Portland Wins Platinum Award While Seeking Better Trails

Portland, Oregon is a city that values bicycles for both transportation and recreation. Recently, the city has been awarded the Platinum Bicycle Friendly Community Award from the League of American Bicyclists. Portland is the first large city in the US to receive this award.

However, despite the well-deserved recognition, mountain biking enthusiasts still believe that there is still much room for improvement when it comes to better access to city parks and recreation areas for off-road cycling.  Compared to some other large cities in the country, like Austin, Philadelphia, New York and Seattle, Portland does not have any quality mountain biking experiences in the city itself.  Right now there are 40 miles of non-paved trails in the city's parks and only 6.5 miles of these are singletrack.  

According to the IMBA, citizens of Portland are creating an action plan. "To address the lack of riding opportunities, a citizens' group has teamed up with IMBA and Portland-based trail planning professionals Alta Planning + Design to analyze the potential for new trail opportunities in and around Portland. The group will consider diverse options, such as building "daisy-chain" greenway links to give access to singletrack trails, following the lead of Seattle's innovative model facility at Colonnade, and various public/private partnership projects. Connecting to Portland's bicycling transportation infrastructure will promote "ride to ride" cycling opportunities. These actions could produce substantial new mountain biking facilities for Portland in less than 4 years."