[This story was written by Jen Sotolongo, a Clackamas County tourism development specialist. It first appeared in the Clackamas County Bicycle Tourism Newsletter and is being used with her permission.]
After two years of operating a satellite bike repair shed in North Portland’s public mixed-income New Columbia community, the Community Cycling Center is deepening its community involvement.
The nonprofit bike shop and biking-for-everyone advocacy group is combining bike events and education with a rising educational philosophy known as “Thrive” in an effort to help residents change their city for the better.
“A lot of the time organizations go to a community and they don’t really try to help, but you give them what you think they need,” said Sheena Ilaoa, an educator who just finished a summer designing the new curriculum for the CCC. “What we’re trying to give them is tools.”
With Jonathan exploring the state on Cycle Oregon and me in Pittsburgh for my other gig, this will be an unusual week here on BikePortland: We’ve been socking away enough to have one or two posts each day this week. And though we’ve got some great stories lined up, barring major events we won’t be posting breaking news. We’ll both be checking in on the site regularly, but this may also slow down comment moderation — our apologies.
But without further ado, here’s a particularly good crop of bike links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Housing preference: Even in a fantasy world where cost were no issue, one in five Portland-area residents would still prefer an apartment, condo or duplex. About one in four dream of life in a “rural setting.”
One of the frustrating facts of life at BikePortland is that we’ve never had time to cover the big Clark and Washington County suburbs nearly as much as we’d like. But if you bike in Washington County and haven’t followed the comments beneath this week’s Washington County post, you’ve been missing out.
Something about eastern Oregon keeps calling me back.
In the past six months I’ve made three trips east of the Cascades and tomorrow I’ll shove off for yet another one: the Cycle Oregon Week Ride.
The first two trips I took to the place known as “Oregon’s dry side” were for work: a reporting/riding excursion in The Dalles in March and a trip to Treo Bike Ranch in July. Through my bike adventures and people I met along the way, I’ve learned that the towns and roads in this region have so much to offer I wanted to share them with my family. So, over the long long Labor Day weekend I packed up our mini-van and took my wife Juli and three kids on a camping/road trip. We drove out to the Gorge, stopped in The Dalles, then went south into Heppner, the John Day River Valley, and then looped back up through Fossil, Maupin, Dufur, and then back to the Gorge. It was fantastic.
After nine months and 270 petition signatures, the people who live on SE 34th Avenue between Clinton and Division just can’t seem to persuade the city to remove five parking spots in front of their houses in order to add a bike lane.
“It’s not strictly a bicycle issue. It’s just traffic working more smoothly.”
— Mark Zahner
“We’re just framing the argument as safety on this block vs. parking spots,” said Mark Zahner, who lives at 34th and Clinton and has led the campaign. “We see there’s a lot of near misses, we’ve acknowledged the problem, we’ve got support from the neighbors. Where do we go from here?”
The Bureau of Transportation is eyeing NE 7th Avenue between Weidler and Schuyler for its latest street re-design project aimed specifically at improving conditions for cycling.
Northbound on 7th, the project will add a six-foot wide bike lane and a bike box between Weidler and Broadway, then a bike lane and sharrows between Broadway and Schuyler. In the southbound direction, the project will a mix of bike-only lanes and shared lanes with sharrow markings between Schuyler and Weidler. Also in the plans are a bike box on Broadway to facilitate two-stage left turns from 7th onto Broadway.
Here’s PBOT’s latest project concept drawing:
