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- Portland Ore
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- PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) - Three years ago, a nonprofit group
began leaving yellow bicycles around town in a show of neighborliness
and confidence in the basic honesty of people.
Anyone who needed a ride could take one. There was only one rule:
Leave the bike in a public place for someone else. Eventually
hundreds of bikes were introduced all over Portland.
- The Yellow Bike Project, modeled after a program in Amsterdam,
inspired similar efforts in U.S. cities from St. Paul, Minn.,
to Austin, Texas.
- But today you'd be hard-pressed to find one of the bikes
on a Portland street.
- "I saw one about six months ago, but it was all broken
and bent up," says police Officer Joe Schilling. The Yellow
Bike Project "seemed to certainly work for a while. But
it didn't take people long to figure out that a free bike is
a free bike."
- Riders started taking them home, and they didn't seem to
mind that the bikes were painted from seat to spokes in a loud,
hot-dog mustard shade of yellow and were made of parts that were
a few pedals away from the landfill.
- "They're not the kind of bikes you steal. They're just
rescued from the junk pile," says Rex Burkholder, who helps
run a state cycling group that furnished the Yellow Bike Project
with hand-me-downs. "The idea was to get them out and give
them a few more months of life before they headed to the Dumpster."
- One of the survivors, a mangled 10-speed with one wheel broken
and the other beaten into an egg shape, hangs in the window of
the Bike Gallery, a store downtown. Ben Edwards, a 23-year-old
employee, plucked it from some brambles near the Willamette River.
- "You still see them around, but they tend to die out
pretty quickly," Edwards says. "It's the effort that
counts, I suppose."
- The effort was there in the beginning. The man who started
the Yellow Bike Project, Tom O'Keefe, helped put nearly 1,000
bikes on the street. But the ones that weren't ripped off fell
into disrepair, and volunteers couldn't keep up the maintenance.
- The program's phone has now been disconnected, and O'Keefe
is said to have moved to Arizona.
- Another nonprofit group, the Community Cycling Center, is
hoping to get the Yellow Bike concept rolling again. Workers
are fixing up donated Schwinns and Huffys, and the group is hoping
to release a new fleet of bikes in the spring.
- The new models will include a few changes to make them last
longer, says Ira Grishaver, the center's program director. One
idea is to remove the middle bar from all the bikes and leave
the women's "step-through" bar, to discourage the male
riders who Grishaver says commit most of the vandalism and theft.
- The tires may be filled with foam to prevent flats. Seats
and other parts will be welded on, and the rear derailers will
be taken off to make all the bikes one-speeds. Others may be
outfitted with large, unwieldy plastic containers on the sides.
- The goal is to make the bikes so nerdy that nobody would
want to keep one.
- "It may be a clunker, but it's still more utilitarian,"
Grishaver says.
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