The golden bicycle

Portland State just received the title of Gold Bicycle Friendly University from the League of American Bicyclists, a national advocacy group that promotes bicycling for fun, fitness and transportation. While Portland is frequently being celebrated as a leading bicycling city, it’s great for PSU to receive honors like these to help bring positive exposure as we all graduate into the workforce.

Photo Miles Sanguinetti
Photo Miles Sanguinetti

Portland State just received the title of Gold Bicycle Friendly University from the League of American Bicyclists, a national advocacy group that promotes bicycling for fun, fitness and transportation. While Portland is frequently being celebrated as a leading bicycling city, it’s great for PSU to receive honors like these to help bring positive exposure as we all graduate into the workforce.

The league, which has a current membership of 300,000 affiliated cyclists, focuses on a handful of categories that are used to decide whether a college should be ranked as platinum, gold, silver or bronze. member. The organization cutely calls these criteria their “five E’s.”

The first of the five E’s is engineering, focusing on what’s been built on and incorporated into a campus to promote cycling; things like bicycle lanes, street policies and innovative bicycle accommodation. The bicycle lane on Southwest Broadway is a key example that probably boosted PSU’s ratings.

The league also focuses on education by attempting to determine how much information on bicycling safety is available to cyclists and motorists. Educating individuals on the correct use of pathways and sharing space with other modes of transportation is considered, and somehow Portland, despite all of the illegal sidewalk cycling and red-light pedaling we see from far too many bicyclists, impressed the judges, earning the city a platinum ranking.

Encouragement also plays a large part in the decision whether a campus is bicycle-friendly. If a school promotes bicycling by, say, having a month-long bicycle challenge, it gets kudos. Other incentive programs and organized campus rides also help boost a school in the rankings.

A fourth factor the league uses when determining whether a college has earned a gold or the epic platinum—membership is enforcement. The organization asks questions about how bicycle theft is prevented, what local law enforcement policies are and if the college is supporting campaigns to help cyclists and motorists safely share
driving space.

The final “E” considered is evaluation and planning. Much like it sounds, this is an evaluation on whether a college’s programs for increasing bicycle commuting are actually working and what the school’s plans are for future improvement.

Whether those are good criteria for establishing which are the most cycle-friendly universities, it got PSU placed in the gold membership category. The only university to rank higher than us was Stanford University—with its fancy amenities like locker room showers for cyclists and access to an epic bike station called the Palo Alto.

More important is how we beat out other prestigious colleges like Harvard and Cambridge with our awesomeness. We’ve even rolled over local competitors like the University of Oregon and Oregon State University, though why should they care about sustainable commuting choices when there’s money to throw at more important things like football?

Of course, the real joy should come from setting a great example and getting other colleges to be as bicycle-friendly as we are, but it’s still nice to know that PSU is at the top of the list for some things.

We’ve actually grown a considerable amount over the past decade. Students who regularly bicycle to PSU has increased from an impressive 6 percent in 2005 to a whopping 12 percent in 2012, according to The Oregonian.While that number seems small, it’s incredible that so many students choose to meet their transportation needs in the wettest and sweatiest way possible in order to save the world, one pedal at a time.

Our school has done a tremendous job of pushing the appeal of commuting by bicycle.

Back to that whole month-long bicycle challenge: It’s probably worth noting that PSU is actually currently in the middle of its Bike to PSU Challenge. Students can sign up and join a movement that tracks riders who are actively logging their trips, including how many miles they’ve logged, how much carbon dioxide has been saved and how many calories they’ve burned.

Impressive programs like these have played a huge part in developing PSU into an innovative place for forward-thinking, sustainable people, and they’re a great pick-me-up on those days when you just want to start hurling textbooks and screaming about the outrageous cost of tuition. Our university might not do everything right, or even do most things OK, but it does sustainability like a pro.