Godzilla is alive and well in the Bay Area. But this Godzilla is unlikely to destroy any buildings or have people running in the streets. This monster is green, stands 7 feet tall and has three wheels.

Godzilla is a bike. Bryan Duggan, a local artist, is its owner.

Anyone who’s seen the bike around town is bound to remember it. And that’s exactly the way Duggan wants it.

“I like to shake folks out of their boxes,” Duggan said, smiling. “Art takes many shapes and forms.”

Duggan, 37, lives with his wife of 10 years, Bittin.

Every weekday, rain or shine, he rides along busy U.S. Highway 101 from the couple’s home in Coos Bay to his job as a water quality specialist in North Bend. In the morning he pedals down Central Avenue. At night, he coasts along Commercial Avenue back home. He towers over drivers in cars and those in SUVs. He hasn’t had any close calls in traffic, he said. Truckers usually give him a wide berth. But things are a little scary with the rank-and-file drivers, he said.

“They’ll zoom right past you going 50,” he said.

Jennifer Skoglund saw Duggan pedaling along Highway 101 in front of Coos Bay Toyota one morning on her way to work as a student first representative at Southwestern Oregon Community College. She worried about him falling off the bike, she said.

“I actually couldn’t believe what I saw,” she said.

Duggan said some people even pull over and take pictures of him with their cell phone cameras.

Stopping on a 7-foot-tall bike is tough, Duggan said. In traffic, he tries to plan his riding so he doesn’t stop at red lights, but when he can’t avoid it, he’ll try to find a place in which to circle, such as a parking lot. Or he’ll place a foot on a stopped car to help him keep his balance. Even so, he’s taken a couple of falls, usually when trying to get on the bike. He doesn’t wear a helmet, but he’s getting one, he said.

 Even getting off Godzilla is a challenge.

“It’s like getting off a horse,” he said.

Godzilla started life as two bikes. Duggan’s cousin, the founder of the Dead Baby Bike Club in Seattle, helped him weld two bike frames together during the week between Christmas and New Year’s Day. According to Dead Baby Bike’s Web site, the group’s members make choppers, tall, short and experimental bikes.

Duggan’s bike is held together by saw blades welded to the frame and adorned with animal bones, a plastic skull, a trophy and bike tools. While the chain on most bikes is  horizontal, Godzilla’s chain is vertical. The chainwheel is on the top bike, connecting to the rear derailleur on the bottom bike. The back wheel has a mountain bike tire, the front a roadbike tire.

Some people have asked Duggan where they can buy a Godzilla. He laughs when they ask. The bike, he contends, is a piece of art, not “just another commodity.”  

He’s even a little offended by the question, he said, insisting people can make their own bikes by using recycled bikes and bike parts. Godzilla cost Duggan about $30. Most of that was for cables and grommets, he said.

Duggan would like to see more bike lanes in the city.

That might not happen for awhile, at least in Coos Bay.

“This isn’t really a bicycling town,” said Steve Doty, operations administrator for Coos Bay Public Works. “It’s not like Eugene.”

One of the biggest stumbling blocks, he said, is that many of the residential streets in the city are 36 feet wide, which limits the amount of room for bike lanes. And then there are costs associated with buying land to widen streets.

“It’d be great to do it, but it’s just not practical,” Doty added.

The Oregon Department of Transportation plans to provide some shoulders and bike lanes on Highway 101 during paving operations this spring and summer from just south of Bay Park Lane to Fir Street, ODOT’s pedestrian and bicycle Program Manager Shelia Lyons said.

Duggan would like to start up his own bike club in the Bay Area and is urging residents to donate their old bikes, bike parts, saw blades, and unusual adornments they’d like to see on bikes to help the cause. He has enough kids’ bikes, he said, and he’s especially interested in bikes with unusual frames. Those interested in donating items can e-mail him at bduggan@mindspring.com. Those interested in the Dead Baby Bike Club can visit the group’s Web site at http://www.deadbabybikes.org/.