🚨 Please note that BikePortland slows down during this time of year as I have family in town and just need a break! Please don't expect typical volume of news stories and content. I'll be back in regular form after the new year. Thanks. - Jonathan 🙏
Less than 24 hours from now Portland will have a bike share system.
Let that sink in.
OK. Now let’s get focused and think about what we need to know about this Biketown thing. Below is a roundup of news tidbits we’ve been collecting for the past few days:
We could have more diverters if the city did not create the most costly equipment and costly labor methods to install them. – See pictures and video below of the $50,000 diverter at N Holman and N Mississippi. Crews of 4-9 people spent 4 days to install this with overtime. We could have 8-80 diverters for the price of 1 bloated design by the Portland Bureau of Transportation,PBOT ( Commissioner Steve Novick ) This is not a question of money, it’s how our lawmakers in city hall and Salem waste our Transportation money chasing old design methods and cars focused designs. We will never get close to #VisionZero with these leaders.
Preface: Diverters are those objects placed on quiet street corners so that cars from neighbors can still get from A to B. Long distance commuters can’t cut straight through quiet side streets, and cars going long distance are diverted back to an arterial street designed to be safer for that. The media sells diverters as a ban on cars.
My question to fellow BP readers: What ideas would you send to the city leaders and staff? Please reply here and I’ll print them and hand deliver them in a meeting.
Your ideas?
My ideas:
a) More low cost diverters. Involve the people or City Repair Project. We already paint colorful art in some intersections at zero cost to the city. Citizens could just as easily build safer and more sustainable ( and maintainable ) objects to divert cut through cars. Some might cost the city zero dollars. Adopt a diverter. Design a diverter contest. We could have 80 community diverters for the cost of the Holman diverter. Seriously.
With two new traffic diverters installed in the past week, the City of Portland continues to fulfill its promise to defend the low-stress biking environment on neighborhood greenways.
— This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by Hassalo on Eighth, Portland’s new neighborhood now leasing in the Lloyd District.
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Urban alleys: They’re narrow. They’re non-uniform. They’re underrated public spaces.
Collision text: If you’re ever in a traffic crash, having this text in your notes app might be a good way to avoid forgetting to gather important details as your body escapes shock.
The day has finally come: You can now ride your bike in legally-protected, cycling-only space between Davis and the Steel Bridge on Naito Parkway.
Wow- This has been an *amazing* year for the Tour De France!
No matter if you’re a die-hard TdF fan, or have never watched it before . . . EVERYONE benefits during our 3rd Annual Tour De France SALE where we’re taking 20% OFF all Bike Fitting visits!
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For more about Pedal PT and our bike fitting services by a licensed Physical Therapist, please check out: www.pedalPT.com/bike-fitting/
Some recent updates to a map of future bikeways in Portland’s central city have advocates talking.
“You can’t stay here any more.”
After months of telling park rangers and police to avoid issuing that order to people living in tents along the major Portland biking path, Willamette Week and The Oregonian are reporting that Mayor Charlie Hales plans to order a sweep of the length of the corridor within city of Portland boundaries (the eastern border is SE Jenne Rd/174th).
Here’s more from Hales in a video created by The Oregonian:
The biggest conference about open-streets events (like Sunday Parkways) and tactical urbanism (like Better Block) is coming to Portland next month.
The International Open Streets Summit will bring many people who work to humanize street space to Portland State University from Thursday, Aug. 18 to Saturday, Aug. 20. The draft program includes speakers from Philadelphia; Dallas; Los Angeles; Missoula; Toronto; Cape Town, South Africa; and Santiago, Chile, among others.
The “tactical urbanism” thread is newly added to this conference, reflecting the fact that fast, flexible changes and demos on city streets are a growing trend among community groups and city governments alike. Mike Lydon, a planning consultant helping produce this conference, literally wrote the book on that subject.
Pokemon Go has gamified cycling. The new app that’s taking the world by storm also happens to be great to play by bike. As more and more people realize this, the game could do more to encourage biking — especially among young people — than decades of advocacy.
I haven’t tried it myself but I’ve been monitoring chatter about bikes on the internet long enough to know when something big has happened. And it has.
The game itself is really interesting. It uses a combination of your smartphone’s map and camera to “augment reality” by placing the game’s features right on the streets where you live, work, and play. When it first hit the news all the reports were about people playing it on foot. We then started hearing about people playing while driving (bad idea!). And now it appears that a bicycle is the secret Pokemon Go weapon.
Here’s Bicycling Magazine writer (and Portland resident) Caitlin Giddings explaining why bikes and Pokemon go so well together:
Not only has my bike allowed me to access Pokéstops more quickly—so it’s easy to stock up on Pokéballs and other items—but it’s also proved invaluable in hatching eggs. Eggs are items you can find at Pokéstops. To hatch them into Pokémon, you have to walk (or even better, ride) a certain distance—between two to 10 km, as measured by your phone’s accelerometer. Eggs won’t hatch if you’re traveling that distance in a car—so you essentially have to get outside and use your own body to get the job done. On foot, this can take a while because you have to leave the app open the entire time for your steps to count. But on a bike? I think you know where I’m going with this.
Although not really a cycling app, Pokémon Go is the first cycling-adjacent app I’ve ever given a damn about
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Not everybody loved the local gas tax that Portland voters approved in May. But most Portlanders can probably agree that now that it exists, it ought to be spent as promised.
There’s a strong possibility that the tax might bring in more or less money than expected, or that the city might eventually consider changing the project list in ways that violate the implicit promise to voters that it made when it created the list.
If either of those things were to happen, the main watchdog institution will be a volunteer oversight committee that’s currently recruiting members.