Is Portland making progress on getting more people biking and walking, and on making streets safer? What do you think is behind that trajectory?

I would challenge the premise that Portland is making enough progress in getting people to bike and walk. We have made some meaningful improvements to street safety, but we have not done enough to get more Portlanders choosing to bike or walk for everyday trips.

Portland's own 2025 bicycle count found that the number of people biking remained essentially flat for the second consecutive year. BIKETOWN ridership also declined in 2025, despite the expansion of the e-bike fleet. That tells me that simply building more bike infrastructure does not automatically mean more people will use it.

I do think there are examples where Portland's street redesigns are making a measurable difference. For example, the SE Hawthorne improvements reduced speeding, improved bus travel times, and created better conditions for people walking and biking. The city has also reported meaningful safety improvements on several high-crash corridors.

The bigger question is why aren't more people choosing these modes? I think convenience, safety, connectivity, and reliability all matter. A bike lane that ends unexpectedly, a dangerous intersection, poor lighting, or a long gap between safe crossings can make an entire trip feel inaccessible. Walking has a similar challenge: Portland needs more continuous sidewalks, safer crossings, better lighting, and better connections between neighborhoods, transit, schools, and business districts.

I would focus less on simply counting how many miles of bike lanes we build and more on whether people are actually changing how they travel. We should set measurable goals for walking, biking, and transit use, track them by neighborhood, and invest where the infrastructure is most likely to change behavior.

Portland should absolutely continue making streets safer, but the goal should be bigger than infrastructure. We need to make walking and biking safe, convenient, and practical enough that more people actually choose them.

Portland has made modest progress on street safety, but we need more convincing progress on getting more people biking and walking.

I’m encouraged that traffic deaths fell from 69 in 2023 to 39 in 2025. This is a significant improvement, and the people doing safety work deserve credit. But 39 deaths are still 39 too many, and more than half of the people killed in 2025 were pedestrians. Meanwhile, the city’s bicycle counts were essentially flat for a second year. I would not call that the growth Portland says it wants.

The trajectories we’re seeing represent both piecemeal success and systemic inertia. Safer crossings, lower speeds, and better bikeways help. But a person deciding whether to bike or walk a routine trip experiences the whole route: the uncomfortable crossing, the gap in a bike lane, the missing sidewalk, or the facility that is poorly maintained. One good project cannot overcome several places along the trip that feel unsafe.

If elected, I would do everything I could to help Councilors Loretta Smith and Mitch Green obtain funding for their Sidewalk Improvement and Paving Program (SIPP) initiative and push it through to the success it deserves. SIPP is one of the few, comprehensive transportation-related strategies that the “new” City Council worked on, but it has stalled out for too long.

No. I think we are regressing, continuing a sad trend that I’ve watched unfold over the past 10 years. When I moved to Portland, I was so excited to live in a city that took biking seriously as a mode of transportation. Seeing all the bikes parked outside the bars on a Saturday night was such a thrill. I bought a bike and went without a car for more than 10 years. I was committed to it.

I think some of that came from the nostalgic feelings I had about biking as a child. I was a kid in the 1980s and ’90s, and biking was how I got around and experienced freedom. I explored everywhere on my bike, even though there was virtually no biking infrastructure where I grew up, and no adult told me I couldn’t.

I worry that the younger generations haven’t always had that same experience. Between more protective parenting, social media, and changing childhood habits, many kids that are now adults may never have experienced a bicycle as a real form of transportation and independence. If you don’t grow up with that experience, getting on a bike as an adult may not have the same appeal or spark the same sense of joy and freedom that it did for me.

I also think the smartphone era has made biking feel more precarious. I don’t ride nearly as much as I once did because I’m increasingly concerned about distracted drivers not seeing me. That’s an unfortunate trend that even great bike infrastructure may not be able to fully address.

Infrastructure is important, but so is rebuilding a culture around biking. Encouraging children to start biking when they’re young, giving them the freedom to ride independently and explore their world on their terms, and supporting biking as a family activity could help make bicycles an important part of daily life in Portland again, not just as recreation, but as transportation and a healthy source of independence and freedom.

