What's a bike box?

Before I set out this morning in my power chair, an article in USA Today about car-free Portland Oregon caught my eye. Known for its progressive urban mass transit, including the use of street cars, Portland has become attractive to those looking for easy ways to get around.

Among the smitten is Paul Kahn, a Philadelphia lawyer who recently arrived in Portland via Amtrak from Seattle. After hopping a MAX train for a seven-minute ride from downtown to lushly forested, 130-acre Washington Park, Kahn and his wife, Janet, are ensconced on a free shuttle bus that runs May through September between the zoo and two of the city's best-known attractions, the International Rose Test Garden and the Japanese Garden.

"We never considered renting a car, because it's so compact and easy to get around," says Kahn, whose appreciation of what he calls Portland's "edgy East Village" vibe extends to the tattoo of mountains and waterfalls that spreads across his middle-aged bus driver's right calf.

The city is also friendly to bicyclists and has added bike boxes, one of which is shown in the photo above. A bike box provides a lane running toward the front of the line of traffic that leads to an outlined box which allows a biker to go in front of stopped cars at an intersection to make a turn. Bike boxes are showing up in New York city and other urban areas, to make sharing the road safer. Cities like Washingon, D.C., New York, Santa Barbara, and the state of Virginia have developed park and ride your bike programs, ranging from offering discounts to those who use mass transit to weekly designated car free zones.

As a wheelchair user, I like the idea of a bike box as a buffer between me and the front of cars, especially trucks and SUV's since it helps solve the "height differential" issue that arises when drivers in high vehicles stop right in front of crosswalks and can't see wheelchairs. And it might even help clear up what can become a curbcut problem if bicyclists are given a space on the street to wait rather than be forced to wait near curbcuts, adding to pedestrian traffic there that blocks wheelchair users and parents pushing carriages.


This just goes to show there are better ways to share the streets - ways that make all of us safer.

[image description: An animated map courtesy of City of Portland, Office of Transportation, showing the increase in number of bicycle routes built over the years 1973-2003.]