I have seen one elephant who wasn’t in a zoo or otherwise in captivity. Even if I hadn’t seen that pachyderm, and even though I am, shall we say, a bit more corpulent than I was thirty years ago, I don’t know how an elephant could get into my pajamas—or on my bike.
He looks like a hippie who became a prep-school Latin teacher. For me, that was his charm.
And it probably helped him to be effective at his job.
Since 1996, he could be seen with a bow tie between the wings of his shirt collar—and a fluorescent bicycle pin on the lapel of his blazer.
Perhaps not surprisingly, he’s been the best friend cyclists have had in the US Congress in, oh, a century or so. In addition to crafting legislation that allocated money for cycling and pedestrian infrastructure, and for making his hometown the “poster child” for livable, sustainable cities—at least among US cities—he helped to expand healthcare coverage through the Affordable Care Act, save over 100,000 restaurants during the COVID and—in something almost un-heard of these days— worked with a member of the opposing party to create a pathway to permanent legal status for Iraqi and Afghan nationals who directly supported US military missions in their countries.
Perhaps it will not surprise you to learn that he has represented Oregon’s 3rd Congressional District—which includes most of Portland. In fact, he has been called “Mr. Portland.”
Earl Blumenauer has just announced that he is not running for re-election next year. I guess it is understandable: Not only has he spent 27 years in Congress; he is 75 years old.
He has not been specific about his “next chapter.” The Democratic legislator said, however, that he plans to continue his work to “make communities more livable, people safer, healthier and more economically secure…without the burden of day-to-day politics.”
Thank you, Earl Blumenauer, for all you’ve done. And I wish you well in whatever comes next.
One valid criticism of bike lanes, and bicycle infrastructure generally, is that they’re constructed mainly in gentrified or gentrifying neighborhoods. Whenever someone suggests that the lanes, bike parking facilities and bike share programs into neighborhoods populated by people who are darker or poorer than those in Williamsburg or Chelsea, the excuse for not “sharing the wealth ,” if you will, is that “people don’t ride bikes” in areas like Jamaica, Queens.
That is a point Samuel Santella makes on Streetsblog. He lives in Saint Albans, a southern Queens community that is a “transportation desert:” it is not served by the New York City subway system and only a couple of bus lines traverse it. So, its residents—nearly 90 percent of whom are Black—either drive or, like Santella, ride their bicycles, whether to their destinations or to the subway in nearby Jamaica.
Sound on for commentary pls 🙏 pic.twitter.com/HHzMHZhQSI
— Samuel Santaella 🚎🤝🚲 (@TransitNinja205) November 11, 2021
Many New York City neighborhoods like Jamaica have a “downtown” that is a commercial district and transportation hub. Santella, as he recounts in his piece, rides to Jamaica to take the subway to Brooklyn. He shows how it’s difficult to cycle safely on any of the thoroughfares that lead to the train stations. Hillside and Jamaica Avenues are essentially “stroads,” while Archer Avenue has a bus lane that are, technically, illegal for cycling. And all of those streets are chaotic messes of delivery vehicles and “dollar vans” that ferry people from neighborhoods like his to the subway and Long Island Rail Road (yes, it’s spelled as two words) stations.
I know what he’s talking about: I sometimes ride those streets. As a matter of fact, I cycled them almost daily for seven years, when I worked at York College, in the middle of Jamaica. I experienced some of the pandemonium he describes, which is undoubtedly worse than it was when I was making the commute in pre-pandemic, pre-Uber days when SUVs, while growing in popularity, didn’t dominate the roads as they do now.
