An Interview with Councillor Rex Burkholder

Councillor Rex Burkholder

Rex Burkholder is one of the key reasons that the Portland metropolitan area is today a bicycle friendly region. Over the past two decades, he has come a long way from being a bicycle activist and founding the Bicycle Transportation Alliance to being elected in 2008 for a third term as councillor on the Metro Council. He first joined the Council in 2001 and represents District 5 in Multnomah County. Through the years, he has championed various causes aligned with his broader goals of achieving sustainability and mitigating climate change. He spearheaded the update of Metro’s Regional Transportation Plan and now leads Metro’s Regional Climate Action Strategy.

Drawing on experiences of interacting with communities while teaching high-school science, serving as faculty at the Portland State University Office of Student Development and as a founding trustee of the Coalition for a Livable Future, he has achieved tremendous success in engaging communities in crucial decisions. In 1998, he was voted the Most Effective Citizen Advocate in the metro region by 1000 Friends of Oregon and was honoured as a founder of a New Northwest by Sustainable Northwest in 1999.

Rex Burkholder earned a master’s degree in urban and environmental policy from Tufts University in 1989 and a teaching certificate from Portland State University. He holds a bachelor’s degree in biology. More details on the issues that he is pursuing are available on his webpage at http://news.oregonmetro.gov/4/

 

Councillor Burkholder poses against a backdrop of
Hmong textile art that adorns his office wall



In this interview with The Urban Vision, Councillor Rex Burkholder talks about the need for organising communities to empower individual voices. He also praises the relative responsiveness of Metro to citizen’s needs and demands as well as the overall supportive framework provided by the state of Oregon. Councillor Burkholder appears hopeful and prepared to meet future challenges such as climate change and transportation safety.

Read on to understand what it takes for a determined individual to transform his will into the way.

Getting started

Let’s start at the beginning. What motivated you in the 1990s to take up the difficult task of transforming the way Portland lives?

It started with my involvement with the Boy Scouts. Scouting was an important part of my life. A part of it was going out and having fun, but it was mostly about public services by doing projects and helping people. Even as a young person, I was interested in environmental stuff and taking care of natural areas (though it wasn’t called that at the time). We would just go to pick up litter. I also started a recycling programme in my community as a boy scout. I think my family was a major influence. My mother is a major volunteer in her community and she had us volunteer as well.

So as an adult, it was pretty natural for me to look for an organisation that was doing work that I was interested in and volunteer for them or become a board member. I even started a couple of organisations because there weren’t any working on issues such as bicycling (biking).

I was always a bicycle (bike) user. I started biking as a kid and I never stopped. To me, it was a nice mixture of improving personal health, being able to enjoy the world, and also doing something for the environment. In the 1970s, the US had a major resurgence in the interest in biking. This coincided with the oil crisis, when the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) raised oil prices. The US has always been very dependent on foreign oil. So for me, this was a big motivator; one that I have kept since. Hence, my whole life involved commuting by bike.

And then I had children. My first son was five years old when he got on to a bike by himself and we went riding in our community. At the time, there were no bicycle facilities anywhere. As a young male adult, I could ride anywhere. I could just race the traffic, yell and scream at the drivers, and make them pay attention. But having a child made me realise that children are much more vulnerable as they do not have such skills. At that time, this inspired me to look for other people with similar concerns.

It is always about other people too. An organiser cannot really be successful unless other people are interested too. So you can either get them interested, or if they are already interested, you just need to help them figure out what to do. And that’s what I did. I helped pull together a group of interested people to form the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (BTA). Some of the organising effort was quite mundane – who would keep the database of interested people; who would put out the newsletters and make sure it got to the post office; who would file the paperwork to create a legal entity that could collect donations, etc. Even though it was mundane, I had the time and interest and worked on that part. Then I worked on framing the issue in a manner so as to speak to people about it.

