Still from a video shot of this morning's bike train at Beach School. -Watch it below-
Like a cycling tsunami washing over North Portland in several waves, students (and parents) from Beach School showed, once again, just how inspiring and effective the local bike train movement has become.
Reader Matt G. emailed us a few days ago to share an interesting experience. Matt got his bike stolen back in January and, like a smart and responsible Portlander, he immediately reported it to the police and listed it on our Stolen Bike Listings. A few months passed, then he got an email from what he assumed was a Good Samaritan.
A great sign for local biking and business. (Photos by The Lumberyard and Josh Harvey)
The Lumberyard, an indoor bike park on NE 82nd Avenue in Portland, is now open for business. The new, privately-owned riding area swung open its doors to the public earlier this month. It's the first facility of its kind west of the Mississippi and will provide a much-needed riding opportunity for both Portlanders and visitors alike.
Lumberyard co-founders Will Heiberg and Michael Whitesel began renovating a former bowling alley across the street from Madison High School last fall. $3.5 million of redevelopment and countless hours of hard work later, they've transformed the space into a 48,000 square foot cycling Shangri-La. The facility includes jump lines, pump tracks, skill sections, and a "cross-country style" trail loop that winds between it all. Riders of all abilities will find something to love about the place, says Heiberg.
[Publisher's note: As part of our ongoing racing coverage (made even better by our embedded racer and journalist Josh Liberles) we'll be featuring profiles of local teams. From the super fast to the super silly, Portland is full of them! And, as the subject of our first profile proves, those attributes are not always mutually exclusive. — JM]
The Ironclad Performance Wear Cycling Team is a road-racing-centric team based in Portland that focuses on helping novice riders to develop. It's a diverse bunch, ranging from an architect to a former army ranger to a semi-pro hippie, but somehow it all works, and amazingly well.
Team Ironclad (photographed by Catherine Leigh Cooper in August 2011).
If you're looking for work in the local bike scene, this is your lucky day. We've gotten a little behind in featuring the excellent opportunities posted to our Job Listings, so we've rounded up the last seven of them for your browsing pleasure...
Detail of Hazard Map for downtown and the eastside. Blue dots are unreinforced masonry structures, yellow diamonds are HAZMAT locations, red line is a major fault.
The Portland Bureau of Emergency Management (PBEM) has released a series of maps showing where natural hazards exist in each neighborhood throughout the city. In the interest of being prepared if and when disaster strikes (having a cargo bike all ready to go will only get you so far), I thought it'd be fun to see how these known hazards line up with popular bike routes.
Here's more about the maps from PBEM:
"The maps identify natural hazards throughout the city. They offer a neighborhood coalition by neighborhood coalition account of known earthquake faults, flood plains and other dangers, including hazardous material sites, steep slopes and forested areas at risk of fire. The maps also show community resources – such as evacuation routes and key transportation corridors used during emergencies, hospitals, county clinics, schools, fire stations and police facilities – within each neighborhood coalition area."
Chrome, a well-known bag and urban bicycling/lifestyle apparel brand, opened a new retail store in downtown Portland yesterday. Staffers from the company's San Francisco headquarters spent three weeks completely renovating a 1,300 square foot space at 425 SW 10th Avenue (around the corner from the Ace Hotel and up the street from Powell's). Portland is just the fourth city where Chrome has opened a store, and we're by far the smallest. Their other stores are in San Francisco (their headquarters), New York City, and Chicago.
Chrome was founded 17 years ago in Boulder, Colorado and moved to San Francisco a few years later. Since then, due in large part to their iconic messenger bags, they've extended their product line and now offer apparel, backpacks, and footwear. While their gear is not bike-specific, the brand lives and breathes urban biking and everything is made with the assumption that the customer will move around the city on a bike.
Eastern Oregon is known for its dry climate; but there's something taking root along its gorgeous backroads that could help grow the economy of its many small communities: bicycle tourism.
A makeshift meeting room in the Outpost Pub and Grill in John Day (pop. 1,744) is probably the last place you'd expect talk about the need of a bicycle friendly business program, community bike share or bike racks. However, this is the sort of quiet magic that a small, road-weary crew comprised of representatives from Travel Oregon and the Oregon State Parks and Recreation Department have been performing through many rural Oregon communities over the past year.
The location of yesterday's enforcement action on SE Foster.
The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) and the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) held one of their regularly scheduled "crosswalk enforcement actions" yesterday. This excellent program, run by the PBOT traffic safety team and dedicated staffer Sharon White (who often puts herself at risk on our most dangerous roads as a decoy during the missions), has resulted in nearly 1,000 citations since it began five years ago.
The set-up is your typical sting situation, except that it's not exactly a sting. The reason we call these "enforcement actions" is because both the PPB and PBOT give plenty of prior warning that the missions are happening. They notify the public about them via the local media and they even set up signs at the locations announcing that an enforcement is ahead. The goal, says the City, is not to fill the City's coffers busting scofflaws, but rather to increase awareness among road users of traffic safety and the laws that govern it.