One of my signature pieces of legislation from my short first term was recommitting the city to ending traffic deaths and serious injuries on our streets, after years of rising, senseless deaths. This process, which I was able to organize as a unanimous vote, secured significant administrative and fiscal resources for street design improvements and safety measures. I also was able to direct the implementation of some nimble, low-cost safety measures like curb daylighting and ending right turns on red at our most dangerous intersections. I can say that at the city level there is progress, but it’s not enough and the work is not done. Just this week I spoke to the mother of a middle school student who was struck and injured on her bike by a driver making a turn at a low-visibility intersection. We have continued to see traffic fatalities, including in my district. I am confident that the trajectory is changing, but this is not an issue when you can say it’s “good enough,” when people are still being hurt and killed on our streets.

yes. i like the stop lights / crosswalks and the timing on the changing. more People less parking.

Portland is making some progress on street safety, but bicycle commuting is down and remains is below pre-pandemic levels.

There are likely several reasons. More people are working remotely since the pandemic is certainly a big part of it. I also think we should look at whether public safety, street homelessness, and reduced activity in parts of downtown have discouraged some people from biking and walking.

I think we have unfortunately fallen far behind on this. Portland used to lead with bold vision, yet we now seem to be stuck in a malaise. Part of this is cultural, with gentrification and COVID leading to an increase in driving culture, while the other is political will. Sadly, the City of Portland seems resigned to decline rather than seizing it as a motivating call to action.

While I think PBOT generally does a solid job when it actually builds bike and pedestrian infrastructure, the implementation is too slow and doesn't seem to follow a strong, cohesive vision. Our bike network is still too fragmented and piecemeal. A good example of this would be the bikeway on Washington starting at 76th Ave and going up to 82nd. It starts off as solid infrastructure and then suddenly drops off. It makes me wonder who would actually use it when it feels like more of a demo of an idea rather than something applicable to someone's day-to-day reality. You can find examples like this all over the city, great ideas that unfortunately manifest as half-measures in their implementation. We have incredibly talented people at PBOT that unfortunately seem held back by a lack of political will to do the bold thing. The current City Council has a role in this too, with little in the way of bike legislation passed or even proposed since they took the oath in 2025.

It would be easy for the Council to say, "we just don't have the money," but I think it is more of a limitation of imagination than anything else. Look at "Better Naito" as an example and what Better Block was able to accomplish in 2015. What started off as safety cones eventually became solid infrastructure. We can implement pilot projects all over the city to demonstrate their value with little to no expense. We can alleviate the fears of drivers by pointing to a project's temporary "pilot" status while tracking 'real-world' (rather than theoretical) traffic data.

The 2025 Bicycle Count report from the Portland Bureau of Transportation found that the number of people biking remained steady for the second year in a row (see https://www.portland.gov/transportation/walking-biking-transit-safety/bicycle-counts and https://bikeportland.org/2026/04/10/city-reports-steady-not-stagnant-bicycle-use-in-2025-count-report-399860). But before that, we had years of declining numbers.

I think a number of factors have driven declining and now steady numbers. The COVID pandemic really changed where and when people work, and many people who used to commute by bike are probably working remotely without any commute at all. Or, people who work hybrid schedules may only commute two or three days/week rather than five. And along with these different work schedules may come more complicated and less repetitive trip patterns that combine different patterns of errands and travel on different days, disrupting bicycling efforts. (At the same time, it makes sense to me that COVID may have increased recreational cycling, but this perhaps doesn’t translate into the same number of trips as bike commuting.) Infrastructure is also part of the problem - there are places in the city that lack basic infrastructure that makes bicycling easier and safer. However, it doesn’t really make sense that we have continued to make improvements in bicycling infrastructure while seeing a reduction in mode share from ten years ago.

