received a Bud Clark Award for lifetime achievement
from the Bicycle Transportation Alliance in 2001.
(Photo courtesy BTA.)
— This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by the Ride for Schools, a ride to raise money for Oregon’s public schools that takes place in Hillsboro on June 27th.
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Time capsule: What did it feel like to run a bike shop in the middle of Oregon’s 1971 bike boom? “They’ve taken all the fun out of the business,” complained Portland retailer Pat Patterson in this newspaper article from that spring. Leading the activism charge at the time was the late PSU English professor Sam Oakland, who said “We want to redesign Portland to make it a city for people — particularly in the downtown business area — instead of what it is now, a giant, smelly parking garage for commuters.”
Kerry’s cycling: Secretary of State John Kerry, who broke his femur while biking in France on Sunday, is quite an athelete. “If he raced in his age category, he’d be one of the top riders in the U.S,” says former pro racer Jonathan Vaughters, who’s ridden with the 71-year-old politician.
National plateau: The number of Americans who reported riding a bicycle was unchanged last year in just about every way.
Biking dynasty: True to his team’s tradition of bike lovers, Blazers Coach Terry Stotts blew off his end-of-season steam with his first trip up the Banks-Vernonia path.
Freeway-induced congestion: Texas spent $2.8 billion to widen a freeway from eight lanes to 23. Result: it now takes 51 percent longer to drive the route during rush hour than it did in 2005.
Biking promotion: How-to-be-safe campaigns don’t seem to increase or decrease people’s interest in biking, but biking-makes-you-healthy campaigns seem to appeal more to people who don’t.
The best gets better: Groningen, the Dutch college town where a world-leading 57 percent of trips are by bike, has a new 10-year plan to improve biking. It includes a new bike-themed city logo and fixes for its 11 unsafe roadway crossings.
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Bike theft: How do the Dutch and Danish handle it? The Danish Cycling Embassy has some tantalizingly brief but useful answers.
12 feet bad: To minimize collision rates in urban areas, the optimal traffic lane width seems to be 10 to 10.5 feet — well narrower than the current widths on streets like SE Powell, SW Barbur or NE Going.
CRC still dead: Washington State Rep. Liz Pike’s bill to reboot Interstate 5 bridge replacement plans has died without a Senate vote.
Wagner resigns: Southwest Washington’s top state transportation official, a major highway expansion advocate but also a backer of bike infrastructure, is retiring.
Sun-glare collision: A 79-year-old man who hit two men riding bikes with his car on Wednesday in north Clark County said he couldn’t see them due to sun glare.
Healthier highways: Most safety fixes to major arterial streets also make people who live near them healthier, according to a Clackamas County Public Health analysis of a McLoughlin Boulevard safety audit.
And your video of the week is a quick promotional spot of a breakdancer showing off an interesting new product: classy-in-the-light, reflective-in-the-dark boots.
If you come across a noteworthy bicycle story, send it in via email, Tweet @bikeportland, or whatever else and we’ll consider adding it to next Monday’s roundup.
Thanks for reading.
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Freeway induced congestion: actually the linked article says that it took 51% longer in 2014 than in 2011. Even more absurd.
This could be added to Tom Vanderbilt’s list of myths you linked to here in a recent Monday Roundup.
If I read the original Houston Tomorrow reporting correctly, Streetsblog misinterpreted the timelines involved. Crossley (the Houston writer) went back to 2005 for his “before” data.
That is about a 30 mile trip, which is now 25mph. On/off ramps at least every mile! Parking lots as far as the eye can see.
If you wanted to bike it, the route google suggests is 5 miles extra. Interestingly, the 2011 speed was 40mph, which is nearly possible with an electric velomobile.
I’m having to drive further to work, ‘cos they’ve knocked down my house to widen the road to take the traffic increased by people having to travel further to work, ‘cos their houses have been knocked down to widen the…..
The obvious question- what Portland bicycle shop was Pat Patterson at in 1971 in the “bike boom” article? Google wasn’t helpful, though there’s talk of a Pat Patterson in this article- I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the same fellow.
http://bikeportland.org/2015/04/03/two-weeks-two-wheels-portlanders-share-bikes-skills-new-pay-forward-program-136842
Good find, Tedder, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the same Pat; the guy I talked to at Central City Concern a couple months ago didn’t seem to be a bike expert until recently and would have had to have gotten to a *very* young start to own a bike shop 44 years ago.
23 lanes? I keep rereading that to make sure I’m not seeing things.
Yes – that was only 5 more lanes than the ODoT CRC cross section for the Janzen Beach/ Hayden Island interchange.
Always that strange asymmetry:
“Keith Kerbs, 42, of Vancouver and Larry Hiday, 42, of Battle Ground were both cycling west on Northeast 299th Street when an SUV, also traveling west, crashed into the cyclists near Northeast 128th Avenue, according to the Clark County Sheriff’s Office. The crash was reported at 5:13 p.m.” (emphasis mine)
Misbehaving automobiles, again (TM Ted Buehler)
When some people enter their vehicle, they become slightly less human?
Would help explain why some the people I know can be kind, generous, patient, loving people and drive like complete ********.
