Free Public Forum: Building Cycling Cities - The Portland Success Story
Tuesday 12 October at 7pm
Prince Philip Theatre, Architecture Building, the University of Melbourne
Roger Geller
Bicycle Coordinator, City of Portland
Dare to build cities that promote the use of bicycles rather than cars – that’s the challenge laid out to Australian planners by Roger Geller, the Bicycle Coordinator at the City of Portland, USA.
Drawing on his direct experience of turning Portland - once a city of cars - into the most comprehensive bikeway network of any North American city, Geller will reveal his approach to managing bicycle capita and, planning projects in this free public forum.
Geller, who has been driving the change since 1994, believes that Australian cities have the potential to replicate the Portland experience:
‘The better you build cycling cities, the more people you'll attract,’ he says. ‘While engineering is the most important don't neglect the other "E's" of bicycling that are encouragement, education and enforcement, as well as evaluation of new designs and your overall efforts.’
Today Portland is made up of 314 miles of developed bikeways and another 47 miles funded for completion in the next few years. Geller says the initial goal was to make bicycling a part of daily life in Portland. That vision has now changed – its current policy directive is to create conditions so that bicycling is more attractive than driving for trips of 3 miles or less and, in doing so, become a world class cycling city. He says that the vision is doable: in 2008 the City Auditor report found that 8% of Portlanders identified the bicycle as their primary means of transportation to work and another 10% identified it as their secondary means of transportation to work. ‘We are aiming to achieve a 25% bicycle mode split by 2030 as our new goal,’ he says.
Roger Geller is the current Bicycle Coordinator at the City of Portland, Oregon. Roger has been Portland, Oregon’s Bicycle Coordinator since 2000 and has been with the city’s Bicycle Program since 1994. He has 15 years of experience managing bicycle capital, planning and policy projects. During this time he has contributed to the implementation of hundreds of miles of bikeways, the introduction of many innovations to Portland’s streets and planning vocabulary and to the successful evaluation of their effect.
Geller is in Melbourne in October as a keynote speaker at the Bike Futures 2010 Conference, hosted by Bicycle Victoria.
This is a Bike Futures event, co sponsored by Melbourne School of Design and GAMUT, coordinated by Bicycle Victoria.
Roger Geller: Download the lecture - Audio : Video
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