The Bike Nazi

Did you catch the Oregonian's article today about Mia Birk, the women who ran Portland's bike transportation office in the mid 1990's?

It reveals a lot. But heck, what do they care if they reveal a lot? What are going to do about it?

The article starts out basically laughing about how Birk got the city road crews to restripe a freshly paved street with a bike lane, reducing the car lanes, and basically blowing off the businesses that complained. "We had two mottoes that guided us in those days," she explained at a conference years later. "One was, go like hell until you can't go no more, and the other was, it was easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission."

The article chronicles how she pushed to put bike lanes on nearly every major city arterial, assisted by the Bicylce Transportation Alliance who didn't want bikers to be relegated to bike trails and low traffic streets.

She proudly admits that she is a social engineer. "My philosophy is, you treat the system how you want people to act," she says. "So we put in bike lanes because we want people to bicycle."

And then this:

"In essence," she says, "we've been involved in a grand social experiment, if you will, asking and answering the question, 'Can we transform and adapt a large, car-oriented city into one in which cycling is an integral part of daily life?' "

Maybe it' just me, but I for one get pretty nervous when liberals start talking about grand social experiments.


.....Meanwhile, over on the editorial page, the authors apologize for criticizing the Eastbank Esplanade, ask for more and more of the same, and finish with:

"Amsterdam spends about $36 per citizen a year on its bicycle/pedestrian infrastructure. Portland spends about $2 a person, per year. We have, in other words, only just begun."

They literally do want to turn Portland into a European style city. They are quickly ruining this place.