An article published Friday in the Portland Business Journal makes short reference to some very interesting news about the Burnside Bridgehead project site.
The four acre site (at the northwest corner of the intersection of Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd. and E. Burnside) was initially planned to be a gateway to the Central Eastside. However, the $260 million project fell through last year and is still on hold.
The City of Portland’s Safer Routes to Schools program is facing a steep drop in its funding for the 2009-2010 fiscal year.
In the past two years (Portland’s fiscal year goes from July 1 to June 30) the Safer Routes to Schools program has had a budget of $850,000 and $840,000 respectively. According to the program manager at PBOT’s Transportation Options division Linda Ginenthal, a sizable chunk of that budget — $250,000 — came from the city’s General Fund in the form of “one-time funds” (PBOT-speak for allocations taken from a surplus in the city’s budget).
Kidical Mass
Kids are traffic, too! Kidical Mass is a celebration of family bicycling. Training wheels, tagalongs, and trailers are all welcome on this easy-going, short, legal family ride. Be sure to bring lights and warm clothes. All families are encouraged to attend.
Sunnyside Environmental School — SE 34th and Taylor
Meet at 5:30, ride at 6:00
Contact: Angela Koch, angela at bta4bikes dot org
Newly elected Oregon State Representative from Southeast Portland, Jules Bailey, has introduced a bill into the legislature that would create a new vehicle weight class for non-motorized vehicles weighing under 50 pounds — such as bicycles (we think that weight might be too low with some of today’s new cargo bikes, but this is a matter that can likely change as the bill moves forward).
If the bill passes, it would create the new weight class and instruct state and local law enforcement agencies to index their traffic violation fines to match the weight class of the offending vehicle.
I spoke with Representative Bailey last week, and he explained his reasoning behind the bill. “It’s your basic physics equation,” he said. “Force equals mass times velocity, squared.”
“[The OTC showed a] cautious willingness to consider the possibility that local bike, pedestrian and transit projects might just be as “shovel ready” as ODOT’s existing list.”
— Bob Stacey, 1000 Friends of Oregon
The Governor-appointed Oregon Transportation Commission (OTC) was set to make a decision on how Oregon would spend it’s federal economic stimulus money this week. However, after hearing concerns from Metro and a new coalition calling themselves Transportation for Oregon’s Future, the OTC has decided to delay their decision until Friday of next week.
That information comes from Bob Stacey, executive director of 1000 Friends of Oregon. Stacey was in Salem for the OTC meeting on Wednesday. Joining Stacey was Metro councilor Rex Burkholder. Also at the meeting was Karl Rohde from the Bicycle Transportation Alliance. Both Stacey and Burkholder have written letters expressing their concerns that the OTC and the Oregon Department of Transportation were hurrying into approval of a project list that leaned too far in favor of highway paving projects — at the exclusion of more multi-modal projects.
Mayor Adams’ office has just released a survey titled, Bicycle Transportation During the Storm of December 2008.
The survey (take it online here) comes after their initial Winter Storm Response Survey, released back in January, failed to mention bicycles at all.
Today, the Mayor’s office released a new, bike-specific survey along with this statement (emphasis mine):
On January 14, the Office of the Mayor launched a survey to gather information about the City of Portland’s response to the recent winter storm. Six hundred people responded to the survey, and provided critical feedback on walking, transit and driving conditions during the storm. Almost immediately after releasing the survey, we realized that we had failed to consider bicycle transportation.
Since its humble beginnings back in 2006, the Oregon Bike Summit has steadily grown into an important event for anyone working to make Oregon, “The Land Bicycles Dream About”. This year, the event will continue that growth and take a big step in its evolution.
Following in the footsteps of the National Bike Summit — which takes place just blocks from Capitol Hill and the White House — the Oregon Bike Summit moves to Salem in 2009 with a focus on lobbying state lawmakers to pass bike-friendly legislation.
We had another great opportunity listed on the BikePortland Job Listings this week.
Learn more about it here:
The Institute for Bicycle and Pedestrian Innovation at Portland State University will host a week-long course on bicycle and pedestrian facility design and planning this summer.
Here’s the blurb:
“This week-long course will provide practitioners with the fundamentals of pedestrian and bicycle planning and design through an intensive week of classroom, field, and project experience. In addition, the course will integrate intersection design, transit access and connections, bridges, trail crossings, and other special features into the discussion…
…
Daily field tours (on foot and bike) will explore Portland’s “living laboratory” of bicycle and pedestrian facilities to provide first-hand experience of design and operations of facilities and projects discussed in the classroom. Week-long bike rentals are available for an additional fee. Please request the bike rental when registering for the workshop.”
More info on the course can be found on the IBPI’s website.
Frank Selker, the man with the mountain bike plan for Forest Park, is just 20 people shy of his goal to get 100 new, mountain-bike loving Portlanders to join the Forest Park Conservancy (FPC).
When we checked in with Frank last month, he was halfway to his goal. Today, he emailed to tell us that he just got the latest membership numbers from January. “I believe we are up to 80 cyclists,” he wrote, “and close to $6,000 in contributions to the FPC.”
Back in December, Selker challenged the community to step up and join the FPC — a non-profit group that works closely with the Parks Bureau as stewards of the park — in an effort to make a statement that it was time to move forward with talks about opening up more space for bikes in the 5,000 acre park. Currently, there is just 1/3 of a mile of trail that is legal for bikes to ride on (bikes are allowed on all the park’s larger, fire access roads).
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has recognized the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation for their work in encouraging seniors to adopt a healthy lifestyle. A key component of that effort is the PBOT’s Senior Cyclist Program.
The Building Healthy Communities for Active Aging Achievement Award was given at the recent national Smart Growth Conference. According to a report on the EPA’s website, Michelle Pirzadeh from the EPA said, “The City’s action merits national recognition because it improves the health and well-being of the community and its older citizens.”
TriMet’s new Westside Express (WES) commuter service officially opened at the end of January to big celebrations, but people that showed up to ride the train with their bikes in tow, quickly found that the WES has less — as in, less hooks for bikes.
Max Campos rode the train on opening day and he was immediately concerned that the WES comes equipped with just two bike hooks per car instead of the four that exist in other trains in the MAX system. After he rode home on the WES, Campos wrote on the Shift email list, “I’m concerned about this….On the train ride back both hooks in my car were full and I thought ‘oh god, and the thing isn’t even open yet!'”