An interesting movie is coming to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) on March 6th. It’s called “Wired to Win” and according to the film’s website:
“the film combines spectacular live-action footage with cutting-edge computer graphics and medical imagery to demonstrate how each brain responds to experience and challenge in ways we’re only just beginning to understand.”
The images are sort of creepy, but it looks like it’ll be an interesting movie.
One reason Portland is such a great biking town is that bikes have been a part of the landscape for well over 100 years. Case in point; in my office I’ve got a framed version of the “Cyclists’ Road Map of Portland” dated 1896 (more photos here). It’s a really cool map and it has advertisements for all kinds of interesting things including:
Compare that to Metro’s current Bike There! map and you can see how far we’ve come in 110 years.
For another interesting look at the progress of Portland’s bikeway network, check out this animation I created. It shows the bikeway network in 5-year increments from 1980 and into the future.
Local racer and co-owner of Sellwood Cycle Repair, Erik Tonkin has just been named to the U.S. team for the 2006 UCI Cyclocross World Championships. He joins his wife Rhonda Mazza who was recently named to the women’s team.
Congrats to the world’s facest ‘cross couple! The big race is January 29 in Zeddam, the Netherlands.
I guess this is a good time to mention that Erik will soon have his own column here on BikePortland.org so you can read all the juicy details and race reports from the Netherlands. Stay tuned for more on this early next week.
Check out my photos of Erik and Rhonda in action (on bikes that is).
Long time bike advocate and current city employee Randy Albright (seen here at a June Critical Mass ride) has filed a lawsuit against TriMet seeking damages of over $48,000. The suit, which was filed last Friday, details an incident which occured on the Hawthorne Bridge back in January 2004.
I recently met with Randy to get his side of the story:
The City of Portland has just released the results from their 15th annual “Citizen Survey”. This survey was sent to residents in all 95 neighborhoods with over 22,000 responses being tallied. The goal of the survey was to find out what residents think of a variety of city services; from trash collection to water quality.
There was only one bike-related question:
In general, how do you rate streets in your neighborhood on safety of bicyclists?
Here’s a quick look at the results:
Last week I posted about bike lawyer Ray Thomas’ new campaign to take the law into our own hands when in a serious injury crash with a motorist. The advice was great, but it wasn’t very clear to non-lawyers.
What follows below is a more straightforward checklist of what do to after you’ve been hit. It was submitted to me by local cyclist Austin Ramsland.
[via GravelTech]
Ira Ryan has added his name to the growing list of Portland frame builders. Ira is one of the founders of Magpie Messenger Collective, is the reigning champion of the Trans-Iowa endurance mountain bike race, and apprenticed with Sacha White of Vanilla Bicycles.
Back in October, transportation advocates and concerned citizens attended a Transportation Safety Summit hosted by Commissioner Sam Adams. The goal was to identify specific strategies that would make our streets safer.
Based on the summit, PDOT created an action plan and released it for public input. Only problem is that no knows it exists. Turns out it was released just before the holidays and has since become buried in a far off corner of Sam’s blog…until now.
I never realized Cycle Oregon had its headquarters right here in North Portland. I visited them today to talk top secret business stuff and was impressed by what I saw. I especially liked this nifty bike rack.
Here’s a photo of their top guy, Jerry Norquist (thanks for lunch!). He’s been in the bike industry (Specialized, Trek) for over 30 years and brings some serious vision and connections to his position.
The Bicycle Paper has been covering the Pacific Northwest bike scene since 1972. It’s distributed free on over 500 newsstands throughout British Columbia, Washington, Idaho and Oregon (70 of those are in Portland).
They’re looking to expand their coverage of Portland and Oregon, so starting with the March issue, I’ll be writing a news column for them on a regular basis. The only problem is, we can’t think of a good name.
Got any ideas?
Chris DiStefano, former PR director for Shimano and board member of the International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA), has been hired to the sales and marketing team of Portland-based bike part manufacturer, Chris King Components.
According to the official press release, King has a unique way of breaking in new office staff:
