A little over a century ago, before the auto’s ascendance, the bicycle was leading-edge transportation technology. The Oregon Legislature passed a law to create a statewide network of bicycle paths. Today no one remembers the law or the paths.
Keep celebrating! In honor of National Bike Month, drag out your old two-wheeler, dust off the spokes, air it up and take it out for a spin. Better yet — ride it to work once a week while the weather is warm. Here are some local opportunities for other biking adventures: Join Salem Bicycle Club’s Keizer Family Rides. Meets Thursdays at Cummings Elementary School, 6:30 p.m. Helmets required. Family pace, approximately 12 miles. Info: Salem Bicycle Club under “Weekly Rides.” Take a ride with Salem Bicycle Club’s “High Wheeler” group. Meets Sundays at 1:30 p.m., usually start from the Red Lot, located between Center and Marion Streets on Capitol Street across from McDonald’s. 20 or 25 miles, relaxed pace, no one left behind, perfect introduction to club rides. Info: Salem Bicycle Club under “Weekly Rides.” Visit Mary Lou Zeek Gallery for “Different Spokes,” the inaugural bicycle art exhibit featuring sixteen one-of-a-kind bike art sculptures and a variety of community and family events, including a bike art competition, kids bike decoration and parade, and film and installation art. Saturday, May 3 kick-off event 12 p.m. at City Center Motel, 510 Liberty. Info: Bike Art Chow down with the Bicycle Transportation Alliance at their Breakfast on Bikes event. Pastries, fruit, and coffee are served to bicycle commuters the last Friday of every month. Look for the breakfast from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. on Winter Street, between D and Union Street. Share your bicycle-related thoughts with the Salem-Keizer Bicycling Survey. The Bicycle Transportation Alliance is developing a `Top 10 List’ of the most important projects to make the Salem/Keizer area a safer, more inviting place to bicycle. Go to Salem Bicycle Club and look for “Salem-Keizer Area Bicycling Survey” on the home page.
The problem the paths tried to solve is a familiar story — roads and road repair. Until Oregon passed a gasoline tax in 1919, there wasn’t a reliable funding mechanism to improve roads. In winter and spring, roads were deep in thick, gooey mud, often fertilized with livestock droppings.
In honor of National Bike Month, drag out your old two-wheeler, dust off the spokes, air it up and take it out for a spin. Better yet — ride it to work once a week while the weather is warm. Here are some local opportunities for other biking adventures:
Join Salem Bicycle Club’s Keizer Family Rides. Meets Thursdays at Cummings Elementary School, 6:30 p.m. Helmets required. Family pace, approximately 12 miles. Info: Salem Bicycle Club under “Weekly Rides.”
Take a ride with Salem Bicycle Club’s “High Wheeler” group. Meets Sundays at 1:30 p.m., usually start from the Red Lot, located between Center and Marion Streets on Capitol Street across from McDonald’s. 20 or 25 miles, relaxed pace, no one left behind, perfect introduction to club rides. Info: Salem Bicycle Club under “Weekly Rides.”
Visit Mary Lou Zeek Gallery for “Different Spokes,” the inaugural bicycle art exhibit featuring sixteen one-of-a-kind bike art sculptures and a variety of community and family events, including a bike art competition, kids bike decoration and parade, and film and installation art. Saturday, May 3 kick-off event 12 p.m. at City Center Motel, 510 Liberty. Info: Bike Art
Chow down with the Bicycle Transportation Alliance at their Breakfast on Bikes event. Pastries, fruit, and coffee are served to bicycle commuters the last Friday of every month. Look for the breakfast from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. on Winter Street, between D and Union Street.
Share your bicycle-related thoughts with the Salem-Keizer Bicycling Survey. The Bicycle Transportation Alliance is developing a `Top 10 List’ of the most important projects to make the Salem/Keizer area a safer, more inviting place to bicycle. Go to Salem Bicycle Club and look for “Salem-Keizer Area Bicycling Survey” on the home page.
In February 1899, Governor-elect T.T. Geer signed the “cycle path” legislation. Between 1899 and 1900 Marion County selected ten different routes for improved bicycle paths. The bicycle paths would be better than most roads, and because they would be so attractive, the law needed provisions to prohibit carts, buggies, and wagons from driving on the paths.
Nevertheless there was controversy, much of it in the outer county. A local newspaper feared that “we now have such cities as Salem already scheming to hog all the money … it is not to be expected that the rest of Marion County will remain in placid humor while such antics are being played.” Citizens of Silverton submitted a petition asking that any construction start from Silverton rather than from Salem.
The final selection of routes shows the importance of these outer farm communities. The paths would run between Salem and Aurora, between Salem and Turner, Jefferson and Turner, Salem and Silverton, North Salem and the Wheatland Ferry, Pioneer Cemetery and Liberty Store, the Fairgrounds and the Howell Prairie Post Office, Brooks and Silverton, and Monitor and Woodburn.
The first laid was the Salem to Mehama route. It followed the course of Old Mehama Road. Historian Roy L. Stout called Mehama’s hotel a “popular resort for vacationers” from Salem.
There were no statewide road standards, and some criticized the quality of the paths. Many of the paths were dirt instead of being graded and graveled as they were elsewhere in the state. Marion County bicyclists registered only a third of the bicycles that they registered in 1899, despite a significant increase in cycling.
Many bicyclists resented the tax. The New York Times reported in 1898 that League of American Wheelmen president Isaac B. Potter “considered it just as sensible as to tax boots and shoes for wearing the sidewalks,” and he called it a tax on the “only kind of vehicle that does no injury whatever to the roads.” A Multnomah county bicyclist felt similarly and filed suit. The courts found the law unconstitutional.
While the suit was pending, in May 1900 the County Commissioners ordered Sheriff Frank W. Durbin to stop collecting funds.
In 1901 the Oregon legislature passed a new law to remedy the old, but while other counties continued to work on the cycle paths, Marion County refunded money, and appears to have stopped building paths.
It had been a grand experiment.
Nationally, automobile sales didn’t equal bicycle sales until 1913, and the growth of the auto was slower than people often think. It took about 20 years for auto ownership rates to equal the bicycle ownership rate in 1900. Photos in the early teens show a moderate jumble of vehicles in the streets.
Just a few years later, by 1919 and the gasoline tax, the story of the bicycle was being rewritten as a story for kids, a way to prepare them for the driver’s license, or a story of second-class transportation.
