Taking the train to Portland with my kid and a folding bike

A biking, walking and transit bridge is so much quieter and more pleasant.

As something of a last hurrah before the school year began, my kid and I took a trip down to Portland for no purpose other than to have fun. So we needed to travel by what may be my favorite method: Taking the train with a folding bicycle.

Our Brompton folding bike is not just any folding bike. It also has a simple attachment that allows us to also carry a kid. My first-grader barely fits, her knees just inches from bumping against the handlebars. So this trip was also the last hurrah for this kid seat set-up, which has served us very well (thank you Ben, a Seattle Bike Blog reader who gifted us this seat after his kid grew out of it). I previously hauled her up the gravel Cascades to Palouse Trail to go camping and see the Snoqualmie Tunnel.

Unlike the camping trip, our trip to Portland was all about combining transit and biking. We packed all of our stuff into one big Brompton bag (a Swift Industries Gilman bag, sadly discontinued) that fit on the front so that getting on and off the train was as simple as detaching one shoulder bag, folding the bike, and then carrying them on as luggage. We started by biking to the Link station in the morning to take the train to King Street Station. On light rail, the kid struck up a conversation with a woman who told her there were giant cat statues all around Portland and then showed her photos of a few of the cats she found when she was there recently. My kid was immediately more interested in these cats than any of the ideas I had floated to her in the days before we left, and she kept talking about them for the rest of the journey. This is one more reason why transit is amazing. These kinds of community interactions just cannot happen when you drive.

When we got to King Street Station, we carried the folded bike onto the train and stowed it. Amtrak's policy is that a bike that folds to be 34'' x 15'' x 48'' or smaller counts as one of a passenger's two allowed carry-on bags (plus a personal item). I ended up stowing it in the overhead area, though re-reading the policy I now see I should have put it in the luggage rack at the end of the car instead. But it was fine and nobody said anything about it.

I accidentally broke Amtrak's folding bike rules by putting the bike in the overhead instead of the luggage rack.

The train ride was lovely and smooth. Especially when traveling with a kid, Amtrak is just the best. If you've never done it, know that it's nothing like flying. The station locations are much better than airports, and the pre-boarding process is way less stressful. Then once on board you get more space at your seats and more freedom to move around, which makes all the difference when you have an antsy child with you. The bathrooms are weird, but compared to airplane bathrooms they are downright luxurious. We walked to the snack car, which might be my kid's favorite restaurant because they make Cup Noodles and have Twix bars. Then the Amtrak workers gave her a coloring book and crayons, and after watching the scenery go by for a while and slowly eating noodles the journey was nearly half over.

Once in Portland, we unfolded the bike, hopped on and within minutes we were biking around Old Town en route to kill time along the waterfront before check-in at our hotel. This is when it happened. We saw our first cat.

These cats are part of a celebration of the re-release of 2009's Coraline, which was the first feature-length film from Portland-based animation studio Laika. There are 31 of these cats in and near the city center as part of Coraline's Curious Cat Trail. They are all the same basic shape, but with unique designs and paint jobs. There's an app you can buy for a couple bucks with a navigable map and some other features, but we instead left it all up to serendipity. As soon as we found one, she just wanted to bike around the city looking out for more. Every time she spotted one, she would yell and point. In the end I think we found nine of them.

It's so easy to get jaded about stuff like these cats when you're an adult, but these things made Portland almost magical to her. All of our time spent getting around became a search for more cats. When she thinks of Portland now, she thinks of biking around looking for colorful cats.

We stayed at the Crystal Hotel, ate at some food cart pods, went to Powell's Books and ate Voodoo Donuts. During our one full day, we biked to the Max and took it up to the Oregon Zoo, which was lovely. After the zoo, we hopped on the bike for a long, winding and beautiful ride through the woods back to the Pearl District. It was even more fun than I was expecting even knowing the legendary status of the Zoobomb route. It just keeps going, and then suddenly you're downtown.

On our last day, we again biked to the Max and took out to Westmoreland Park, which has a fantastic playground. Then we biked back to the train station via the Springwater Trail and the car-free Tilikum Crossing over the Willamette River.

It was a fantastic way to spend 48 hours with my soon-to-be first grader and experience the whimsy of Portland through her eyes.

Where are the downtown protected bike lanes?

I used to visit Portland often back in my pre-parent days, so it was very interesting to be back after seven years or so. The Naito bikeway is great. I know that took a ton of organizing work. Absolutely worth it. But I had assumed the city would have built some proper protected bike lanes through the downtown core in those years. When I started writing this blog in 2010, people from Seattle used to travel to Portland to marvel at some of the creative solutions PBOT came up with to create connected and comfortable biking routes. It was also clear by the number of people of all ages and abilities riding on them at that time that these projects were huge successes. Seattle was certainly inspired.

In the past decade, Seattle has built a connected network of protected bike lanes through our much more constrained and dense downtown, and the lanes have been very successful. Every time I am downtown I see people biking and scootering who you never would have seen doing that in busy mixed traffic or in skinny paint-only bike lanes. Seattle is learning for itself what Portland learned previously: Many more people will bike if there is a safe and inviting space to do it. Has Portland forgotten its own lessons?

I have purposefully not researched the local politics behind all this or spoken to local advocates because I want to provide the perspective of a dad from out of town biking around downtown Portland with a kid in 2024. I hope it is useful. Perhaps if there's interest here, I'll talk to some folks for a follow-up. Let me know in the comments if you all are interested.

NW Couch Street is a fine enough route for a reasonably confident person to bike, but it's still biking in mixed traffic even if that traffic is lower than nearby streets. The bike lanes on SW Harvey Milk and Oak are wide and green, but they aren't protected (as a result, there was pretty much always someone parked in the bike lane). Some of Broadway has paint-and-post-separated bike lanes in both directions, but other parts have a bike lane in only one direction and it is not clear why. Naito does a great job of connecting the bridges along a single north-south route on the edge of downtown, but odds are good that a rider will need to turn onto a street with mixed traffic and/or embedded tracks to get wherever they are going. I was surprised by how disconnected it all was, and we ended up biking in mixed traffic or walking the bike on the sidewalk at some point on nearly every trip we took around downtown looking for cats or a place to get dinner, etc. I am the kind of person who feels reasonably comfortable doing this, but I was also the kind of person who biked in downtown Seattle before our city's protected bike lanes went in. It was me, a bunch of confident commuters, the pedicabs, and the messengers. Now, it's people shopping, people heading to or from transit, people heading to a sports or music event, people heading to a bar or restaurant, people doing preschool drop-off, and many more.

Biking in much of Portland is great, so a fully connected and separated bike circulation network in downtown would be an instant success. It feels like the city has done all the hardest parts, like creating quality biking spaces on the bridges, and then has failed to actualize that previous work by plugging it into a network of routes people can use to get around their destination-packed downtown neighborhoods.

There are plenty of ways that Seattle is still far behind on developing a city-wide bike network, and there's still plenty of work to do downtown. But come on, downtown Portland. Stop resisting your city's bike successes and choose to embrace it instead.