On 4/5/2021 4:53 AM, Sepp Ruf wrote:
jbeattie wrote:

Since when is being able to see "safety inflation"? Let's go for a night
ride sometime, you and your bottle dyno and light, and me and my whatever
light I chose. I'll wait for you at the bottom. On flat roads and the
bike path through South Waterfront I can get by with a little flea-watt
flasher or a clip on flashlight from 1968 -- or my old Wonder Light. But
that is not where I do (or did pre DST) most of my riding.

Frank is not acquainted with Portland's exotic rain-forest, mountain-bunny
routes. If you are interested in a regular contest, ask a local, like your
son, to take the dyno lamp. Make sure you use Specialized's prototype Zn-C
matrix battery fork for extra power!

Not many years ago I was quite familiar with Portland. I would visit
there for maybe a week at a time at least once every year. About the
bike routes, my recollections:

Portland's older residential areas are in a flat river plain. I remember
grid style streets, lots of lovely old architecture, with shops,
restaurants and pubs sprinkled through mixed-use neighborhoods making
for short travel distances. Lots of bikes, of course, but also an
unusually good public transit system. They still have streetcars on
steel rails, lots of buses plus a light rail system.

But the farther you get from the oldest residential areas, the more U.S.
normal the area gets. And in particular, immediately west of the older
areas are some amazing hills that act as a barrier between old Portland
and general PDX. (I gather Jay lives on one of those hills.) There are
forest areas there, fancy houses with amazing views over the city, and a
nature preserve or two. I remember a road or two in that area that was
an amazing miles-long rural-esque high speed downhill into the city.

West beyond that it gets to be mostly American suburbia, former country
roads that now sprout spaghetti-plan housing developments, the opposite
of a grid. That's still Portland, but it's not Portlandia. There are (or
were) bike lanes on some of those roads, but I saw few people using
them. Cars dominate, as elsewhere in the U.S.

And really, bikes don't dominate Portland at all. Car traffic downtown
is intense and clotted. The claim of 6% (or whatever) bike mode share is
by survey of only residents inside city limits, not of all road users.
That 6% is dominated by the trendy folk in those old grid neighborhoods.
So many people drive in from suburbs that the major freeways back up to
crawling speed for miles almost every day.

Jay is not unique, as he said; but at the same time, Jay is not a
typical Portland cyclist. I don't think a typical one commutes with
Jay's consistency or over his distance, and I think only a small
percentage would regularly challenge the hills he does.

Those are my recollections from some years ago. I haven't been out there
recently. Jay may want to correct me.

--
- Frank Krygowski