25 July 2016 Archives

Here’s what Portland’s first Brompton Urban Challenge looked like

Buffered Bike Lane with a bike symbol and arrow pointing forward

At this checkpoint at Salmon Street Fountain, the teams had to re-enact a fish ladder by passing a folded Brompton between each other while holding a basketball between their knees (that last part was just for added fun). And yes, they got wet!
(Photos by J. Maus/BikePortland unless noted otherwise.)

A bike scavenger hunt? With folding bikes and a salmon theme? That’s a thing? Yep! And it all went down last weekend on the streets of Portland.

The inaugural Brompton Urban Challenge — a.k.a. Great Salmon Run — was a big success! Thank you to everyone who showed up to play and all the volunteers and crew who helped make it happen.

I spent most of the day filling 2 dumpsters with trash that homeless people had collected and put in bags along the SpringWater Corridor. It’s an amazing community that is safe and mostly not even seen from the bike path.

Amanda Fritz and her park rangers continue to violate their oath and put a variety of restraints ( exclusions, citations, written warnings) on the peaceful assembly protected by the Oregon Constitution. Cops did this to bikes for a long time:

http://bikeportland.org/2006/12/20/standing-next-to-your-bike-is-not-a-crime-2729#comment-193531

Everything I observed in my court case ( URL above ) was made more obvious to me at the time because I was teaching at Jefferson High. My African American students would constantly tell me about being abused by cops for being black. I did not want to write that then, but I will say it loudly now that #BlackLivesMatter and the cycling community should be more supportive.

When the city Sit Lie Ordinance was tossed out for the 5th time by the courts I took my very young daughter to read the Oregon Constitution to Amanda Fritz and Sam Adams.

Please stay tuned to the Bike Portland Subscriber pages so that cyclists can show more solidarity with the movements of #blackLivesMatter and not evicting the residents of the SpringWater corridor

https://www.facebook.com/BootsOnTheGroundPDX/?fref=ts

Portland’s drop in car use frees up $138 million in our local economy every year

Per-person car ownership is down 7 percent since 2007 and miles driven are down 8 percent.
(Photos: J.Maus/BikePortland unless noted)

Last month, we wrote about the 38,501 additional cars and trucks that would be in Multnomah County right now if its residents still owned cars at the rate they did in 2007.

What does it cost to own 38,501 cars? Or more to the point, what does it not cost to not own them?

For that post, we focused on the amount of space those nonexistent cars would take up. They’d fill a parking lot almost exactly the size of the central business district, for example.

But what about the money that isn’t being spent to move, maintain, insure and replace all those cars, and can therefore be spent on other things? How much money have Portlanders collectively saved by having a city where car ownership (or ownership of one car for each adult) feels less mandatory than it used to?

The head of “Graham,” a lifelike model of what humans might look like if they’d evolved to use cars.
(Image: Towards Zero)

This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by The Portland Century, a one or two-day bicycle tour coming August 6-7th.

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

Crash-proof human: An Australian artist collaborated with a trauma surgeon to create “Graham,” a full-body silicone model of what humans might look like if they evolved to survive car crashes.

Bike bridge: San Jose’s proposed biking-walking bridge over a freeway would certainly be spectacular.

Here’s what Portland’s first Brompton Urban Challenge looked like

Nothing changes with police abuse

Portland’s drop in car use frees up $138 million in our local economy every year

The Monday Roundup: A crash-proof human body, a San Jose bike bridge & more

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