🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏
The story below from the Oregonian was sent to me by a reader. It’s sad on so many levels (emphasis mine):
A 97-year-old woman was killed Saturday in the parking lot of an apartment building in Milwaukie when she was hit by a car that was backing out of a parking space, the Milwaukie Police Department said Sunday morning.
Two members of the PSU Cycling Club got a lot more than they bargained for while riding along NE Ainsworth yesterday.
According to witnesses, Club president Reuben Vyn was riding along with six other members of the club on NE Ainsworth near NE 23rd when a Portland police officer in a patrol car came by “within a foot” of his handlebars. (Ainsworth is a narrow, one-lane, residential street with car parking. The street is a designated bike route, but it’s also notoriously uncomfortable to ride on. See photo below)
The good news is that it’s going to be a chilly, beautiful weekend.
There is no bad news.
Saturday from 11 to 3 is the annual PUMP Swap Meet. PUMP may be a mountain bike organization, but the swap meet caters to every kind of rider, whether you want an obscure kind of knobby tire, a sassy new bike t-shirt, or just a decent secondhand derailleur that won’t make your life a misery. It’s also a fun scene. Check it out.
Copenhagen should become a sister city to Portland. I can barely keep track of all the local planners, politicians, advocates and bureaucrats who have made a pilgrimmage to the “City of Cyclists” this past summer alone.
“As a 30-year cyclist, I feel this message is crucial.”
–Howard Russell, ODOT
The Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) has launched a bike safety campaign.
Word of the campaign comes from ODOT’s Howard Russell. Russell is the safety enforcement manager of the agency’s Motor Carrier Division, which he says is a specialized unit devoted to preventing truck-related accidents. In addition to public education, his division investigates trucking companies and does roadside truck inspections.
The New York City Department of Transportation has picked a winner in their City Bike Racks Competition. It’s an elegant and simple hoop design created by a team from Copenhagen (which is quite fitting).
The NY Times City Room blog has the story:
A simple circle, resting on the ground with a bar bisecting it. That concept, called “Hoop” — the brainchild of Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve, designers based in Copenhagen — is the winner of the CityRacks Design Competition and will be used as the new standard bicycle rack installed on New York City’s sidewalks, officials announced on Friday. Nearly 5,000 such racks are to be installed over the next three years.
Have you ever biked up to an intersection and had the sinking feeling that the traffic signal sensors don’t know you’re there?
A new gadget (that’s still a prototype at this point) just might solve that problem. Here’s the news from Wired Magazine:
Richley spent a decade lugging an oscilloscope to intersections, measuring the signal voltages to determine what kind of signal the loop sensors used. He discovered that they vary, “so I came up with a technique that scans for frequency and accommodates the pulsed mode of modern sensors,”…Push a button and Richley’s gadget creates a brief, but strong, magnetic field that simulates the presence of a much larger conductor — say, the body of a car — and triggers the inductive sensor that lets the light know a vehicle is waiting.
Shipping giant United Parcel Service (UPS) will add a new weapon to its arsenal in the holiday shipping battle this year — bicycles.
Jeff Grant, the company’s workforce planning manager for the Oregon district (that includes Vancouver, WA), says UPS plans to hire 28 bike delivery employees this season. In the Portland metro area, Grant says eight riders will be hired.
I spoke with Grant via phone yesterday. He said the main impetus for the bike delivery program was to save money.
Portland has been at the cutting edge of traffic design for many years. In America, with our stringent, car-centric traffic design guidelines, that means having engineers who are not afraid to push the boundaries of the status quo.
The most recent example of this are Portland’s colored bike boxes. We weren’t the first city to do them, but we were the first to launch several of them at once on busy intersections in the urban core.
Before laying them down, PDOT sent an official “Request to Experiment” to the Federal Highway Administration. It’s not a required step, but an official nod from the FHWA would help PDOT breathe a little easier, and more importantly, would open the door to make colored bike boxes a standard treatment that could then be adopted more easily in other cities.
This weekend, the Cross Crusade makes its final stop at the Washington County Fairgrounds in Hillsboro.
Last year (check out my report here), Hillsboro was the sight of an epic battle between man and mud that still brings back fond memories for me both as a racer and as a photographer.
The puddles were over knee-deep, the energy-draining mud was sticky and thick, and the rain continued relentlessly through the day.
But even still, the Crusaders pressed on with smiles on their faces (after their race of course).
If the weather continues with rain in the next few days, a similar battle might have to be fought. If so, it will be something special to behold, and even more special to participate in.
Check out all the details for Sunday’s event at CrossCrusade.com.
This is the preliminary plan for Broadway Williams that was presented at the Bicycle Advisory Committee meeting last night.
“There’s no way we could have put in the facilities we’ve put in in the last 20 years without the bike tax.”
— A Colorado Springs city planner as told to the Gazette newspaper
In light of the bike excise tax idea that is being mulled about here in Oregon, I thought I’d share a story I came across several months ago (thanks to the excellent blog, Cyclelicious) about a bike tax in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
According to an article in the Colorado Springs Gazette published in August, the city has had a bike excise tax in place since 1988. In the past 20 years the tax has generated about $2 million in revenue and, more importantly, the article reports that: