🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏
About 15-20 bike safety advocates held a brief rally tonight at the site of yesterday’s fatal bike/bus collision on SW Farmington Road just west of Murray Blvd.
Participants held signs and placed tea lights and flowers at a ghost bike that has been erected for 15 year-old Austin Miller.
At tonight’s meeting of the Portland Bicycle Advisory Committee, PDOT Project Manager Rich Newlands unveiled the marketing materials intended to educate Portlanders about the new bike boxes coming this spring.
Here is the centerpiece design of their “Get Behind It. The Bike Box: Portland’s new green space” campaign:
The Vancouver (WA) City Council unanimously approved an all-ages helmet ordinance at their meeting yesterday. The ordinance was initially drafted to only apply to kids under 18 and was then re-written as an all-ages law at the suggestion of a local bicycle club.
The Council has set a second reading and public hearing of the ordinance to take place on February 25th.
Vancouver is one of only a few jurisdictions on Washington to not have an all ages helmet law. If it passes in its current form, the law would also apply to other human-powered vehicles including; scooters, skateboards, roller skates, unicycles and roller blades. The ordinance also sets aside $5,000 for an educational campaign about the new law and for the purchase of helmets for low-income youth.
PDOT’s Transportation Options Division has announced that their “SmartTrips Southeast” program led to a 9.4% reduction in drive-alone trips in the target area.
The program — which uses individualized marketing techniques to encourage participants to walk, bike, and take transit — was focused on over 20,000 Southeast Portland (and Milwaukie) households.
Participating residents were subjected to an all-out blitz of outreach events, access to resources, and free gifts (including the wonky-yet-fashionable bicycle map bandanna!) to help inspire them to make more sensible transportation choices.
Hal Ballard, acting executive director of the Washington County Bicycle Transportation Coalition has organized a brief memorial service tonight for Austin Miller, the 15 year-old who was killed after colliding with a bus in Beaverton yesterday.
The service will begin at 5:00pm tonight at the intersection of SW Murray and Farmington Road.
Ballard says he and a group of supporters will hold signs with the ‘And we Bike‘ slogan, “to remind motorists of our relationship to them”.
The City of Beaverton has also granted permission for a ghost bike to be installed in memory of Austin.
Yesterday’s tragic bus/bike collision in Beaverton that claimed the life of 15 year-old Austin Miller occurred at an intersection that is known to be tricky and dangerous.
The precise mechanics of what happened are still unclear, but we do know that Miller was struck by the #52 TriMet bus as he entered SW Farmington Road from SW Murray Blvd.
As many of you know, the site was completely down yesterday.
My server crashed due to too much traffic. The culprit was my coverage of the Handmade Bicycle Show.
I worked with my host to fix the problem, and they tweaked the server as much as they could, but they said the traffic was simply more than the server could handle.
I should have foreseen this potential issue and taken better precautionary measures to prevent it, but I guess I learned this lesson the hard way (again).
