I’ve been occasionally posting the views of the Steel Bridge homeless camp.
My last update was February 3rd; the police told the camp to vacate on Feb 2. They didn’t.
Yesterday morning (Feb 25) the city removed the camp. They took out five dumpsters of garbage and found stolen computer gear. A bunch of bike serials were run through the BikeIndex, one was confirmed as stolen.
The Tilikum Crossing is not a normal route for me, though I do ride through the 11th/12th/Gideon area daily. However yesterday I rode from inner SE across the Tilikum and then back again to attend a meeting at PSU. One the West side of the bridge, I nearly hit two pedestrians, once on the way there and once on the way back.
The first person was walking in the sidewalk next to the Moody cycle track and then turned to cross the cycle track (and eventually Moody). This person was intently staring at their smartphone and had earphones in both ears and did not look up as he started walking into the cycle track. Despite my repeated verbal warnings that I was approaching, he did not look up until I was swerving around him (and then he did promptly apologize and realize what he had done).
The day after she drew criticism for suggesting that biking should be deemphasized compared to transit in city planning, Portland Commissioner Amanda Fritz went out of her way to put forth a different proposal.
It came Wednesday at the tail end of a report from Portland Streetcar Inc., the publicly chartered rail transit service that Fritz has become an enthusiastic supporter of. Discussion of one of Streetcar’s perennial problems — getting stuck behind cars, either in traffic or due to parking mishaps — seemed to prompt her to ask a question: do we really want cars to be able to use streetcar lanes at all?
And for that matter, she asked, do we really want cars to be able to use the major biking streets?
Dan Christensen, a former TV writer and stand-up comedian turned TriMet bus operator, is one of the best windows Portlanders have into the emotional life of our transit system.
On his recently rebooted Roll Easy Blog, Christensen has an interesting set of perspectives about the things he feels the city’s bike users are doing well, and where they (or the streets beneath them) could improve.
We’ve gotten a bit behind with this post so the 10 listings below are actually from the past few weeks. Still hot and fresh though!
Learn more about each job via the links below…
