Ride of Silence Reflection
VULNERABLE, adjective, susceptible to physical or emotional attack or harm.
As cyclists, we are very vulnerable at times. I know I have occasionally looked down at my skinny little front tire and cute little spokes while hurtling down a hill at a fast rate of speed and felt vulnerable: “If something goes wrong here…” I’ve thought. I think we have all had cars come too close, at least in our opinion, while we are riding city streets, or have cycled across one of the interstate bridges with cars and trucks racing by mere feet from us, or glanced over from the seat of our bike to a driver and observed they were on their phone or otherwise distracted. Yes, at times we cyclists can feel very susceptible to physical harm.
The Ride of Silence honors those whose vulnerability on a bike cost them their lives when they interacted with a car. The Ride of Silence is held the third Wednesday of May each year. The organization asks that the ride be only 10 or 11 miles long and that travel speed is about 12 MPH. ✎
On May 21, PBC had a Ride of Silence leaving from Woodstock Park. I had identified some of the sites of bike/car crashes through the Portland Traffic Fatalities database and plotted out a route that would include a few. Sadly, to visit all the bicycle fatality sites in the Portland Metro area would be far more than 11 miles.
As we stopped at each location, I read a bit about each person and the circumstances of the crash. One woman, who died at 92nd Avenue and Division, had no information that I could find other than her name, age, and date of the crash. But our mission was not to adjudicate these incidents from the curbside or create some arbitrary hierarchy of human value. Our mission was to stop and consider lives lost when cars and bikes intermingle.
There were ten of us at the ride start. We had three non-members. I had also posted the ride on Shift 2 Bikes about which I was a little apprehensive. Shift 2 Bikes has a huge following and I envisioned throngs of people. As is often the case with worrying, it was pointless.
It was a pleasant evening, and we started with a brief ceremony after I reviewed the ride safety rules. I had black arm bands which some took, I read a poem called Ride of Silence, and we had a moment of silence.
The ride is ridden in silence. That is hard, for me anyway. I use my voice a lot when I am a leader. I advised at the start that safety would take priority over silence but fortunately we were safe!
I am glad our club offered this ride. I think it is important, as Portland’s premier bicycle club, to acknowledge the vulnerability of cyclists as they ride the city streets. I believe that these deaths, coupled with citizens who took action and demanded change, have made our metro area safer over the years. At the time of the Ride of Silence, I believe there had been no bicycle/car-related deaths in 2025.
Ann Morrow, President