In case you haven’t heard, the Portland Trail Blazers are one of the hottest teams in the NBA. After saying goodbye to four of their five starters in the off-season everyone had written this team off. But now they’re sitting comfortably close to the upper ecehelon of the Western Conference and are poised for a playoff run.
Sorry, this job has been filled. Browse more great jobs here.
A state parks advisory committee that met in Salem today voted to officially designate the Painted Hills Scenic Bikeway. The new bikeway becomes the 15th route in the scenic bikeways program which is administered by the Oregon Parks and Recreation Department.
Every time we turn around we hear another city staffer or elected official tell us how serious they are about cycling. They say it’s key to our health outcomes, it’s the only way we’ll reach our climate change goals, it buoys our national reputation, and so on and so forth.
But if we’re really serious about cycling, why don’t we take our cycling infrastructure seriously?
There are too many examples in Portland where the design and implementation of our cycling infrastructure has not been completed with the care and seriousness it deserves.
Here are a few of those examples:
Have you ever noticed a car parked on the Morrison Bridge bicycling and walking path?
As one of Portland’s precious few pieces of physically protected, non-motorized travel space it sure seems like a bad place to park. It would be one thing if this was a rogue private citizen, but in this case the cars belong to Multnomah County employees.
The city’s economic development agency agreed this month to have city taxpayers make an eight-figure bet that driving to the Rose Quarter area is going to remain popular for decades.
The Portland Development Commission voted Feb. 10 to borrow $26 million from one of its property tax funds to build a new 425-stall parking garage on public land between NE Holladay Street, Multnomah Street, 1st Avenue and 2nd Avenue, across the street from the Rose Quarter Transit Center.
Fifty of those stalls would then be resold to TriMet for an estimated $8 million, and the other 375 would be set aside for rental to the publicly subsidized 600-room Hyatt Regency Convention Center Hotel that’s supposed to go up across the street.
https://vimeo.com/155563027
Welcome to this week’s roundup! We have a lot of dirt riding videos this week, but first we’ll start with a simple short documentary (above) about Damian Riehl, a bike messenger/photographer here in Portland. It’s a promo video for Chrome, but it’s a nice slice of life. Here’s his instagram account.
A man riding a bicycle was involved in a collision with a TriMet WES Commuter Rail train south of Tualatin this evening. It happened just before 5:30 pm.
Our first Wonk Night of 2016 happened last night. Since the first one in 2012, we’ve held these events in the lobby of Lancaster Engineering (our sponsor) on Southwest 4th and Oak in downtown. It’s a great venue, but it was time to take the show on the road. We headed east and find a venue right on the corner of Southeast 82nd and Division — a community space managed by the nonprofit Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO) that also happens to be inside the most diverse census tract in the state of Oregon.
BikePortlanders may remember that a few years ago, Portland Planning and Sustainability Commissioner Chris Smith approached us with an idea: he felt the city’s bike parking rules needed an update, and wanted help proving it.
So we teamed up with our friends at Lancaster Engineering to host a “wonk night” at which 30 attendees broke into groups and brainstormed ideas for updating the city code that tells developers how to design bike parking and how much of each type to include.
Smith wrote us this week to share some good news: Tomorrow night is the first meeting of the Bicycle Parking Stakeholder Working Group, which has been officially tasked with rewriting the city’s code.
Saying that “not everybody can cycle,” Commissioner Amanda Fritz Tuesday urged the city to switch the order of its “green transportation hierarchy” to prioritize public transit above biking.
“Everybody can use the bus,” Fritz, who a city staffer mentioned was supported by written testimony from advocacy group Elders in Action, said at a council work session on the city’s new comprehensive plan. “And our transit system is not good.”
Fritz’s comments drew disagreement from her counterpart Steve Novick, who said the city’s plan already calls for big upgrades to transit and that “historically we’ve spent a hell of a lot more on things other than biking and walking.”
A new event dreamed up by one of Portland’s many creative bike fun enthusiasts could actually wind up making competitors dizzy.