Eva and I are back with fun chat in the warm and cozy shed. As per usual, you can watch and listen via YouTube or find it on your podcast feed.
Segments and links this episode:
- What’s up with all the leaves in bike lanes and why the issue is challenging for advocates.
- How’d She Get There? OMSI to Gateway Green: Eva and I discuss the best bike route from Central Eastside to Gateway.
- Cranksgiving is this Sunday! Eva will be there helping organize.
- My impressions of TriMet’s new ramp at Hollywood Transit Center — which is not a “bike ramp” because that is “ableist ideology”.
- Bike shop news updates and the new “Secret” bike shop on Hawthorne from the inimitable Starmichael Bowman.
- How the Tillamook/Hancock neighborhood greenway works through a plaza in Hollywood
- Our frustration with the new signal on NE Going and Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
- What’s up with the bumpy pavement on Tillamook and Ankeny greenways?!
- KGW called out drivers parking in bike lanes and it was wonderful.
- And more!
Thanks for listening!
Thanks for reading.
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Yes! The pavement on Tilamook and Ankeny is horrible now. What is going on there?
Ankeny and other parts of SE are in a large BES project.
it’s probably going to be like that until at least March 2025
https://www.portland.gov/bes/improvements/construction/buckman-kerns-green-street-and-sewer-project
A stretch of NE 26th, also a greenway, has been opened up and poorly patched between NE Multnomah and NE Tillamook.
What Joe said. Whatever they are doing it is not cool at all. I’ve been procrastinating on looking deeper into this but it’s now at top of my list. I’ll start asking around and do a story with whatever I find out.
Was Eva thinking of the Ansel Adams exhibit at the PAM from a few years ago? It was excellent! Also thanks for the little history lesson on the Dalles!
Ok question for the How Did She Get There segment: If one was going to participate in the Rose City Yan Crawl in March and wanted to get from Starlight Knitting Society in Brentwood-Darlington to the Knotty Lamb in Forest Grove, what would be the way to do that? I have a hunch it would involve taking the Max out to Hillsboro first, but I’m a city biker and would love some tips on leaving the city limits by bike.
I appreciated the discussion regarding bike lane design as it relates to our climate.
ODOT and Washington County are working on a plan Farmington Road in the Aloha area and one of the project staff shared that maintenance staff were pushing hard for only painted bike lanes, as they can use their standard sweepers to clear the lanes.
Safety advocates pointed out that physical separation is preferable when cars are traveling at 45+mph next to the bike lanes.
I wonder if it would be possible to design a raised bike lane at curb level, with a slight grade down into the road to help water flow off of the bike lane (similar to how they design general travel lanes).
Link to the project page: https://www.washingtoncountyor.gov/lut/planning/farmington-road-concept-plan-pac
Yeah, that MLK/Going crossing is annoying. I specifically cross it daily on a long bakfiets bike, and it’s bad. If I remember to set up for it (which I always do now), I can get really close to the curb and follow the extension such that I can easily reach the button. That puts me out of the lane and so any cars that happen to come will try right turning in front of me which is worse than it was before for sure.
Also, coming west, there is almost always a large van parked right up to the curb extension. It blocks line of sight to the button and makes reaching it even harder. You definitely need to do some complicated maneuvering which can cause falls for certain riders (on some bikes with awkward top heavy loads like a kid in a car seat).
And if you don’t get it right, there is no reverse on a bike! All the more annoying backing up uphill.
And that’s if you already know to be ready for the damned buttons! They’re almost invisible and if you didn’t know they were there you would certainly miss them. Guaranteed, 99% of riders will miss the one going west if they didn’t know it was there.
You’re right that it sounds whiny (you said it in context of leaves), because unless you do it the problems sound trivial. But they’re not. Imagine having to do a 3 point turn to trigger a light to go straight in a car!
It should be considered a definite failure and regression in safety at this point, until they fix it.