Not surprisingly, the death of Kathryn Rickson while she rode in a bike lane just one block from Portland City Hall has got a lot of people talking. Apart from the grieving we do as a community when something like this happens, many people are turning their feelings toward finding a solution to the problems they feel might have led to the collision.
Two major strains of discussion have emerged: large trucks and the safety issues they pose in tight, urban environments; and how we design bicycle access into our roads. Today I want to focus on the issue of truck safety (I am not dismissing the bikeway design issue; but it's worth noting that we coveredthatat length following a similar fatality back in October 2007).
To get a better understanding about freight movement and truck safety downtown, I got in touch with Corky Collier. Collier is the former chair of the Portland Freight Committee, which is an advisory group to the Bureau of Transportation (think of it as the Bicycle Advisory Committee, but for freight). Collier is also the executive director of the Columbia Corridor Association, a non-profit business association that represents industries along the Columbia River.
[Publisher's note: As we shared on May 16th, PBOT has unveiled plans for the Multnomah Street Main Street Pilot Project. The road this project has taken to this point has raised many concerned eyebrows. One of them is Craig Harlow. Harlow was chair of the stakeholder advisory committee for the NE Holladay Street project (which is — whether PBOT wants us to remember or not — closely tied to the Multnomah project) and he sat on the "task force" for the NE Multnomah project. Below, I've shared a letter from Harlow to PBOT project manager Ross Swanson - JM]
"This counter will raise awareness among all travelers of the significant role bicycles play in Portland's transportation system." — PBOT spokesman Dan Anderson
As we shared on Monday, the Portland Bureau of Transportation is all set to install the city's first automated bicycle counter on the Hawthorne Bridge. The new counter, purchased from a Canadian company thanks to a $20,000 grant from the Cycle Oregon Fund, will provide a daily and ongoing tally of the number of bicycles that pass by it.
After our post, many of you wondered where exactly the counter would go. We followed-up with PBOT and this morning we heard more details from bureau spokesman Dan Anderson and PBOT bike coordinator Roger Geller.
Friends of Kathryn Rickson, the young woman who was killed while bicycling on SW 3rd and Madison last week, have launched a fundraising effort.
One of Kathryn's friends got in touch with me to share that a page has been created on ChipIn.com to handle the donations. So far, $545 has been raised. Kathryn was a student at Portland State University who was working odd jobs. Her partner, Ryan Gaughan, recently lost his job at New Seasons Market. Ryan also has a seven-year old daughter named Madeline.
A tricky crossing of the Springwater Corridor path in Clackamas County just got a bit easier. This morning, county engineers turned on a new, bike-only signal where the path crosses the intersection of SE Johnson Creek Blvd and Bell Ave (in unincorporated Clackamas County, just south of Portland city limits).
The new signal allows bike traffic to cross diagonally from the northeast corner of the intersection to the southwest corner (and vice versa), instead of having to use two separate crosswalks — a situation that was far from ideal, both from a connectivity and safety standpoint.The $70,000 project began one year ago.
After 16 months and countless meetings, PBOT has revealed how they plan to improve bicycle access and traffic safety on N Williams Avenue. And much to the surprise of Stakeholder Advisory Committee (SAC) members, part of those plans include maintaining two full lanes for auto traffic in the busiest portion of the road.
At the "final" open house for their North Williams Traffic Operations Safety Project, held Saturday at a church on Williams, PBOT rolled out new posterboards explaining the project, a 3-D simulation of the proposed changes, and they had project staff, SAC members, and traffic engineers on hand to answer questions.
My low-budget re-creation of this morning's collision at SW Bertha and B-H Hwy. (Bike = green, car = blue.)
28-year old Jessie Belter suffered a broken leg when she was struck by someone driving a car as she rode in the bike lane on Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway this morning.
According to the Portland Police Bureau, the collision happened at about 7:50 am at the intersection of Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway and SW Bertha Blvd (map). The person driving the car was 33-year-old Nicole Poor. The police say that Poor was driving northbound on SW Bertha and attempted to turn westbound (left) on Beaverton-Hillsdale Highway. Belter was headed eastbound in the bike lane. Poor stopped at the stop sign, but then, "failed to yield to the bicycle rider," police say. Luckily, the car was only traveling about 5 mph.
Poor has been issued a citation for, "Failure to Obey a Traffic Control Device." (Asked why that was the citation if the woman stopped at the stop sign, the PPB told me, "She stopped, but should have remained stopped longer... she didn't look and see the rider.")
Oregon State Police survey the scene. Dayley's bike can be seen in the upper right.
65-year old Camas, Washington resident Steven Dayley was bicycling along the same route as the Reach the Beach ride on Saturday when he was struck from behind by a man driving a pickup. Dayley died from his injuries later that night at Salem Memorial Hospital.
The collision occurred on Highway 18, a few miles east of Grande Ronde, just outside the Fort Hill Restaurant (Google Map link).
While there were hundreds of people on the road in that area due to the Reach the Beach ride, both ride organizers and the Oregon State Police report that Dayley was not an official registrant.
- Independent, daily bike news since 2005 -
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