I also worked on understanding how the system works. That is in fact what brought me to this job. I found out that there was this agency (Metro) that actually had a lot of influence over how we spent transportation dollars in the region from the policy side, and the transportation dollars that came from the federal government were also redistributed through here. So I volunteered on a committee here – another volunteer opportunity. It was the Technical Advisory Committee on Transportation. I got to learn how the system worked – where the money came from; where it went; who made the decisions; how the criteria on policies were decided; and even all the acronyms of transportation! Gaining all that knowledge made my work with the organisation more effective because we could understand where the levers were to pull.

On the other hand, the organisation was very important and complementary, because it provided a voice. For instance, it allowed us to send 200 postcards to an elected official demanding action. Had I myself said that I wanted this, it would not have made any difference. I'm just one person; a volunteer. There are lots of people who want stuff. So no one would have listened. Therefore, organising is important for making explicit the desires of the public that were not otherwise seen by the elected officials and decision makers. This model of organising is something that I have learned a lot about over time. You gain power by giving voice to people who care about something but don’t know how to speak for themselves. When they speak together, they see results.

In the case of bicycling, our efforts really snowballed. Each time we had a success, more people came to know about it and the interest would increase. With the construction of bike lanes, more people would ride their bikes and demand more bike lanes where there weren’t any. So it led to a very rapid change. 20 years ago, none of this infrastructure was in place. Today, it is normal for us to spend a relatively large amount of money on bicycle facilities. Moreover, while thinking about each project we ask how we can make sure that it is safe for people biking and walking.

So, basically the philosophy is – one person could be an expert of the world, but why should anybody listen to him. But if you organise a lot of people around the same issue, then the people in power would obviously have to pay attention.

So when you started looking for other people who shared your concerns and passion, were they easy to find?

Well, one of the interesting aspects, and a good contrast, was the ease of finding people with biking interests versus those with walking interests. Everybody walks, and therefore, nobody feels like “I am walker and must fight for my rights.” But bicyclists seem to feel like they are an embattled minority – they are pushed around by giant vehicles and no one pays attention to them. So it was easier to say, “I am a cyclist and I identify with other cyclists”.

Some people join the effort for support because they need help with their concerns. Others do it for political reasons or for health reasons. We also received critical support from companies that sell bicycles as we help bring them customers. These relationships have enabled us to build the organisation fairly rapidly to be a pretty powerful force in the state.

20 years later

You bike wherever you go, transforming bicycles from a mere recreational tool to a serious mode of transportation. Do you feel there has been an attitudinal change towards biking over the past 20 years in line with the example you set every day?**

 Compared to the rest of the US, Portland has actually seen a pretty big shift in terms of biking becoming a viable option for a greater number of people, even if this still isn’t true for a majority or even a large minority.

I think the key thing is to create the conditions where biking is actually an option. This is very similar to the history of transit in our country. Very few people took transit when it was of poor quality. Does it make any practical sense to ride the bus when it is unpunctual, unpredictable and infrequent? The same thing is true for biking.

However, with biking there are two issues that we have to deal with. One is making sure that the facilities are there and that people perceive them as safe and convenient.

The second involves addressing the public’s perceptions about general stuff like the weather. In Portland it rains all the time. How do you ride your bicycle in the rain? Well, you could put rain coats on! Maybe your socks get wet once or twice a year, but that should be ok. So a cultural shift is required too.

Moreover, we are such a rich country, even poor people typically own a car. I guess 9 out of 10 households have cars. Driving a car is very convenient and has been quite inexpensive. So why change? We are seeing a cultural shift now with lots of people making a change because they can choose to. They may do it because of political, economic or environmental reasons. So we do have a lot of people who have the option but choose not to use cars.

However, the largest percentage of people who ride bicycles still comprises those who do it for the economics. Biking is the cheapest, fastest, and most convenient way to get around.

Making sure these people are safe should have been a government concern for a long time. But all government planners drive cars and have always thought about cars. Maybe some took the train because they felt it was sexy. But biking? So there are these cultural barriers that we have to get across as well.

