🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏
The bike lane on SW Broadway between Montgomery and Harrison will be closed for up to a week due to a busted sewer line.
Here’s the story from KGW:
The city is just beginning its investigation into the burst pipe but says auto traffic will narrow to two lanes and a popular bike route along the SW Broadway corridor will be closed for up to a week, according to city spokeswoman Sheryl Cook [correct spelling is Cheryl Kuck — Ed.].
A reader (thanks Andrea) brought a sad story from Los Angeles to my attention.
Here’s the snip from a report in the LA Times:
“A woman in her 60s died this morning after being hit by a teenage bicyclist in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles police said.
The woman was crossing the street in the 600 block of Palisades Drive just north of Sunset Boulevard shortly before 7 a.m. when she was hit by the 16-year-old boy riding his bicycle…
“He’s just devastated,” Thomas said of the boy, who sustained cuts and bruises.
It was not immediately known how fast the boy was traveling, but it was still dark outside when the accident occurred. Authorities also did not know if the woman suffered fatal injuries when she was struck or when she fell to the ground.”
It doesn’t happen very often, but it does happen.
Full story at LATimes.com.
Close readers of this site might recall that on several occasions I’ve written that, “cars are the new smoking cigarettes.”
It’s something that came from my continued bewilderment that, while most everyone realizes the multitude of negative impacts that come with America’s love-affair with cars, we are just now (and hardly still) beginning to think of them in the same way as cigarettes. That is, as something that is very dangerous, has broad public health implications, and claims the lives of thousands of people each year.
Way back when, cigarettes were cool. Everybody smoked them. From housewives to movie stars, nobody considered the negative impacts of puffing away (like lung cancer, asthma from secondhand smoke, and so on). But, as people started dying by the tens of thousands (including two Marlboro Men), suspicions grew.
I was wondering when we’d hear from AASHTO — the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials (the “voice of transportation” a.k.a. the highway lobby).
This just in (via Traffic World and Carfree USA):
“AASHTO is weighing a $544.5 billion proposal for the next highway reauthorization bill…
Such a proposal would be almost double 2005’s $286 billion surface transportation bill, which was seen by many in the transportation community as a disappointment.”
It will be important to monitor how AASHTO and Transportation for America both position themselves for the upcoming funding battle.
A delegation of Portlanders from Metro’s Blue Ribbon Committee for Trails recently completed a week-long exploration of bike policies, culture and infrastructure in Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
Findings and recommendations from the trip will be presented at the final meeting of the Committee (which was launched back in May) on November 10th at Metro headquarters (600 NE Grand Ave.).
A reader (thanks Austin!) just gave me a heads up on an interesting new product idea from Nike.
Gadget blog Gizmodo reports that the new Hindsight glasses “are designed to do one simple thing: stop cyclists from getting hurt on the roads.”
How do they do this?
“It’s winter and cold and dark, but that doesn’t mean you need to sit around and get blob-like.”
— from the Pain in the Park website
Jeff Henderson (the man behind the Oregon Trout City of Portland Triathlon) and his partner Jonathan Eng (a personal trainer) are launching “Pain in the Park“, a new series of free cross-training workouts that will take place at parks throughout Portland.
On his website, Henderson writes that he launched the workout series because, “It’s winter and cold and dark, but that doesn’t mean you need to sit around and get blob-like.” He also writes that the workouts will focus on fun.