I think one important factor is making the streets safer and thus more welcoming to people who want to ride bikes but are afraid to. I am proud that the Fixing Our Streets gas tax that I championed has helped strengthen Safe Routes to School and made a lot of specific intersections safer. But my impression is that driver behavior got worse during the pandemic and has not improved. One enforcement strategy we have to use more is red light and speed cameras – and one city that performs better than Portland on traffic fatality rates is New York City, which has ⅓ of the fatalities per capita that we do. There are a variety of reasons for that - but one important factor is that they have 3,000 speed and red light cameras, and we have something like 40, even though we have a third of the lane miles as New York City. I am constantly nagging PBOT about whether we can increase the number of speed and red light cameras that we have. PBOT hopes that with their new, hopefully more competent and efficient, contractor, it might be possible to add more cameras without costing the city any additional money. The courts are another possible barrier since they process the tickets given by cameras, and need the resources to do so, but I’ve talked to the Multnomah County court administrator and she thinks the Legislature should be willing to provide the courts with the staff needed for additional cameras. I need to check in with PBOT to see if we are in a position where we have a basis for asking the next Legislature for those resources. In fact I’ll send that email right now.

I’d note that I asked a similar question at a Bike Happy Hour in 2024, and I was really impressed by the thoughtful responses from BikePortland readers in the comment section of the article: https://bikeportland.org/2024/10/17/council-candidate-steve-novick-has-some-questions-for-the-bike-community-390690

As you know, Roger Geller thinks that part of our problem has been that bicycling has just kind of dropped out of the public discourse from where we were 10 years ago. I want to try Roger’’s multi-pronged proposal to restore mode share, including an organized framework of rides.

https://bikeportland.org/2024/11/15/roger-geller-has-a-plan-to-spur-portlands-cycling-renaissance-391332

I think the trajectory is mixed. Portland continues to build safer bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, and recent traffic-safety data are encouraging, but one of the key performance indicators has to be whether more people are actually walking and biking.

On bicycling, we have not yet reversed the decline. Portland’s bicycle counts rose through the mid-2010s, declined substantially afterward, and have only recently begun to stabilize. At locations counted in both 2024 and 2025, bicycle volumes increased just 1%. That is better than continued decline, but it is not yet the growth we need.

I think that matters because infrastructure mileage alone cannot be our measure of success. Portland’s own Bicycle Plan treats bicycle mode share, network completion, connectivity, safety, and access to low-stress routes as performance measures. We should be asking not only “how many miles did we build?” but “did more people use the system, did they feel safe using it, and can they actually reach everyday destinations?”

I think the current trajectory reflects several things: remote work changed commute patterns, but the decline in bicycling began before the pandemic; parts of the network are still disconnected or stressful; and cost and availability have affected BIKETOWN. Portland has made substantial infrastructure investments, but we have not yet translated those investments into sustained ridership growth.

For me, the next phase is about outcomes. Complete the low-stress network, maintain it well, make it useful for ordinary trips, and then measure whether more Portlanders are actually choosing to walk and bike.

We are not doing enough to make Portland’s streets safe, and that needs to remain the starting point for Vision Zero. Recent deaths have reinforced the need to focus on the conditions that make streets dangerous, particularly for people walking and biking. The City has made meaningful investments in traffic calming, safer crossings, speed management and bike buses, but we need to turn those efforts into a connected system that prevents serious crashes. We also need better ways to measure how people are traveling as trips have become more distributed since COVID. I want to focus limited resources on the High Crash Network, measure whether projects actually reduce speeds and crashes, and build on what works.

We’re making progress on street safety, but we aren’t making enough progress on getting more people to bike. Traffic deaths declined from 69 in 2023 to 56 in 2024 and 39 in 2025, which is encouraging. But bicycle counts remained essentially flat last year, increasing just 1% at locations counted in both 2024 and 2025.

