2015 Archives

As big bike investments loom, the debate goes on: Which neighborhoods need most?

Southwest Portland’s bikeways need huge work. But is that work more important than improving areas that have immediate ridership potential?
(Photos: J.Maus/BikePortland)

The debate is familiar. But lately, we’ve been hearing an interesting twist to this story: there might actually be a way to resolve it.

Portland is getting ready for a burst of its biggest biking investments in years, and it’s prompted a creative proposal for confronting one of the stickiest issues in local politics.

The city is preparing to put $6 million toward its first high-quality downtown bike lane network. Next year, a $5.2 million upgrade of Foster Road will make that highway-style street much safer to walk, bike and drive on between SE 52nd and SE 90th. Another $4.2 million will create a 130s Greenway; another greenway running east from Gateway Transit Center; and bike facilities on Division Street as far east as 130th. The $2.4 million 20s Bikeway Project is being built piece by piece.

Tilikum Crossing, Bridge of the People.
(Photo: TriMet)

If you, like us, have spent the last five years dreaming of the day you’ll be pedaling across Portland’s lovely new car-free bridge, this weekend is your first chance.

The Tilikum Crossing will temporarily open to bike traffic this Sunday, Aug. 9, for two events: first, the Providence Bridge Pedal, the paid ride that loops across Portland’s Willamette River bridges; and second, a three-hour open window that TriMet is calling “The People’s Preview.”

Just another day in Amsterdam.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

Here are the bike links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:

Parenting by bike: A diary travel study of 37 Dutch women concluded that mothers there bike as much as childless women and see transporting their kids by bike as “pleasant and natural.”

Hidden costs: Todd Litman notes that to build an auto-dependent city is essentially to put a tax on your population — hidden in the cost of their car payments and gas bills.

Buffered Bike Lane with a bike symbol and arrow pointing forward

Under the concept, residents of the mixed commercial zone along Southeast Ankeny Street wouldn’t be allowed to buy permits to park cars on nearby residential streets unless there were spaces left unused by nearby residents.
(Photo: M.Andersen/BikePortland)

After months of research and discussion with a massive stakeholders’ group, the Portland Bureau of Transportation on Thursday circulated its first concept for how to deal with shortages of free on-street car parking in some neighborhoods.

The proposal, which the city described Friday as “preliminary,” combines two main ideas:

1) Neighborhoods would get the option to vote to start charging themselves a yet-to-be-determined amount for overnight street parking, and

2) people who live in most of the buildings along commercial corridors wouldn’t get to park in permit-parking areas overnight unless people who live in nearby residences don’t want the space.

For Oregon’s roads, the first seven months of 2015 have been the deadliest since 2008.

We’ve had four great jobs listed this week. Learn more about them via the links below…

Customer Experience Specialist – Velotech, Inc.
Volunteer & Outreach Coordinator – Oregon Walks
Account Service Representative – Chris King Components
Mechanic / Sales / Management – The Bike Commuter

The Salmon Street Fountain will be the last stop at tonight’s water-themed Portland Bike Party. Bring a swimsuit.
(Photo © J.Maus/BikePortland)

This menu of delicious rides and events is brought to you by our friends at Hopworks Urban Brewery. Their support makes BikePortland possible.

The peak of summer isn’t letting us go yet. This week’s heat wave will continue through this first weekend of August before slackening off. It’s a perfect reminder to savor what we’ve got, at least in between gulps of water. There’s plenty of outdoor fun to choose from.

Friday, July 31

Fly to Pie Kid Ride – 2 p.m. at Oregon Park (NE Hoyt and 29th)
Bike-based clowns Olive and Dingo lead a ride celebrating fairies, bugs, birds, bats, squirrels and of course flying monkeys. Put on your wings and ride to the Pie Spot for food and story time. Suggested $5 donation includes balloon animals and clown show. More info here.

The Facebook page for the new “subgroup”
Livable Streets Action.

A new group called Livable Streets Action is taking the tactics that have won a string of victories for local biking this spring and summer and applying them to other modes, too.

