A BikePortland Get Together in Tigard in 2010. The city’s trail system consistently ranks highly for state grants.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

As we reported Wednesday, Portland’s proposed Flanders Crossing Active Transportation Bridge across Interstate 405 made the cut for probable funding from a two-year, $45 million state program.

On Friday, the state released a full list of 75 project rankings from the final review committee for the lottery-backed Connect Oregon program.

Of those, 37 fit into the top-priority $45 million worth of projects.

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Plans for downtown Milwaukie’s bike network.
(Image: Milwaukie)

One year after Milwaukie voters elected two vocally bike-friendly politicians to their city council, Milwaukie is lining up some significant investments.

The biggest new one in the works, a crosstown neighborhood greenway on Monroe Street, will get its first public meeting at city council on Nov. 3.

“We have consensus on council to make this a top priority,” Milwaukie City Councilor Karin Power said in an interview Wednesday about the city’s work on an “all-inclusive bike-, pedestrian- and street-safety program.”

Milwaukie doesn’t have a citizen biking or pedestrian advisory committee. But public support for biking and walking improvements has led to something interesting: the city’s public safety committee has broadened its focus and is now taking a lead role on infrastructure planning.

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This year, the city just south of Portland is getting a new light rail line and an excellent new bike path extension alongside McLoughlin Boulevard. The co-founders of the group Bike Milwaukie want to add another amenity: a public bike repair stand.

“Over the past four and a half years, we’ve gone on over 50 rides with hundreds of participants, and it’s been a lot of fun,” group co-leader Greg Bartz-Bowman explains in the Kickstarter video above. “The only thing what hasn’t been fun is that when we have that occasional breakdown, there’s nowhere in town to get your bike fixed.”

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(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

The Bicycle Transportation Alliance’s campaign to get walking and biking education and infrastructure to public schools across the Portland metro area got two strong boosts this month.

In successive unanimous council resolutions, the suburban cities of Milwaukie and Tigard voted on March 17 and 24 to ask the Metro regional government to dedicate funding to programs like the ones currently enjoyed by many Portland elementary and middle schools.

“Our goal is for Tigard to be the most walkable community in the Pacific Northwest where people of all ages and abilities live healthy, interconnected lives,” Tigard Mayor John Cook said in a BTA news release. “Providing a safe route to school for every kid is essential to the health and safety of our community.”

Various Milwaukie and Tigard residents had more to say in the BTA’s release: (more…)

TriMet has at least $34 million, and maybe much more, unspent within the project’s scope of work.
(Photo: TriMet)

Four years after the Portland area’s transit agency furiously chopped costs and recruited other local governments to balance the budget for its new $1.5 billion rail line, the price tag so far is turning out to be more like $1.3 billion.

Though a few remaining bills have yet to be paid, the combination of far more cost-efficient track and systems construction than expected and persistently low interest rates has been so large that TriMet has been searching for new ways to spend some of the unexpected surplus locally.

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Milwaukie City Council will take up the proposed
new path on 17th Ave tonight.

After we posted a story yesterday about a Milwaukie real estate owner who plans to demolish his retail building on Main Street and build a parking lot, we heard from a few readers who worried their hometown was getting a bad rap.

Truth is, there is a lot of positive momentum for bicycling and livable streets in Milwaukie. Reader Matt Menely has been advocating for bikes in Milwaukie for many years. He got in touch to tell us about tonight’s city council meeting — which has an agenda that’s chock-full of bike-related projects.
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A Google Street View image of the building that
could be destroyed.

Here’s an odd story forwarded to us this afternoon by reader Tim D.

According to Pamplin Media, a downtown Milwaukie business that already has a parking lot has gotten permission to demolish a row of sidewalk-facing shops on its small commercial Main Street in order to build a parking lot.

The property owner, regional credit firm Reliable Credit, doesn’t seem to have immediate plans to destroy the row of buildings at 10605 SE Main Street, which county records value at $180,000. Instead, the firm’s owner is apparently acting to ensure the company has the right to do so in the future.

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SE 17th is getting a makeover between Sellwood and Milwaukie.

A new, $3.4 million path and street design update will vastly improve the bicycling connection between Portland and Milwaukie and the City of Milwaukie wants your feedback on its preliminary design.
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“This picture is just way too awesome!” according to
a Milwaukie city council candidate.

1:14 pm: Barbur has released a statement. Read it at the end of this post.

Scott Barbur, a lawyer running for Milwaukie (Oregon) city council, is facing serious questions from voters about a Facebook post and comments that surfaced last week. The post makes light of a horrific collision in Mexico in 2008 that killed one person and injured 10 others.

On July 20th, 2010, Barbur posted a photograph of the collision on his personal Facebook page. That post was discovered a few months ago by Mandy Zelinka, the editor and founder of the Milwaukie Rules! website. Zelinka then posted a screenshot of Barbur’s 2010 post on the Milwaukie Rules! Facebook page last week.
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Google Street View image of the approximate incident location. The bus stop is visible beneath the tree at right.

TriMet is investigating an incident in which a man claims that a TriMet operator blew him off after a bus pulled in front of him while he was riding his bike, prompting a collision.

The encounter took place June 6 at 4:30 pm, leaving the man, Erik Holm, with what he described as “minor pain in my left shoulder, injury sustained when I used my left arm to brace against impact with the bus at oblique angle.”

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