No cars go

It’s been a week since Brett Robert Jarolimek, 31, was killed by a truck making a right-hand turn at the intersection of North Interstate and North Greeley. It’s been almost three weeks since Tracey Sparling, 19, was killed in the same situation (known as the “right hook”) at Southwest 14th and West Burnside streets.

These two tragic deaths in the past month underline what we have known for quite a while now: Something’s gotta give. As the number of cyclists in Portland continues to shoot up, tensions with drivers are obviously at a dangerous point. It is clear that action needs to be taken for everyone’s safety, and something has to be done to lower the vitriol spewed between cyclists and drivers.

(And if you think one side is to blame more than the other, you might want to think harder. Of the 221 detailed cyclist-crash investigations that the Portland Police Bureau completed between 2002 and 2006, the number one type of crash was the “right hook” kind, with number two being cyclists running stop signs.)

City Commissioner and mayoral candidate Sam Adams jumped right in, and last Friday declared an “emergency meeting to discuss the issues and brainstorm solutions to improve bike safety in our city,” reported www.bikeportland.org’s Jonathan Maus. A lot of higher-ups attended, including Police Chief Rosie Sizer and Multnomah County District Attorney Charles Sparks. Maus generally praised the meeting, saying that he felt the meeting “was a solid first step.”

Addressing these concerns is tough, because our road system simply wasn’t designed with bikes in mind. Mere bike lanes are, as this month’s events have shown, not going to be enough. Oregon traffic law dictates that in most situations, cyclists are subject to the same rules as motor vehicles. But cyclists are not motor vehicles, nor are they pedestrians. And while the rate of cyclist accidents in Portland is actually going down, these deaths and the mudslinging that’s resulted has shown that we are in need of an aggregate paradigm shift.

As for me, I’ll toss my vote out right now: Let’s make it harder to drive a car.

The fact of the matter is that most car use is unnecessary, especially in our fair city. According to the 2000 census, 20 percent of Portlanders commute without a car. While this might seem like something to brag about, it actually places us ninth for rates of non-car commuters in U.S. cities with a population above 500,000. We have one of the best public transit systems in the country and, recent tragedies aside, the most bike-friendly streets in the country, according to Bicycling magazine.

We don’t really need cars in our everyday personal lives. To those who are squeamish about cycling and public transit, I say with encouragement: lighten up. You’d be surprised by how much more refreshing and relaxing it is to get out of the car and be around living, breathing people, to have time to read a book on the bus or get fresh air on your bike. Give it a try.

Sure, leaving the car at home means everything goes a little more slowly. It means you have to lug the groceries home yourself. It means you have to cook a little more instead of getting food from the drive-thru. None of this is bad. In a world where stress rates climb high (not to mention obesity rates) and 25 percent of Americans report that they have no close friends they can confide in, there is little wrong with taking steps to slow down our lifestyles, and meeting fewer of the increasing demands asked of us.

Driving less does not have to butt heads with the love that so many Americans (this writer included) have for driving and their cars. It’s possible to love your car and not drive it every day. Taking the car out of everyday life doesn’t have to mean war between the hippies and the soccer moms.

True, the motor vehicles in the accidents this October were commercial trucks, not cars. But the measures that Adams and the like will be putting in place in the future should focus on favoring the cyclist, the pedestrian and public transit. They should take the motor vehicle down a few notches from its present status as king of the road. Perhaps they could raise taxes on gas and parking meters to make public transit cheaper and more available.

We tend to pat ourselves on the back for how alternative-transport friendly our city is, so let’s go the extra mile. Let’s make it a wonderful and easy thing to get out of a car in Portland, without demonizing automobile lovers or forcing a wedge between drivers and cyclists. Let’s have a new vision for a new way to get around.

That’s my paradigm shift.