Rich Mintz  

Portland community activist Mia Birk has probably done as much as anyone in the United States to advance a subculture in which driving everywhere alone in a car is not taken for granted as the only legitimate transportation option. Janette Sadik-Khan’s and Mike Bloomberg’s transformative changes to New York probably wouldn’t have happened in the way they have without Birk and her merry band of Portland trailblazers (see what I did there?).

You should of course buy Birk’s book Joyride: Pedaling Toward A Healthier Planet, but in the meantime, take heed of her “50 Keys to Transforming Communities and Empowering People, One Pedal Stroke at a Time” (PDF). These 50 principles are not earth-shattering, and most of them are obvious when you think about them; they amount to a mix of traditional community organizing tactics, common-sense urban design principles, and social equity.

If you want a bike-friendlier community — or just a community that doesn’t take for granted that everyone drives alone in a car — you could do worse than starting with Birk’s principles — they’re a system that works if you work it. I’m going to write about these one at a time to try to illuminate them a bit from my own experience.

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Tags: bikes, Mia Birk, policy, transportation, urbanism

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