all get killed!" at the riders going by.

(I'm happy to report that, although I saw a couple of ambulance runs on the 35-mile route, the riders in question appeared to be victims of road rash and not much more. At least I hope not.)

And I'll admit I was thinking in training terms, since I've got something coming up next month that has me a little nervous.

Still, shaking that off, it was a good ride. As a final touch: A crony met me at one of the little parks along Willamette Boulevard with one of his patented "orange creamsicles"--that would be orange juice, ice, vanilla ice cream, and orange vodka in a blender. Very refreshing, but since going down the Greeley hill (with about a zillion other riders) was coming up in a couple of minutes, I had to go easy. I recommend them, though.