Ha ha, yeah. That title surely won’t attract the attention of MADD and the OLCC.

At any rate—and believe me, this isn’t an impartial review—last Tuesday’s installment of Debate Club (Bikes Vs. Cars) was great, and it was all because of our excellent panelists (Sreya Sarkar, Mel Zucker, Jonathan Maus, and Scott Bricker), moderator (Commissioner Sam Adams), and all of our volunteers.

I, sadly, didn’t take notes, but Jonathan wrote a balanced, insightful review over at BikePortland.org, which I highly recommend you read. (Actually, I even more highly recommend you bookmark or subscribe to his site.) The crowd was huge—we couldn’t have squeezed any more people in if we wanted to—and the conversation was civil and productive.

Knowing that no minds were likely to change, and that we weren’t going to be rewriting city or state transportation policy, what we had hoped to accomplish with the event was to allow people with differing view points to voice and defend their opinions, in order to further everyone’s understanding of politically sticky transportation funding issues.

And on that, I think we succeeded. For all of the bikers who thought that everyone from the Cascade Policy Institute was a two-dimensional, cars-only monster, it was instructive to see that Sreya, who heads up the Wheels to Wealth program, is genuine in her passion for getting low-income people into good jobs. Just as it was instructive to hear that Jonathan and Scott both have cars, which they occasionally even drive.

The crowd was way pro-bike, and a vast, vast majority of the people who came rode in on their bikes. That either speaks to the fact that Portland is an overwhelmingly pro-bike city, or that bikers have far more passion about their transportation than car drivers, who tend to take their transportation for granted.

One of the strange highlights of the night for me was having Mel, Craig Flynn, and Steve Buckstein of the Cascade Policy Institute spend about 15 minutes after the debate trying to sell me on jitneys, privately owned cars that run on a fixed route and offer rides for cheap. Like a cross between a taxi and a bus but, since this is championed by libertarians, largely unregulated. They’re convinced that TriMet and bus driver unions are keeping jitneys illegal—but, seriously, guys, unregulated taxis? Doesn’t that seem a bit, I don’t know, dangerous?

The real highlight, though, was seeing Scott Bricker take on his role as interim executive director of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (Jonathan notes this, too, in his post.) This was, as far as I know, his first public appearance in the role, and he brought the passion, energy, and intelligence you’d expect from the state’s leading bike advocacy group. Hopefully, it bodes well for the BTA.

Were you there? What’d you think?

p.s. Oh, we’ll have the bike vs. car video posted as soon as it’s ready.

Update: The video is here.