Here are the great bike links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Racetrack gamble: As Minnesota’s only velodrome considers closing rather than putting up $850,000 for repairs, a private company is building a $100 million bike racing arena in Philadelphia.
Bike camping: You can now purchase a camper trailer for your bike. (Hope for low winds.)
As we wrote beneath the last Comment of the Week post, BikePortland has decided to be the only blog we’re aware of that pays for great comments. The person whose thoughts we select for this feature gets a crisp $5 bill in the mail, as a way for us to appreciate the site’s amazing discussion community. So watch your email — we might be in touch.
Street safety matters to cities. So does street comfort. But only one of those issues will land you in court.
That’s the insight shared this week by BikePortland reader paikiala, responding to the discussion on Wednesday’s post about a guerrilla traffic diverter installed on Clinton by anonymous activists.
Kyle Carlson was a couple hundred feet up the hills of Northwest Portland when he mentioned he used to ride all the way home without switching out of his biggest front gear.
Now that construction of the North Williams Safety Project has nearly wrapped up, it’s time to address how specific parts the new design are working — and how they’re not.
Welcome to your menu of weekend rides and events, lovingly brought to you by our friends at Hopworks Urban Brewery.
You know what’s great about this town? Even with the cold/wet weather and the holiday season craziness, there are still fun bike rides and events to take part in.
Whether you are looking for a group ride or an event that lets you connect with other biking fans, there’s something for you in the roundup below. I have a feeling many of your bike rides this weekend will be of the shopping variety. If you do plan on doing some gift-buying by bike, remember to lock up your bike well and don’t let yourself become a bike prowl victim by leaving stuff in your bike bags.
Have a great weekend!
Some of the bike world’s best companies have posted new job opportunities this past week. If you’re looking to break into the industry, check them out in the links below…
It’s the end of the year, and that means the next couple weeks here on BikePortland will be rich with retrospectives and analysis from 2014 and predictions for 2015.
One of those will be part of a new tradition: the annual question show on our podcast. This is a fun endeavor where the three of us — Jonathan, me, and producer Lillian Karabaic — take questions from listeners and others and address as many as we can, on air, in 25 minutes. The only restriction: the questions somehow have to be about either the year past or the year to come.
Last year, we tackled subjects like proper use of crosswalks, the latest improvements to the Springwater Trail and the Nobel Prize for Physics.
If Portland’s street safety advocates hope to put special requirements on Uber drivers, they’d better move fast.
On Thursday afternoon, city officials reached a deal that will make Uber and similar ride-summoning services legal by April 9. In exchange, Uber promised to suspend its service in the city starting on Sunday.
According to Willamette Week, the first local outlet to report on the city’s deal:
Oregon Congressman Peter DeFazio — who likes to mention in speeches that he’s the only member of Congress who has ever worked as a bicycle mechanic — is taking his fight for safer bicycling to the United States Government Accountability Office.
Citing a “troubling increase in pedestrian and cyclist fatalities in recent years,” Rep. DeFazio has joined with fellow House Democrats Rick Larsen from Washington state and Eleanor Holmes Norton from the District of Columbia to request a GAO investigation into the issue.
In a statement released today, the trio said they want the GAO to investigate, “trends and causes of accidents involving pedestrians and bicycles and to make recommendations about improving safety.”
A few times each day on the wooded four-lane stretch of inner SW Barbur Boulevard, state data released last week suggest, someone decides to hit the gas and zoom through at an average 55 mph or more.
And about a dozen times each year, Barbur’s crash history suggests, someone on this part of Barbur loses control of their vehicle and hits something. Once or twice a year, someone dies.
Since narrowing the road in this stretch to one lane in each direction appears to make many fewer people choose to hit the gas, a redesign that would replace one of the northbound lanes with a bike lane and walking path in each direction could be seen as a perfect test case for Vision Zero. That’s the principle, endorsed by Portland’s transportation director, that safety is always a higher priority than convenience when it comes to road design.
The law has caught up to a teenager who threw bricks at three men riding their bicycles in northeast Portland back in April.
16-year-old Marquise D’Angelo Murphy was picked up by police in Keizer, Oregon Tuesday night in connection with a shooting at a high school in north Portland on December 12th. Murphy was also arrested by Portland Police on April 20th for his role in the brick-throwing incident that injured Adrian Richardson.
The Bicycle Transportation Alliance wants more of the community to step up and become their own advocates for better biking. Tonight they host a Bike Advocacy Clinic that aims to give people with bike-related concerns and issues the tools they need to fix them.
The BTA has done free bike legal clinics for many years, but this is the first time they’ve offered a clinic on advocacy. The group’s engagement manager Carl Larson said today that they recognize there’s, “A need for informed advocates in our community and we can’t tackle every little problem.” “With some basic tools and and tactics,” he added, “our members and the public can make biking better.”
It’s sort of like getting to tap into the BTA’s 25-years of lessons and expertise. Topics that will be covered at tonight’s clinic will include messaging, defining success, figuring out who holds influence on your issue, finding allies, and the difference between pressure and persuasion.