There are some neighbourhoodsin the region that have 10-15 per cent of residents who ride their bikes to work throughout the year. In the summer time when the weather is fine, you get an even higher percentage in neighbourhoods that are convenient. So there is the urban design and evolution issue too. You actually have to design it so that people can get to places they need to.

On average, the Portland metropolitan region fares well compared to the rest of the country in terms of biking for commute. For the whole region, including far-flung suburbs, about 4.5 per cent of commute trips are by bike (according to US census data) as compared to around 1.5 per cent trips by transit. So, biking is actually used more than a mode of transportation (public transit) that gets hundreds of millions of dollars every year. So just with a few million dollars, we get a pretty good response! Once you start biking, it is just fun.

Absolutely! I went on a bike ride recently after ten years! It really was fun, especially the trail along the Willamette River.

I call trails “gateway drugs” to biking. Build a nice trail, with a beautiful park and a natural area, and people love it so much that they want to ride more. And then they are gradually willing to take on a road with a bike lane and so on.

Over 20 years later, do you feel you are close to achieving the vision you set out for when you started?

I had no vision. I just felt it wasn’t right to have your life endangered to ride a bike and we needed to fix it. At that time I didn’t have any answers. I had to do research for myself to find out what works and what doesn’t. I talked to people who know how roads are built to find out how we could make it safer for biking and if there was a better way to do it? So there was a lot of self education.

The vision, really, in my mind is about how we can develop cities sustainably. And transportation has a big impact on that. It may not be the be-all-end-all, but it certainly has a large impact in our circle of things. It is one area that is fairly discretionary in terms of choosing what mode to spend your money on. The choices of transportation spending in turn have a big impact on urban form and therefore, a big impact on things like greenhouse gas, pollution, safety and quality of life.

So that is why I focused on transportation. It all comes from that big picture of how we survive on this planet as a species without destroying it. Urban areas are where our biggest impact takes place.

And I understand that you are also an integral part of the update of the Regional Transportation Plan of Metro?

Well, we just finished that update and it was a four-year process. It is something that we do under a federal law every four years. But this was a major change in direction of that programme and we made that change happen by starting quite differently and actually going to the public and asking them what they wanted.

The way we did this was by first telling them that we spend $700 million on transportation every year just for the Portland metropolitan region (just public expenditure, not private). And then we asked them if they were getting what they wanted. And they would normally ask what we meant by this, and we would tell them that we wanted their opinion on what they wanted their community to be like and how they would spend transportation dollars to achieve that.

So what did we get from the different groups that we spoke to? There was a wide variety of groups (low-income groups, only-Spanish-speaking low-income groups, environmentalists, business people, health care professionals, etc.). When posed with this question, they all said the same thing – we want a strong economy, we want a safe and healthy community, and we want some place that is fun to live in and is a vibrant and exciting place to be.

It is these outcomes that we redesigned our transportation plan around, which is a totally different process from the rest of the US. The rest of the country focuses first and foremost on how to improve the flow of traffic. Then they get into details such as freight, but it starts out with transportation as an end in itself. But it is not.

Transportation is, in fact, a means to get to something that we want. Using this approach, one designs quite differently, asking how transportation would link with health, equity, economy etc. This is quite a different question, and so that is why it took so long to update the Regional Transportation Plan; because we redesigned it totally.

It is very interesting that now the federal government is taking a lot of lessons from what we learned, which we hope will help other states use a similar approach. They are also doing a lot of work to provide technical assistance to other places that want to do outcomes-based planning. 

We have gone a step further now with outcomes-based planning and are using it for other decisions that we make like our land-use decisions and our design and development decisions. So for me, this is one of those revolutionary concepts that actually make so much sense. Why didn't we do this before? Because we have a history of practice of doing it a certain way!

Current situation

Portland’s doing well on various sustainability indices. What do you think works for the Portland metropolitan area (policies, funding structures, infrastructure, land use planning, etc.)?

