Speaking Bike-n-eese

Approximately 14 days ago I bought a road bike. A Scattante R-330. If you know what that means you know more about bikes then I do and if you don't know what that means you still probably know more about bikes then I do. Living in Portland, I have an opportunity not many people in big cities have and that's a substantial amount of bike friendly lanes, bridges and corridors to commute to safely commute to work. I, like too many others, live on one side of the city (SE) and work on the other side (Beaverton). I drive an dilapidated 98' Dodge Dakota that needs a number of repairs that I can no longer justify paying for, so instead of spending another $400 dollars on some new plugs, wires, wheels and flux capacitors this time I gave the $400 to a 20 something who lives in an upscale apartment under Broadway Bridge and seemed to have received a fairly decent bike from his parents which he posted on craigslist at a substantial discount in order to afford a trip to Vegas (true story).

In the past two weeks my inability to justify my carbon footprint has only been exacerbated by the Portland City Council and Mayor Sam Adams proposal to apply $20 million dollars of the cities transportation budget to improve upon the bike-ways of PDX. To put this in context the average mile of road costs $6 million dollars to complete and the overall cost of the construction of the bike-ways of Portland so far has been approximately $6 million. The city believes that this increase in infrastructure will help to cultivate the PDX bike culture and raise the approximate percentage of the city residents that are bike commuters from 5% to 25%.