PORTLAND PRESS HERALD • April 19, 2024
I’m selling my bike. Until I moved to Maine, biking from A to B was one of the great day-to-day pleasures of my life. I didn’t think Portland would take it from me; I was wrong. It’s really hard to bike in and around Portland. It shouldn’t be. The city is eminently bikeable. It’s packed with people who are physically active, environmentally minded and interested in using bikes to get around it. But the car is king, its reign tyrannical. It’s really hard to reconcile the nature of the place and its residents with the screaming lack of bikes. We need many more functioning bike lanes; we need to upgrade the uninviting public bike scheme, encouraging more willing people to take bikes around casually and intermittently; we need places to safely park bikes, of which there are very few; and we need PSAs to rouse inattentive motorists and pedestrians. ~ Siobhán Brett