Portland’s Yellow Bikes Going Nowhere Fast Oregon City Has Same Troubles Spokane Purple Bike Program Encountered

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 sooner spot Elvis on a Portland street than one of the bikes.

“I saw one about six months ago, but it was all broken and bent up,” says Police Officer Joe Schilling. “It 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.”

A similar program in Spokane met much the same fate. All but a few of the 50 purple bikes distributed around town in late June disappeared by mid-July.

Some were smashed on the banks of the Spokane River, their mangled frames visible from the Monroe Street Bridge. Program supporters suspect others are parked in garages and on back porches, no longer in the public domain.

The thieves don’t seem to mind that the bikes are made of parts that were a few pedals away from the landfill, or that they’re ugly as sin.

Those in Portland are painted from seat to spokes in a loud, hot-dog mustard shade of yellow. The Spokane bikes are painted a color of purple that even Barney the TV dinosaur would find offensive.

“They’re not the kind of bikes you steal. They’re just rescued from the junk pile,” says Rex Burkholder, who helps run an Oregon 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 Portland 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 downtown shop. 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 reportedly has 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. 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 said.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: DISCOURAGING THIEVES Bikes could be altered by: Removing 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. Filling tires with foam to prevent flats. Seats and other parts will be welded on. Removing the rear derailers to make all the bikes one-speeds, a tactic that didn’t discourage thieves in Spokane.