Pedalpalooza festival celebrates biking

Portlanders who love biking can join Pedalpalooza rides nearly every day this summer. Are there any you’re looking forward to? The rides are organized by volunteers and can be short, long, costumed, themed, fast or slow. Meghan Sinnott, a Pedalpalooza organizer, and Armando Luna, a cycling enthusiast, join us to talk about the three-month-long celebration.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: Pedalpalooza is here! What started 20 years ago as a one-month celebration of bicycling and bike culture has blossomed into three months of bike rides and bike events and workshops, hundreds of chances to meet people, to build community, and to just get on a bike. Meghan Sinnott is one of the festival’s organizers, Armando Luna is a passionate rider and a passionate ride leader, and they both join me now. It’s good to have both of you on the show.

Meghan Sinnott: Thank you.

Armando Luna: Hi! Thanks.

Miller: Meghan first. How did Pedalpalooza start?

Sinnott: Well, it started in 2002, when an itinerant festival came through town. It was called Bike Summer, and they happened all over the United States. Portlanders loved this festival of activism and bike fun so much that they kept it going the following years.

Miller: But the original version was maybe going to be a one-off, or was a one-off in other places?

Sinnott: Yeah, exactly, but it was so inspiring to get people together hosting bike rides and bicycle events that we couldn’t just let one year happen.

Miller: Were you there for that very first one?

Sinnott: I was home in Alaska at the time. I moved down here in 2001 to go to college, and I would go home every summer, so I missed the very first one, unfortunately.

Miller: How has the event expanded over the years?

Sinnott: Well, not only in the number of days. It was even less than a month originally, and we expanded it; for a while it was 2.5 weeks, and then a month, and now these three months. Also, in the number of rides and the variety of rides. We have everything from tomorrow, there will be an Adoptees of Color Ride, and then, let’s see, there’s a Gushers Ride.

Miller: What’s a Gushers Ride?

Sinnott: What’s a Gushers Ride? Well, obviously, it’s a ride where you go around and eat Gushers!

Miller: Oh that’s the candy?

Sinnott: Yeah!

Miller: I feel like I’ve offended you with my ignorance, but you know we all need to learn.

Sinnott: No, I love it! I didn’t know and I had to read the calendar to discover that Gushers, apparently, are a vegan candy. And so there you go, vegans, there is a ride for you. It’s a Gushers Ride. Yeah, so, the types of ride, the amount of rides, and the number of ride leaders, continues to expand every single year.

Miller: Armando Luna, what does Pedalpalooza mean to you?

Armando Luna: Oh gosh! It just means a summer full of fun. Every ride is fun, and you get to meet people and see people’s imaginations come to fruition when they come up with rides like the Gusher Ride, right?

Miller: You co-led the kickoff ride last week, am I right?

Luna: Yes I did.

Miller: What did that entail?

Luna: Rudy, a friend of mine actually, had been in touch with Meghan and was going to lead it. He asked a few of us to help out with them, and so we came up with some ideas and put it all together. Usually the kickoff ride is one ride, but we actually turned it into three separate rides. So there were three separate rides for the kickoff ride, and you could attend all of them or just one of them. It ended in a DJ party and it was super fun. It was a really good time.

Miller: A few years ago, I read, you set out to do one Pedalpalooza ride every day for a month. Did you end up succeeding in that plan?

Luna: I did. It was exhausting but super fun. I know I have a friend that did it. Last year was the first year that it was three months long, and I had a friend that actually did a ride every day for three months.

Miller: Beating your record.

Luna: Oh yeah, totally smashing it.

Miller: Meghan, what was the thinking, from going from a one month series of rides, to spreading them out over three months?

Sinnott: We made the decision to do this last year, when we were hesitant. A lot of events were, rightfully so, holding off for another year, canceling, and not gathering individuals because of COVID. We thought about it, and we felt like the one thing that we really knew that we could do was be outside, and what is Pedalpalooza if not a series of events outside? Celebrating humans at a distance, on bicycles.

So what we did then is encourage people not to rush it, right? If you were feeling ill, or hadn’t gotten vaccinated yet, you didn’t have to push forward and attend rides in June, because rides would be there for you June, July, and August.

It also encouraged some of the larger rides, like the World Naked Bike Ride, to take a step back and and split those rides up, and make them Full Moon Rides, and host one every month so that it wasn’t a 10,000 person event bringing people from all over, but instead smaller, decentralized events. The idea was to give people the opportunity to attend rides when they felt safe to do so.

Miller: How much central control do you have over these rides?

Sinnott: Good question. There are specific rides that I have a hand in on the back side, behind the scenes, helping coordinate, for instance, the kickoff rides. Then, I just checked this morning and there are 564 rides, as of this morning, with over 400 unique organizers, and that’s just it. Every single ride is organized by a different person, on a different theme, starting at a different park on a different day.

As one of the festival organizers, I’m here to promote the festival as a whole, but the individual rides are autonomous. I can go in and encourage people to reach out to other ride leaders if their rides, let’s say, are starting in the same park at the same time. I can encourage people to edit the title of their ride if it’s unclear. I can do little things like that, but unless the rides go against the code of conduct that we have, which is a really lovely code of conduct put out by Shift to Bikes, I don’t really have much to say. If people want to host a bike ride that kicks off at four in the morning, and there was just one, then by all means, have a World Without Cars bike ride on the empty streets of Portland at four am.

Miller: Armando, you’ve done something called the Ding Dong Ride. Can you explain what this is?

Luna: Yeah, it’s the Ding Ding Ride.

Miller: Ding Ding Ride! I apologize. Someone should do a Ding Dong, as well.

Luna: We did have the Ding Dong version of the Ding Ding Ride.

Miller: [laughs] Okay, so, what are these?

Luna: The ride, think of it like a flash mob bicycle ride. I actually inherited this ride from another person who created it, and what it is is a ride that starts at a specific time, like just say 5:30 p. m. It goes around Ladd Circle and it goes for three minutes and you ring your bell on your bike, and at the end of three minutes everybody just goes on their way. There’s not really a start or finish, it’s just a starting time and ending time. So for three minutes everybody rings their bell and then everybody leaves. So I held one. I got to take over that ride, so I held one each month last year, and on the last month, in the August Ding Ding Ride was the August Ding Ding Ding Dong Ride where I gave out Ding Dongs to everybody that showed up.

Miller: Meghan, how do you think about the impact of Pedalpalooza? Of what all these things collectively do?

Sinnott: Well, it’s hard when you’re as in it as I am. It is difficult to lift your head up and see around, so instead what happens is I get the feedback in my inbox, and messages on Instagram, and getting to see what people are sharing every day, and most recently, it’s this realization that there are people in different cities, in different counties,  in different states, in different countries, who are looking to Pedalpalooza Bike Summer and being inspired to do similar festivals in their own town.

Then, just following the twitter feed after the kickoff ride, and seeing those people. One individual said they were biking through town after having a really bad day, and they saw the kickoff ride go by, and they decided to join, and how it turned their day around and it brought great joy into their week. Other people, who didn’t think that they had what it took to be a cyclist, but we’re kind of pulled into a group ride with a friend, and they’ve since sold their car and are living a car-free lifestyle and loving it.

Mostly I think that these events, they’re so visible. There they are on the streets. It’s encouraging people to reimagine their city, their lives, what fun can be, and celebrating streets for people, and making Portland for Portlanders.

Miller: Meghan Sinnott and Armando Luna, thanks so much.

Sinnott: Thank you very much. Happy Pedalpalooza Bike Summer!

Miller: You, too.

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