One thing that is very important and makes a big difference in Oregon is the state-wide planning system that we have. It was adopted in the ‘70s. It has 19 goals and while some of them are pretty obscure, the No.1 goal is public involvement. It says that the public has a right to be involved in every decision we are making in the government, specifically for land-use, transportation, affordable housing and similar issues. So there is this culture that has developed where people expect to be involved and the elected representatives and the government work to make sure they are involved; it is one of our big responsibilities. It has really been built into the culture.

Here is an example of how this responsiveness affected my advocacy. In many cities like New York and San Francisco, there is a very strong practice of Critical Mass* actions on a regular basis, where bikers shut down the downtown during rush hour and create all sorts of traffic conflicts as a protest against car-dominated planning. There was an attempt to organize Critical Mass for biking here as well, because it sounded cool. But the concept never caught on, and a lot of it was because we had a responsive government.

My organisation, which didn’t organise Critical Mass, was actually able to point out how much investment we are getting; that these problems are getting solved and the government is responsive. Again, this is an involvement piece, where we went to the government and said we have a problem and the government responded that they better solve the problem. We may disagree on the exact response, it may cost money with a fight over how much money gets spent on it; and support may need to be built over time. But the overall approach of the government is to losten to the public and accept there are problems that need fixing and agree to work on them.

This culture is very different from other states. I might complain about the Oregon Department of Transportation (DOT) a lot. But I am told that our DOT is actually very open, engages the public, and has an investment strategy that is quite different from any other state. This is all because of an open and responsive government.

What are the issues that remain to be addressed?

A big issue is safety. We still have a very motor vehicle oriented concern about safety. There is a huge lack of reporting. Unless someone is seriously injured or killed, it will not be reported as a biking or pedestrian accident. Moreover, the official response too often is “that person shouldn’t have been crossing the street there”, or “they should have been wearing bright coloured clothing”, when the real question is why do we have a 45 mph speed limit in a business area with houses around it? Well, it is because cars need to move fast!

So safety is still a big issue. Of course, the fatality rate has really been dropping in the whole country. I guess some of it is due to changes in attitude, which recognises that more has to be done for this section of road users. But we still just look at biking/pedestrian accidents simply as tragic, when instead we should be looking at our design to determine what is wrong with it. Why was this person going so fast? Why couldn’t they see the bicyclist? These are design issues that we can deal with.

In addition, enforcement of traffic laws is a huge issue. Speed is another regulatory issue.

Another issue is the ongoing subsidy for car use. Free car parking is available everywhere while it is still hard to find good bicycle parking. Given that the price of gas in the US is so cheap relative to the true cost of oil, it becomes very hard to convince car users to try the alternative. Well, why should they, when their existing mode is nearly free and comfortable and they don’t have to be rained on!

Finally, we must look at are our communities’ design in a new way. Can your child get to school easily within the neighbourhood? Can they get there on a non-busy road? Can they cross the street alright? We have not designed that way in very long time, because the assumption was that you drive everywhere. And so, it is very convenient if you have a car, while it isn’t if you don’t have one. This in turn affects equity, safety, and pollution. So a lot of work still needs to be done.

It is interesting that despite the relatively low gas prices, Portland has the highest number of hybrid cars in the US. What is your take?

We are early adopters. I don’t know where that came from though. We have the third highest number of Nissan Leaf’s that have been ordered, despite being a small community. There are big long lines in downtown Portland for I-phones. That kind of social innovation and interest in new things has benefited our investments in biking as well. People want to try something new, and are willing to be upfront about it.

Future plans

What will be your next steps after your current term as councillor?

My major concern right now is climate change, and how do we respond to that effectively. And I see that needing more and more work. I am not interested in running for an elected office. Metro is a very peculiar government, very different from most of the governments. I have been very happy here at Metro, because I have been able to make change happen within this environment.

What I hope to do now is make change happen on a larger scale. So I am in the process of exploring options for that. I do not have any answers yet. I could possibly work with a university or with another government; not as an elected official but as a manager in a programme that looks at the issue of climate change and how to respond to that.

Maybe you’ll have time to come down to India and spearhead community involvement there?

