Standing outside Deadstock Coffee on Northwest Couch Street last week, I unlocked my 30-year-old Bridgestone bike and adjusted my 25-year-old helmet. “Where to now?” I asked. “And what should I be focused on?”

“Staying alive,” Sarah Iannarone said. She wasn’t smiling.

One of the smarter people I know about the way disparate forces and communities in Portland fit together, Iannarone doesn’t own a car. She commutes on her $2,700 e-bike, and volunteered to show me what cyclists and pedestrians deal with on city streets where the margin of error has all but disappeared.

We’d set out from her neighborhood, Southeast 70th Avenue and Foster Road, at 7:45 a.m. We’d already negotiated the opening bell at Franklin High School, the Clinton Street Greenway – where a cyclist would be struck by a car at 26th Avenue, and seriously hurt, several hours later – and the chaotic approach to the Hawthorne Bridge.

Iannarone now had us pointed east, into the October sun, re-crossing the river on the Burnside Bridge and skirting Mount Tabor on the way to Southeast 122nd Avenue.

“I want you to feel what it’s like going from protected infrastructure to hugely dangerous infrastructure,” she said. Her major concern is continuity, or the lack of it, when cyclists need to move from the rare protected corridors to the streets ruled by SUVs.

Iannarone was fresh back from a two-week best-practices trip to Denmark and the United Kingdom. She has no illusions that Portland will ever follow the lead of Copenhagen, where 62 percent of the populace commutes to work or school by bike: “They go 10 mph everywhere. Americans are never going to move at such a leisurely pace.”

But one of the reasons she’s running for mayor, as opposed to a City Council seat, is that she wants to be charged with assigning the bureaus, allocating the budget, and realigning the city’s priorities and perspective on public space.

Jockeying for position at the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge

The space set aside for cars, parking lots and Rose Quarter Freeway expansion projects. The space begrudgingly allotted to cyclists and pedestrians in a city that counts 43 traffic fatalities in 2019.

The space separating the female cyclist taking her child to day-care from an idling panel van at the east end of the Hawthorne Bridge.

“I think through my schedule days in advance, knowing I need a route to get there,” Iannarone says. “It’s the chess game of transit, and I’m constantly terrified. I’ve told my daughter, ‘Make sure they close the street I die on to automobiles.’”

A bike alters your perspective on space, and the time required for a threat to fill it. As Iannarone and I pedaled through the city – she was constantly gearing the e-bike down so I could keep pace – she asked questions that never occur to me behind the wheel of a Subaru.

Why haven’t we banned cars from Southwest 4th Avenue between Yamhill Street and Burnside, if only to revive a downtown retail strip that’s been leaking oil for 30 years?

Isn’t the soon-to-be earthquake-ready Burnside Bridge wide enough to allow a full lane for cyclists, a la Better Naito?

Why do we still allow cars – including the Waze-directed Fiat that swung around me and the sharrows on Southeast Clinton at 35 mph – on the neighborhood greenways?

And why are so few of the cycling infrastructure improvements happening east of 122nd Avenue, the epicenter of affordable housing in Portland, where many minimum-wage families can afford a car or an apartment, but not both?

The protected cycling lanes in the Gateway District

A major exception – a 10-block stretch of protected lanes on the Northeast Halsey/Weidler couplet in the Gateway District – only brings that issue into focus.

“This is premier infrastructure,” Iannarone says, “as good as it gets. You won’t find better than this outside South Waterfront.”

“But buckle up,” she adds as we turn back toward I-205. “It gets ugly from here.” First, the bike lane disappears. Then – Shel Silverstein Alert! – the sidewalk ends, and we’re still ten treacherous blocks from the Max stop at Southeast 82nd Avenue.

Why is it still so difficult, in 2019, for an eastside cyclist to reach the Max line that completes the commute to her job in Portland State or the Pearl?

Where the sidewalk ends, on Southeast Halsey

And is that just another of the reasons, as BikePortland’s Jonathan Maus reported last month, that the percent of people biking to work in Portland is at its lowest level in 12 years?

Iannarone is wholly focused on changing gears. She’s pushing e-bike subsidies, fareless transit, congestion pricing for downtown parking, and investing those precious Rose Quarter Freeway Expansion dollars far from the Rose Quarter Freeway.

We are standing aside our bikes at Southeast 82nd Avenue and Division Street. “Can you imagine what you could get with $500 million out here?” I thought I heard her ask amid the tide of passing cars.

-- Steve Duin

stephen.b.duin@gmail.com