Organizer Dan Kaufman, a videographer and longtime local social justice advocate who has helped organize demonstrations for transportation activism group BikeLoudPDX and the bike-based but non-transportation-focused group Bike Swarm, referred to Livable Streets Action as a “subgroup” of those other groups.

Livable Streets Action’s first event is tomorrow, a Friday afternoon commemoration for Marlene Popps, a woman who was hit by a car and left for dead on the evening of July 4 at the corner of SE 60th and Holgate. She died of her injuries July 21.

Carlton Reid in Grant Park in June.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

Many BikePortland readers are familiar with the work of Carlton Reid, a leading writer for the U.K. news outlet BikeBiz. As of last month, Reid is familiar with Portland, too.

Reid stopped through town for a few days on a tour promoting his new popular history of early bicycling, Roads Were Not Built for Cars. As a side project, he also put together one of the most concisely accurate summaries I’ve seen of Portland and biking at this moment in our history.

Here’s a passage from the piece published today on BikeBiz:

Bike commuters may dominate in some bohemian enclaves but across the city they make up just six percent of the total. This is stellar by U.S. standards – ten times the norm, in fact – but in comparison with, say, Copenhagen, it’s not even in the same galaxy.

Stats can be misleading though. When riding around Portland it’s clear this is a city where, in certain areas, cycling is perfectly normal, not just for getting to work but for running errands or riding to a night out. Bars and shops have bike-corrals (rows of cycle parking hoops instead of car parking spaces) and the light rail system is geared up to take bikes. Portland’s six percent modal share has to be seen in context – in 1990 it was just 1 percent. Between 2000 and 2008 the civic authority’s proactive bicycle programme helped add the other five percent, and the city has held it at that level ever since. Ten percent of kids cycle to school, nine percentage points higher than the U.S. national average.

Activists hang from the St. Johns Bridge
to block an oil ship’s passage.
(Photo: Greenpeace USA)

Update 5:45 p.m.: Police now say that only the southeast sidewalk (upstream, closer to downtown Portland) is closed and that officers were mistaken when they previously blocked people from crossing the bridge on bike or foot.

“It was just that someone didn’t get told,” Portland Police Bureau spokesman Sgt. Greg Stewart said Wednesday evening. “We’re just having people use the other side of the street.”

An updated version of the original post follows.

Some Portland police officers ordered the sidewalks of the St. Johns bridge closed to foot and bike traffic in response to a direct action on the bridge Wednesday.

Late Wednesday, police changed their operation and closed only the southeast (upstream) sidewalk to people on foot or bike.

Supercommuter Kyle Carlson preparing to head home.
(Photo: M.Andersen/BikePortland)

An article published today by the Portland-based magazine Oregon Business takes a look at a handful of local bike-commuting superstars who regularly pedal 20 to 40 miles each way to work and back.

Biking fans won’t find many surprises in the piece, though that doesn’t diminish the accomplishment of interviewees like Kyle Carlson, a recent Friday Profile subject here at BikePortland who bikes 39 miles from Hillsboro to North Portland and back several times a week.

But one passage in the post is a little unfamiliar in Portland’s transportation conversation these days. It’s the simple but (for some reason) rarely discussed fact that if Portland doesn’t decrease the percentage of trips that happen by car, everybody who actually needs to get around by car or truck is going to be screwed.

As big bike investments loom, the debate goes on: Which neighborhoods need most?

It’s time: Bridge Pedal will open Tilikum Crossing Sunday, followed by ‘The People’s Preview’

The Monday Roundup: Parenting by bike, hidden auto taxes & more

City parking reform proposal would limit apartment dwellers’ access to parking permits

Across Oregon, traffic fatalities abruptly return almost to pre-recession levels

Jobs of the Week: Velotech, Oregon Walks, Chris King, The Bike Commuter

Weekend Event Guide: Raging Waters fountain ride, intersection painting & more

Friday, July 31

With new ‘Livable Streets’ subgroup, BikeLoud will commemorate road deaths by all modes

Another outsider’s take: A British bike journalist on Portland

Police response to Greenpeace action closes south sidewalk of St Johns Bridge (updated)

More biking = better driving. So why isn’t this said more often?

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From the Archives

The 10 busiest bicycling spots in Portland