I would love to come down to India. I have been invited a number of times to South America to talk about sustainable transportation and climate change and what we have been doing in Portland. I think it is mainly because I am an elected official from the first-world who says, “I ride my bike and guess what, we are spending money to help people ride bikes and take transit”. This is a message that is not usually heard from the first world countries. They would usually recommend building a big highway and buying cars. So yes, it would be fun to come to India as well.

**(Portland residents are twice as likely to use transit and seven times more likely to commute by bicycle than the average metropolitan resident of the U.S., according to the latest census bureau estimates [Mayer 2007] Source: Portland’s Green Dividend, CEOs for Cities).
^*Critical mass in biking is basically a form of protest. The concept is that you get a lot of people on bicycles and they ignore the traffic rules because you have the critical mass. You have so many people on bicycles that you cannot be stopped.

My takeaways:

1. Organising people around an issue is the best way of making your voice heard. Community engagement allows many individual voices to aggregate into a much stronger voice that cannot be ignored. However, this process is time consuming and often gruelling, and takes a lot of determination and hard work. Constant efforts, discussions and marketing can also create cultural shifts, with more people willing to live sustainably.
2. Transportation, and for that matter any issue that affects daily life, is all about providing options. Governments should not impose any one solution on everyone, but rather create conditions that allow commuters to select active transportation including biking and walking as viable options. If the conditions are right and practical, a larger number of people will themselves make choices that favour greater use of active transportation.
3. Urban design and form are key determinants of what transportation options are viable. Hence, instead of focusing policies on creating smooth transportation flow, a better approach would be to use outcomes-based planning, which considers efficient mobility as a means to achieve desirable outcomes such as health and equity.
4. The Portland region, and the state of Oregon, has a very responsive government unlike other regions of the US. This has allowed communities to be involved in major policy decisions and play an important role in shaping the urban form.
5. Nothing is perfect, and requires constant improvements and deliberations. Portland, despite being a leader in supporting sustainable choices such as active transportation, still has issues such as safety, cultural inertia and increasing car use to deal with.

Happy Earth Day

A happy Earth would mean a happy mankind. So clearly, this is one day I would sign up to celebrate every day of the year!
At Metro regional Centre, I got the chance to really meaningfully celebrate Earth Day with a brownbag discussion by Betty Shelley on "How to bring down your garbage offload to as low as one can per year!!!"
This was really something to attend. It was extremely fun and insightful, and I also won a super cool green cleaning kit!
So what were Betty's golden words of wisdom? Reduce, Reuse and only then Recycle. Basically, Betty focused on how to make sure that the garbage reaching the recycling can is in fact the minimal you could send off. She was kind enough to share many educational materials such as the

1. Green Cleaners: Simple cleaning recipes for a safer home, and
2. A guide to the 3Rs

But most importantly, she shared her years of experience in reducing waste from one can a month to a can per year and the tips that came out of it were amazingly sensible and practical. Another sensible advice she had for us was to take it step-by-step - figure out what goes in your garbage, then devise a long-term plan with short-term targets, and step-by-step, you can reduce your garbage. So what are some of the tips she had for us? Well, here goes.....

Reduce

1. Don't buy stuff that comes with too much packaging. No styrofoam. If there is a favourite product of yours that comes in such packaging, find a substitute, or try writing to the manufacturer to change the packaging.
2. Use durables instead of disposables. For dinner, let each family member have his/her own identifiable napkin-cum-washcloth and let them use it till the next laundry. Absolutely avoid paper napkins and towels.
3. For meat products, buy them without the bones, but if you do have bone waste, freeze it and throw it out altogether over a long time.
4. Think about what you want to buy and what kind of packaging it would involve. Create shopping lists with a column for packaging that indicates the kind of packing it would require (shopping bag or plastic container) and bring your containers accordingly to the grocery store.
5. You don't need to own everything. Just share stuff like power tools with with your neighbours. You might also set up a sharing economy (cookies against drill use?)
6. Besides this, to reduce the size of your garbage, don't crumple stuff but throw them in flat.

