🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏
Use this post to discuss your hot-weather riding this weekend.
Not sure yet what you’ll be doing? Check out the featured events on our Weekend Guide, or for more bike fun see the always well-populated Shift calendar.
I’ve already begun my weekend, taking a chunk of time off in the middle of the day to haul some found boards by bike — hopefully within the next week they’ll become a bookshelf.
We had another great Get Together in inner Southeast last night. A very solid turnout of readers, local bike business owners, event promoters, advocates and planners showed up to learn, network, and drink some very good beer.
Each one of our Get Togethers (this is the fifth) has taken on a different feel. Last night we didn’t talk much about road conditions and bikeway highs and lows. Instead, with the amazing amount of active bike people in Southeast, the night turned into a great opportunity for business-to-business networking and for people to put faces to the names and projects they read about everyday here on BikePortland.
If you live/ride/work in and around Vancouver, Washington, you need to get involved with this very important project to create a new bike and pedestrian plan for Clark County.
Here’s the latest word from a Clark County press release:
Open houses to gather public input on planning for biking, walking
Vancouver, WA – Planning to improve conditions for riding bikes and walking over the next 20 years will be the focus for a pair of open houses on the evenings of July 28 and 30. Both sessions will run from 6 to 8 p.m. and cover the same topics.
The first open house will be at the Fishers Landing Transit Center, at Southeast 164th Avenue and State Route 14, Vancouver. The second will be in the sixth-floor hearing room at the Clark County Public Service Center, 1300 Franklin St., Vancouver.
Project Manager Laurie Nicholson said the public will have an opportunity to ask questions and learn the status of this Community Planning project. In addition, she said anyone interested may provide input on these three topics:
– Potential updates to the Clark County Bicycle Commute Plan adopted in 1996.
– How to enhance planning reflected in the Regional Trail & Bikeway Systems Plan adopted by Vancouver-Clark Parks and Recreation in 2006.
– Broader concerns about how to make the county more “walkable” to promote health and safety for pedestrians both in urban and rural areas.Nicholson said a draft plan should be ready for additional review and comment in the fall, before it is forwarded to the Planning Commission and Board of Clark County Commissioners for hearings and formal consideration in 2010.
More information is available on the project Web site at www.clark.wa.gov/bikeandped. People interested in learning more may also contact Nicholson directly at (360) 397-2280 ext. 4544, or e-mail laurie.nicholson@clark.wa.gov.
Columbia River Crossing (CRC) project watchers are buzzing after a front page story in The Oregonian yesterday detailed its planning costs.
According to reporter Dylan Rivera, the planning effort for the new I-5 bridge has cost taxpayers $65 million. Here’s more from his opening paragraph:
“A new Interstate 5 bridge over the Columbia River has so far cost taxpayers $65 million, without a spade of dirt turned. By this time next year, the tab will hit $100 million — burning though cash at a rate of more than $1 million a month.
The result: mainly an environmental impact statement and thousands of pages of reports.”
It’s been about a month since the re-launch of our Stolen Bike Listings. And it’s a good thing we did. So far in July, we’ve had 63 stolen bikes listed.
Today, I get to a share a story of how technology and the community came together to get one of them back and put its thief behind bars.
James Selman, the founder and creative director at branding agency Weights&Pulleys, listed his one-of-a-kind, custom black Seven Cycles Tsunami singlespeed (with estimated value of $4,600) on June 29th.
According to Selman, someone threw a baseball-sized rock through the glass door of his office in Northwest Portland. The smash-and-grabbers grabbed his Apple laptop and rode off on his bike.