Portland has set a goal of having 25% of trips made by bicycle by 2030, and we are clearly not on track to meet it. I think one reason is that our bicycle network still has too many gaps. A protected bike lane is only as useful as the connections on either end of it. If we want more Portlanders to choose biking, particularly people who aren’t already confident cyclists, we need connected routes, safer intersections and crossings, and infrastructure that makes biking a practical and comfortable choice from the beginning of a trip to the end.

i mean there is more and more homeless every year, so they usually bike and walk, there is always a silver lining to every tragedy

No. Currently I would say for crash deaths we are going to match or have more then last year, on top of of response times being stretched for emergency response, we make it difficult for victims to get help in a timely manner and until we can do that we will continue to have problems. We need to make it clear if you drive you need to be aware in the city limits.

It is primarily through grassroots, citizen action (like Bike Loud, Safe Routes to Schools or Oregon Walks) that we will encourage biking and walking. Since the pandemic and the loss of a better funded traffic division in the Police Bureau, we have created a lot of driving scofflaws that continue to speed and make the streets unsafe. We need more actions like citizens holding up signs in dangerous corridors during commute hours accompanied by police bureau traffic stings (which I’ve found immensely satisfying)!

I'll speak to biking specifically since I am not sure about walking and streets. The number of Portlanders riding bikes is mostly flat. I attribute that to our current bike plan that prioritizes the bike commuter who travels along an interconnected cross-city system. That leaves out the vast majority of people like me who are middle aged out-of-shape parents who just want to get to the local taquería. It also presumes that people who bike will choose that mode for every distance, but we can do a much better job of connecting bike infrastructure to transit infrastructure. So we should redesign the plan so it connects people within their own neighborhoods to their own local resources and so that it helps solve the first mile, last mile problem for transit.

Portland is making progress for active transportation and safety, but we can still do more, and we can’t get too comfortable with these incremental wins in some areas. We’re still seeing East Portland and SW Portland disproportionately impacted by traffic crashes, injuries and deaths and poor infrastructure like missing sidewalks and high-speed roads with dangerous intersections. We’re making progress with new revenue streams but still need to address fairness instead of regressiveness with the Transportation Utility Fee. The state legislature failed to pass a comprehensive transportation package to address even the most basic maintenance and operations needs and failed to stabilize our transit system in the Portland Metro area. We can’t celebrate progress until the legislature prioritizes walking, biking and transit instead of megaprojects and freeway expansions. I’m raising this issue at every chance I get, and submitted these items as my top priorities for Salem to work on for Portland. We also have to protect the Portland Clean Energy Fund from being raided for the Moda Center renovations, for police, or other uses that are not even remotely aligned with the voters intent for PCEF.

We need to create more walking or bike only community spaces and increase the requirement of bike parking inside and outside of new construction and high value remodeling.

I would work more closely with banks in Oregon and request that they create a non-credit banking product to fund more bike, safety, and riding equipment purchases. Getting a bike, is just part of the issue. Bikers need helmets, bags, lights and pumps for safety and maintenance.

I would also advocate for the parks bureau to address biking activities and create a city map of bike paths.

It's getting better. Closing some of the Max stations downtown helps get people walking more. Promoting the Springwater Corridor is always a good idea. Keeping bike paths clear of homeless camps is very important.

Based on the data I can find, there seems to be progress made on safety as measured by traffic and pedestrian deaths, but bicycle counts have been flat for a few years. Of course, that is just documentation of a trajectory, not an explanation. I would want to find out what is preventing non-bikers from taking it up, and if regular bikers are reducing their trips, why.

I think Portland is absolutely making progress, especially when it comes to safety and accessibility, even if we still have a long way to go.

In addition to the greenways, I really like the city’s protected bike lanes and sidewalk bump-outs that make travel safer. Safe Routes to School is another program I’m very supportive of, because parents should always feel comfortable letting their children bike or walk to school. It’s good to get kids used to healthy, safe, and emission-free transportation, because those habits can last a lifetime. I also support Vision Zero and its focus on making our most dangerous streets safer.

A lot of this progress comes from sustained public pressure on the local government. We still have major gaps in sidewalks and safe crossings, especially in East Portland, and those neighborhoods deserve the same level of investment. The next step is making sure that progress reaches every part of the city, and I think it’s City Council’s job to listen to the people who use these streets every day and respond to what they need.