Reuse

1. Donate to shops and companies like goodwill
2. Set up clothing exchange parties parties or pass on clothes to little ones
3. Take all your packaging to United Postal Services. They need it!
4. Take containers to farmers' markets
5. Wash ziplock bags and plastic bags and dry them on a bag stand instead of throwing them away.
6. Give pens and stationary to schools

Recycle

1. Locate artists who can convert old stuff into cool art
2. Compost yourself, or find a friend who does and give your compostable waste to them. Some commercial grade plastics are also composted by Burgerville and other establishments. Find them.
3. Take stretchable plastics (not meant for curbside) to North West for converting to microfibres.
4. Confirm when you dispose soemthing off what the recycled end-product would be.

Doesn't all of that make so much sense and sound simple?

In addition to the brownbag, we also got a tour of various sustainable features at the Metro Regional Centre. The building itself was salvaged out of recycled materials. It has various cool features meant to conserve water and energy, while reducing waste and managing it efficiently. Refer to Metro's Sustainable Features for details!

A planning tool - get around

This post links to my previous post "I can walk".
It is true that I am getting around mostly on foot. The walk that I commonly engage in is from home to work and back. Yesterday, I had an insight based on three weeks of walking in Portland and I thought I should share it.

My insight seems quite obvious. It is something that allowed me in the first place to effectively present an alternate street design for New Delhi's Tamil Sangam Marg at the Young Urban Leader's competition which brought me to Portland. This was a street I used almost everyday, to walk and take transit and drive my car, and I knew exactly what each road user dealt with while navigating the road.
So here is my advice to all planners and city managers:

Using a mode of travel, really using it, can allow you to understand exactly what hurdles a user would encounter.

Why this insight struck me yesterday was that after three weeks of walking in the same neighbourhood, covering a large number of permutations and combinations of streets and avenues, I realised that I had started to understand some of the road use patterns. I knew that the NE 21st and NE 15th Avenues had heavy car traffic at all times of day. I instinctively knew to avoid the Knott and NE 21st intersection for crossing as this would have the heaviest car traffic. I tried to cross Broadway only at a pedestrian crossing or signal as this was a main street. I loved walking along Tillamook and Klickitat becasuse of them being bicycle only strips. I realised there were some blocks I liked better because of the architecture and the flowers and lawns and I would prefer walking along those.

Basically, my insight suggests that once you actively use a mode to get along from one point to another, on a daily basis, eventually you can discover all that is good and bad. You can design interventions accordingly. For instance, in the entire neighbourhood, there are pedestrian signals only along the 15th, because this is the place that requires coordinating car, bike and pedestrian movement due to heavy traffic flow. Also, regulations like disconnection of downspouts for stormwater management on streets have a very good impact on pedestrians. Moreover, it is a good idea to place bright green caution signs at turns that are close to children's play areas. Some flowers and trees are better in terms of the flowers that drop, the fragrance that is emanated and the mess they may create.

So the next time a planner decides to place a sidewalk along that bus stop, I would suggest that they get off and walk for a while before deciding on actual interventions. And also talk to actual users. My supervisor Lake, for instance, who is the Active Transportation Project Manager at Metro, bikes to work everyday and knows exactly what the problems are. And still, when she interacted with me (a new bike user) it became obvious to her that there were other concerns that could be dealt with.

So please, experience it and talk to "experts" before you design! Its the simplest and most inexpensive planning tool I can offer.

I can walk

I have been walking to and from work since the time I have arrived here. I pretty much walk up to 5 miles a day. Walking everyday is not unsual for me. I did this in India too. I love walking, and the hard pedestrian conditions in my city were not enough to deter me from walking as much as I could.

What's new for me though is completing entire trips on foot. In New Delhi, I would walk to complete trips, taken mostly on public or private transit. (Of course, I also walked for recreation behind the closed doors of my neighbourhood, because I didn't get enough walking from work related travel). In Portland, I walk all the way to work, all the way to a restaurant/mall and all the way to the grocery store. Besides the fact that all these facilities are located within a reasonable walking distance, I can also do this because the infrastructure, society and environment here encourage me to walk longer distances.

