🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏
As the grip of coronavirus tightens around Portland, bike shop owners are caught in the middle. Stay open and risk the health of their workers and customers? Or close and give up much-needed sales revenue and leave people with diminished access to a vehicle that in many ways is needed now more than ever?
I imagine most of you bike because it’s just what you do and who you are. But what about folks who aren’t there yet?
Last week when we discussed freight intermodal transportation and compared it to multimodal human transportation, I left out some of my conversation with Clint Culpepper, the Transportation Options Manager at Portland State University. He left me with some choice phrases that brought up more questions for me.
Clint said PSU surveys show a decline in biking among students and staff. He suggested students are like an indicator species: When housing is less affordable and/or available around campus, fewer students bike to school. In Clint’s PSU transportation surveys, the bike-commute threshold was at about three miles, and as students are forced to live farther out, biking to school is less of an option for them.
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Portland Police have issued a statement on a fatal collision that happened early this morning on Southwest Barbur Boulevard.
According to the PPB, it happened just after midnight near the intersection of Barbur and SW Parkhill Drive. This is three miles south of Portland City Hall and just north of the Vermont viaduct.
Officers responded to what they thought was single car collision, but when the arrived they were contacted by the driver of the car, 30-year-old Ivan Cam. Cam told officers he thought he hit someone who was walking. Upon further investigation, the officers found a body lying in the street.
The Oregon Department of Transportation just announced they’ll open a two-week comment period on the controversial I-5 Rose Quarter project.
The news comes a day after revelations that the Oregon Transportation Commission planned to postpone a crucial upcoming meeting where they were slated to vote on whether or not ODOT will perform a more robust Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). As The Oregonian reported yesterday, they postponed their scheduled March 20th meeting to April 2nd and announced it would be held via telephone due to the coronavirus outbreak.
Concerned Portlanders with No More Freeways (and BikePortland) worried that this meeting would be inaccessible to the public and a violation of Oregon public meeting law. ODOT heard those concerns and just announced the following:
