This weekend, I've signed up to volunteer at the Cully Sunday Parkways.
Since PBOT eliminated the Roving Bike Mechanic position after the 2019 Parkways, I now volunteer as an Info Booth helper.
I do this for two reasons:
1. It allows me to work while sitting in the shade and use my comfort with public engagement to my best ability. This has been a wise move since the pandemic changed my body and my stamina.
2. My only other option would be as an "Intersection Superhero," a position that means dealing with drivers trying to get through or around the designated car-free route. From past experience, this can often turn nasty.
When I volunteered as a roving mechanic (from 2008 through 2019), my job was to help bike riders with mechanical breakdowns along the route. I enjoyed being able to ride and to help bike riders get their bikes functional again.
(Photo: 2009 Parkways, a happier time.)
However, during the last three years of my 14-year stint as a roving mechanic, I was often asked to get off my bike and step up as an ad-hoc Intersection Superhero -- either because there was no one monitoring a given intersection, or more often because the assigned Intersection monitor was having difficulty with an aggressive driver who insisted on driving on the closed route, safety be damned.
In several instances, I was threatened by angry drivers; in two instances, drivers tried to scare me by accelerating their cars in my direction. The second time it happened, I didn't get out of the way fast enough and the bumper grazed my knee painfully before the driver sped off -- technically a hit-and-run.
In 2018 and 2019, the final two years before Sunday Parkways was canceled by the pandemic, there were professional flaggers at only the most major intersections along the route, and no police presence. The Portland Police Bureau backed out citing budget constraints. I suspect that the absence of law enforcement allowed the most aggressive drivers to behave with more impunity than before.
In those two years, new routes were added in outer eastside Portland, area which are more car-dependent and served less frequently by transit. They are also areas where cars are a big part of the social culture of the Latino and Black communities that were pushed out of inner eastside by rising rents.
Adding street closures in those neighborhoods aroused the ire of many living there, and to my knowledge the pushback required some rerouting in subsequent years.
Nonetheless, I went ahead and signed up to be an Info Booth heler for one Parkways event this summer. I had enjoyed it last year and figured I'd return.
Then, I got the link to the Volunteer Training Video that all volunteers are asked to watch before showing up. I understood that the primary focus of the training was intended for Intersection Superheroes, but thought I ought to watch it just so I could say that I did.
And everything seemed okay until I got to this screenshot, and the voiceover that came shortly afterwards.
Here's the screenshot.
"Remember, your first priority is to assist neighbors in cars."
And that's when I knew that this would likely be the last summer I'd volunteer at Sunday Parkways.
Because the whole point of Parkways has been to provide Portlanders with a way to enjoy car-free streets for a few hours, three or four times a summer. That means closing off streets to motorized vehicles for that purpose. It's based on Ciclovia, the weekly car-free event that takes place along miles of streets in Bogota, Colombia. This being an American city where cars are still king, there's no way we could get away with staging a weekly event like that here.
PBOT has done outreach to neighborhoods in the communities hosting a Parkways event to let them know how it works and what it's for, and give them enough advance notice so they can make alternate arrangements for the one day of the summer when a four- or five-mile circuit of streets will be closed to cars.
In recent years, that outreach simply has not been as effective, due to a lot of practical and social reasons -- and due to the lack of a police presence at the events.
Whether it's because Covid changed peoples' brains -- and I believe it did, in some part -- or because Parkways has had a hard time connecting with communities of color and low-income folks -- which it always has, to be honest -- it's simply gotten harder to maintain the event as it has been since 2008.
We don't live in that Portland anymore, and it feels like PBOT, BikeLoud and other advocates for bike riders, pedestrians and transit users are currently fighting more of an uphill battle than ever before. Because Covid, rising homelessness, job insecurity, the fentanyl epidemic, mental health woes and nationwide polarization have made us all sadder, more afraid, angrier and less willing to find common ground with each other, and more likely to hole up in our silos.
As of today, PBOT still doesn't have enough people willing to volunteer as Intersection Superheroes for this Sunday's event in Cully neighborhood.