Let's see what helps. Every road has a sidewalk at an extremely comfortable grade. This is in addition to a bike strip/lane. The region is designed into blocks (grid-pattern), so there are no dead-ends (something I come up with almost everyday walking in Delhi; for instance soemthing as simple as walking to the IIFT dhaba from my previous workplace requires you to take an extremely circuitous route). In fact, everyday I have over a dozen route options to walk to work. Depending on my mood, the traffic, the weather and the time of day, I can choose to take one street or the other. And at every interesection (which by the way allow safe crossing without the need for any subways or foot-overbridges and with the provision of pedestrian signals, signage and right-of-way for pedestrians) I have two options. City design and infrastructure that empowers the pedestrian to make transit choices rather than forcing them to take just one (the most difficult) route are key to ensuring this kind of walkability.

To top it all, every street I walk on is lined with huge trees. They not only provide shade and shelter from rain, they present a huge variety of flora that is incredibly educating and intellectually stimulating. The trees have huge trunks and branches that are the abode of a wide variety of fauna as well. Just with the line up of trees that I can walk along, my walk in the city is transformed every single day into a nature walk in the jungle. I see a different bird every day. And the rain does not lead to a stench, cause the blossoming flowers fill the air with a mild fragrance - all hundred per cent natural!

And finally, it doesn't hurt to feel respected. To see a driver stop for you, if necessary for over two minutes, till you're certain that you're safe and can in fact cross. They just won't move till you've crossed the entire street! And to smile to a stranger and receive one in return is not strange; in fact it is quite gratifying. I enjoy walking here. I don't have to run down the reserves of passion I have for walking inside of me to take each step. It is just natural to walk in Portland.

Getting used to a new city

I must say that because of my usual adaptability, Portland was not hard to adjust to. I didn't have a notable jet lag. I didn't feel out of place, thrown in a different city in another continent (pause) on the other side of the world!

But there were things that struck me as unusual. A grid-pattern city; the simple logic of home addresses; the idea of blocks; cats as pets; people of all ages and races walking and bicycling on the road ready with a smile on their face; the general respect amongst car users for pedestrians/bicyclists; the on-time buses (even though you might have to wait 25-40 minutes for the next one); the government office that wasn't dilapidated and in fact led the way in using recycled material and eco-friendly design; garbage recycling in every home and office; grills and breweries; street-side cafes along well-paved sidewalks and bike lanes; the line-up of huge forest-size trees along the street; over 50 blocks of single-owner houses (with yards) as against skyscrapers for living; and the amazing toilet flush technology!

Well, two weeks later, I think I am getting used to these novelties. I don't find the water spout that squirts water against gravity right into your mouth uncomfortable or messy. I know exactly where to place my hands in front of the tap and soap dispenser with automatic hand detection to ensure a steady flow of water and soap respectively. I don't get lost around office trying to find something as simple as a staircase or a colleague. I don't keep waiting in amazement when a car stops for me to cross and instead thank the driver and move on to cross rapidly. I don't find it odd to travel for over 40 minutes covering 2.3 miles to reach office on foot (I've got all the time in the world!).

The trimet website doesn't seem to confuse me anymore, resulting in a lower reliance on Google Transit (sorry Google!). I don't spend money on messaging or calling trimet for bus arrival info in real time because I have managed to get comfortable with my internet-enabled smart phone to access the trimet mobile website from anywhere. My struggles with the yellow wire on the bus which is pulled to indicate a stop request to the driver have exceptionally lowered. I remember to smile to the driver when I get on and thank the driver when I get off, without missing the idea of a bus conductor to issue me a ticket.

This city loves to talk, but I don't feel totally taken aback now when a stranger at the bus stop or on the light-rail starts discussing the weather or the soccer match with me. In fact, I remember to reply to keep the conversation going. And of course, I don't miss the constant honking of cars and trcuks that I could hear everyday in Delhi even from my home.

Portland, I have arrived!