Everyone bikes in Portland. Photo by dontbecreepy from Flickr.

Visiting the New York Times website today, I was struck to find that the most emailed article of the day was about Portland, Oregon’s efforts to promote our two-wheeled friend, the bicycle. For most people in the planning world, and for people like me who float around its fringes, hearing about cycling in Portland isn’t exactly news. After all, it seems that everyone knows that Portland is the Curitiba of the United States: it’s smart, well-planned, pedestrian friendly, and as if that’s not enough, it has an exquisite mass-transit system. The point I want to make is that the real news here is not the story itself, but how the readers responded to it. And that’s with thousands of emails to family and friends. For the first time, I suspect, New Yorkers are looking to this left-coast curiosity for ways to improve their own city.

To learn more about what New Yorker’s are doing to make their city more like Portland, check out our friends at the Streetsblog.