I'm in Vancouver, BC, the first stop on a cross-continent train-and-bike trip. To find out why I'm taking the long way to New York read my first post.

The trails network in Vancouver is beautiful, connected and easy to follow; the bike boulevards are far longer and more completely engineered than anything we've done in Portland; and the bike lanes are wide and well marked. But in three days of biking around town (Sunday it was hot and gorgeous; Monday it was a national holiday and rainy; today is a work day with scattered clouds and sun; so in theory, I've seen every possible condition) I just haven't seen that many people biking!

Which makes me feel like we're getting a really fantastic deal in Portland, where a tiny investment in bike infrastructure has produced big returns in bicycling numbers.

As Roger Geller, Portland Bicycle Program Manager, likes to say, "Bicycling is a cheap date." If we took bicycling out to a five-star restaurant for a change, and made some boulevards as safe and pleasant as the ones I've ridden on in Vancouver, BC, I can't even imagine the kind of change we'd see in Portland's biking and walking numbers. I think they might just go through the roof.

What makes these bike boulevards so great? First, lots of diverters. Every 5-10 blocks I went through some kind of barrier that allowed bicycles and pedestrians, but forced car traffic to turn. They were incredibly quiet streets, with very few cars going more than a few blocks. Sometimes the diverters were just a barrier through the center of an intersection, blocking one or both directions of car traffic (like the two pictured at left) but sometimes, especially downtown, they were what I'll call a "mega-diverter." For one very short block, the road was turned into a pedestrian-and-bike-only street, with cars forced to turn at each end. On these sections there was always nice landscaping; sometimes with benches, water fountains, playground equipment, even a shuffle board court; on one I found a little bodega (pictured at left) where I stopped and bought batteries for my back light. And of course, as nearly everywhere else I went in Vancouver, there were tons of pedestrians making use of this lovely public space.

In many places the boulevard I was on passed through a park or a cemetery (as in the photo below) which I imagine serves the dual purpose of diverting car traffic and providing a safe bike route for people heading to the park. Perhaps also a third purpose of making the park safer by increasing the number of eyes on it, but not knowing the volume of bicyclists on these routes I can't say how many eyes that would be.

At these park crossings, and everywhere else, the boulevards were incredibly well signed. I had a map with me but wouldn't have needed it - at no place did I ever get "dropped" by the directional signs and stencils on the street. There were signs pointing out turns and crossings, signs indicating connections to other bike routes, large stencils on the ground, and bike icons on street signs as in the photo below. All of these were as visible to motorists as to bicyclists, both those on the bike boulevard and those crossing it, which I imagine is a good way of letting people who don't bike know where and how numerous the good routes are.

The largest street I ever had to cross without a bike signal was two lanes wide, and even that only happened once. On every other big street crossing, the signal button was in the middle of the road, on a special island constructed for bicyclists, as shown in the photo below. The wait for a green light was always less than 30 seconds. Sometimes the streets I was crossing were huge - highway sized - and I was surprised that the city was willing to bring all that traffic to a halt just for little old me. Over and over again. But I guess that's what it means to treat bikes as a "preferred" transportation mode.

It wasn't until the end of my day, at the edge of town, that I realized that I was far from the center, in a neighborhood that was clearly less affluent than the ones I'd biked through all day, but the boulevards were still just as awesome. The quality and ingenuity of all the traffic-calming and traffic-diverting and way-finding treatments didn't fall as I got farther away from town. Another good lesson for Portland and Oregon.

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