From the Los Angeles Times

I recently spent a long weekend in Portland, Ore. The trip was for fun, but it was hard not to look and sometimes marvel at the many things that Portland does well on the transportation front and wonder if they can be applied here.

Of course, comparing the Portland area to the Southland is a bit unfair. The city of Portland has a population of about 537,000 (about 10% larger than Long Beach) and the metro area has about 2.1 million people. Los Angeles County alone has about 10 million people.

In other words, they've got the advantage of being smaller and in the world of urban planning, smaller usually translates to getting things done faster.


Census Bureau numbers from 2006 show that 4.1% of commuters in Portland use bikes to get to work compared with six-tenths of one percent in the city of Los Angeles. Portland transportation officials say that their own surveys show that actually 6% of the city's residents are pedaling to work -- tops in the nation for a large city.

I'd be skeptical of that number ordinarily. But on a Monday afternoon I sat on my rental bike watching the number of bike commuters heading out of downtown on the Hawthorne Bridge at rush hour. It was one bike after another on the bike lane on the bridge. Upon reaching the east side of the bridge, some cyclists used a special bike exit ramp to reach a bike path running along the Willamette. Amazing.