This article is the sixth in a series profiling nominees for the 2008 Alice B. Toeclips Awards, and was written by BTA correspondent John McLaren.

Building recumbent bikes, those low riders with built-in back support, ties in naturally with Bill Stites’s former profession as a chiropractor. Stites, a bicycling advocate who has gotten along without a car for15 years, also likes trikes for their cargo carrying capacity.

His most recent achievement was spearheading the successful effort last year to fund and install two on-street bike parking facilities on SE Belmont Street. His business, Stites Design, is nearby, on Alder Street at 35th Avenue.

Stites moved to Portland from New York City 11 years ago, drawn in part by Portland’s reputation as a bike friendly place. In New York, where was a chiropractor for 10 years, he became seriously interested in bicycling after converting his practice to house calls. While he initially thought he'd get around by subway, cab and bus, he noticed all the bike messengers flying past traffic, and considered reviving his old high school bike.

In 1993, he helped start Pedicabs of New York [PONY], one of the first in the country and still in business today. In the mid 90's, Bill taught a Human Powered Vehicle Design course at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

In Portland, Stites, 46, is both the proprietor and sole employee of his business. He started building frames as a hobby, learning machining from established builders. Pat Franz of TerraCycle has mentored his machining skills. TerraCycle, Stites Design and Vanilla Bicycles have shared an old warehouse on SE 35th for years – a building that began its life as part of the Belmont Dairy.

Stites does a lot of custom work, building specialty trikes and bikes in response to requests. “I’ve been a builder, a designer for a long time — I was always interested in invention,” he says. The versatile Stites also worked as a cabinet-maker until 2003, when he turned his industrial design skills to full-time production of customized bikes, trikes and other design services.

He is a tireless advocate for safer cycling, and long-time BTA member and supporter.

The parking structures he got installed, completed in July 2007, are on SE Belmont Street, at the corners of 33rd and 34th avenues. They each contain 11 staple racks, and can accommodate up to 44 bikes. On warm winter days and on almost any summer day they are full. They replaced existing car-parking, increasing the customer-to-parking ratio of those spots ten-fold. They also make crossing safer for pedestrians (some of whom are kids going to and from nearby Sunnyside School) by increasing visibility at those corners.

To get the on-street racks (also know as “bike corrals”), Stites applied for and was awarded a $5,000 business improvement grant through the Belmont Area Business Association. Aided by a five-member neighborhood committee, he gained traction in the application process through his memberships on the Sunnyside Neighborhood Association Board and the Belmont Avenue Business Association. He says that throughout it all the Portland Department of Transportation has been helpful, easy to work with and excited about promoting cycling as an important transportation alternative to the automobile.

Next nominee: Community Cycling Center Executive Director Susan Remmers

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