I also feel that the headline “Cyclists injured in North County crash in satisfactory condition” is slightly misleading. Surely, if you are injured, you’re in an unsatisfactory condition
“12 feet bad: To minimize collision rates in urban areas, the optimal traffic lane width seems to be 10 to 10.5 feet — well narrower than the current widths on streets like SE Powell, SW Barbur or NE Going.”
^Duh. Wider lanes = faster cars = deadlier cars.
And shrinking two 12 foot lanes to 10 foot lanes makes room for a bike lane.
That only adds 4 feet. I don’t follow.
I was biking around Eastman Parkway out in Gresham yesterday and 4 feet would have been a very welcome improvement for the bike lanes out there. Yes, 5 feet is beautiful and what we should aim for but 4 feet on arteries where none exist currently sounds very appealing to me. My two cents-
We have 5 foot bike lanes on Bethany, and almost nobody uses them because they are too skinny.
Also depends on the street layout. I ride on some clean 4′ shoulders which don’t seem that bad, and some 5′ marked bike lanes that have ~18″ of gutter pan with a nasty seam, making the usable width seem closer to 3′.
Correction: nobody uses them because 99.9% of households in Bethany are SUV-dependent. V8 strongly encouraged.
I see more people riding on the sidewalk there.
Right or wrong, personally I feel safer riding on the shoulder on West Union than I do in the bike lane on Bethany.
I love V8. Kind of high in sodium, but otherwise a great way to get my vegetables.
4 lanes plus a turning lane would give an extra (5×2=10) 10 feet.
Portland’s standard lane width is 10 feet, 11 feet if the road is a high volume truck or transit route. Which part of NE Going – the part going to Swan Island??
P.S., last I checked, Barbur and Powell were still under the control of ODOT, and major freight and transit routes.
Yes, Barbur and Powell are definitely ODOT routes. As for Going, if it regularly had cars parked on both sides the greenway would be about 20 feet wide, but due to all the lawn-and-driveway homes that’s a long way off, so I think it’s safe to call it de facto 35 or 26 feet wide for most of its length. No?
Looking at Google maps for the section east of 47th, I also noticed a bunch of people parking on their lawns, presumably to avoid their cars getting hit by someone speeding. That’s pretty depressing.
Reading the article about the bike boom helps to enlighten one little part of the bike boom that goes often unsaid but is often still seen…why are there all these Schwinns and other underused bikes in garages and basements … often in great shape and still being found.
If folks were buying anything with two wheels and often without good guidance by the bike shop this might be other reason to the above and why the bike boom went bust… in addition to not having a lot of high quality facilities other than signed “bike routes” in most non college cities.The latter has often been discussed.
I’m kind of astounded by the comments on the Columbian article. Where are all the decent, humane, and responsible Oregonian readers?
Harder to hide behind an online moniker when using Facebook.
I think there’s a lot of overstatement about that freeway on both sides of the argument. Surely as there is some benefit to the freeway, it’s just as certain that there is something wrong with a design that ever reaches 23 lanes. That plays right into the Will Rogers quote: “If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?”
Well… yes. Here’s the deal. Motorized private vehicles have some obvious benefit, and both freeways and private vehicles have the greatest benefit when distances are greater and density is lower (making other options prohibitive). There is a reason farmers and rural areas were the first adopters of automobiles. I was researching this for a novel recently, and was a bit surprised to learn that cars remained rare in the cities with only a handful of cars per 1000 household, when quite early on in rural areas they were approaching 90% of families owning cars. Even if the rural households were poor, the economic benefits of owning a car were that much greater in rural areas.
Similarly for freeways. The interstate highway system was conceived to move people between far flung cites. They weren’t even intended to go through or into the heart of cities. For that purpose they have (had) significant economic potential. I say (had) because that potential was built up and mostly achieved with the interstate highway system was completed. The law of diminishing returns set it long ago even on the long distance transport.
When freeways become a means of moving people in and out, through and about a city on a regular basis is when the dilemma illustrated in Houston comes up, and this is well documented in DC, Atlanta, and LA. When trying to use private vehicles and freeways within suburban and urban density areas every increase in capacity is likely to simply induce more trips and more driving even in the short term, and in the long term more development in outer areas, so that the cycle just keeps going.
Urbanist image # of people moved relative to road space by mode In suburban areas, in density, cars just take up too much space and making more space for cars just encourages more people to drive in that space, and requires more space for those cars to park when they arrive. Which just keeps moving further behind, while any other mode would do better.
Can I use an an image html tag in comments or will that hit the filters? It really is about as simple as this diagram
Image tags don’t work.
But you can provide a link direct to the image
Kerry is also an avid windsurfer/kitesurfer who’s been known to shut down the winds in the gorge by visiting Hood River.
Moses’ Parting of the Red Sea?
Michael, I can’t get enough great coverage of local bike history from the 2nd half of 20th century. …The infamous Bike Lobby of 1971.
And on Kerry, bikesnob makes a good point: Only you can end of the scourge of ISIS (now that Kerry broke his femur)
http://bikesnobnyc.blogspot.com/2015/06/sorry-im-late-my-apple-watch-doesnt.html
by supporting the horrible bottom bracket standard.
Re: Biking promotion: People respond to positive reinforcement better, wait til they break the news that people who bike are better in the sack.
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And can we just go ahead and make having sun in your eyes a ticketable driving infraction already?