🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏
Looking for a new opportunity in the local bike biz? We’ve got six great job listings that just went up this week.
Learn more about each one via the links below…
–> Office Manager – – Cycle Oregon
–> Bike Shop Manager – WashCo BTC Community Bike Center
–> Mechanic FT – Western Bikeworks
–> Bike to Leadership (B2L) Program Manager – Bike Clark County
–> Fabrication Department – The Vanilla Workshop
–> Cycle Tour Guide – LifeCycle Adventures
Job Title *
Cycle Tour Guide
Company/Organization *
LifeCycle Adventures
Job Description *
Lifecycle Adventures has over ten years of experience running self-guided trips in California, Hawaii, Oregon, the San Juan Islands, and Tuscany. We also operate Guided tours in Oregon.
We are seeking Cycle Tour Guides to help fill support needs for a very busy tour schedule in our Oregon Operations. We tour Willamette Valley, Mt Hood and Columbia River Gorge.
GENERAL REQUIREMENTS:
• Strong communication skills
• Patient, yet upbeat, attitude
• Enthusiastic cyclist
• Capable bike mechanic
• Prior tour guiding or related experience preferable
• Knowledge of local history, culture, and nature
• Clean driving record and proper licensing
• Current First Aid/CPR Certification
• Capable of lifting bikes and luggage
• Must be available to lead trips during peak seasons July to September
• Diligence, firm with commitments and good team ethics
CERTIFICATIONS/OTHER QUALIFICATIONS – a plus, yet not all required:
• Preferably resident of Portland area or immediate vicinity
• Prior tour guiding or related experience preferable
• Commercial driving license a plus
• Able to drive multi-passenger van with a trailer (hitch) a plus
• Fluency in a foreign language a plus
• Culinary and wine expertise a plus
RESPONSIBILITIES (Self-Guided):
• Start, manage and end, multi-day self-guided, inn-to-inn cycling vacations for couples & small groups.
• Provide personal and responsive service throughout trip in a safe and responsible way including:
o Initial transfer and briefings
o Guest and luggage transfers
o End-of day contact and 24 hour telephone support
o Coordinate with Operations Manager for days off or hours away for trips you are running
o Support van response for help requests
o End of trip pick-up and transfer
• Drive 8-passenger support van with roof racks
• Learn prescribed routes and historical information
• Maintain a good working relationship our partners – innkeepers, restaurant owners, bike rental companies and our office staff
• Communicate with sales and operations managers any questions, problems, feedback
• Report any accidents or injuries per the operation manual protocol
RESPONSIBILITIES (Guided):
• Guide week-long, inn-to-inn cycling vacations for groups of up to 16 adults, with overnight stay.
• Drive 9 to 15-passenger support van with roof racks or trailer system
• Lead Guests as an on-bike guide when necessary
• Learn prescribed routes and historic information and give daily briefings
• Facilitate social interaction between guests of varied ages and backgrounds
• Manage prescribed tour logistics in a safe and responsible way
• Maintain a good working relationship our partners – innkeepers, restaurant owners, bike rental companies, and our office staff
• Communicate with sales and operations managers any questions, problems, feedback
• Report any accidents or injuries per the operation manual protocol
• Be available for on-call support 24 hours a day when trips are running
• Coordinate with Lead Guide for days off or hours away during the day when trips are running.
PHYSICAL TASKS:
• Capable of cycling 40 to 60 miles along varied terrain
• Capable of lifting items of up to 60 to 80 pounds and lifting 35 pound bikes overhead
• Capable of sitting (mostly while driving) or standing for periods of 1 to 3 hours
JOB TYPE/CONTRACT:
• This is a contract, part-time, seasonal job.
• Tour schedules are variable; Assignments can range from one day to seven consecutive days.
COMPENSATION:
• Day Rate and Gratuities as applicable– to be discussed at interview
How to Apply *
INTERESTED CANDIDATES:
1. EMAIL resume’ and list of references with contact information to: laura@lifecycleadventures.com
Qualified candidates will be contacted by email accordingly.
2. PLEASE DO NOT CALL OUR OFFICE FOR JOB ENQUIRIES . Our Sales staff will not be able to assist you with job questions.
3. Visit our website to learn more about us:
www.lifecycleadventures.com
Job Title *
Fabrication Department
Company/Organization *
The Vanilla Workshop
Job Description *
Custom bicycle makers, The Vanilla Workshop are hiring for fabrication. We’ve been right here in Portland since we started building almost 20 years ago. We are a small operation with a family dynamic, a low/no drama workplace with people who want to be here and love what they do. At the core of what we do is innovation and refinement of bicycles we make from scratch for our customers. We are not motivated by bringing more “stuff” into the world, as the world already has more than enough stuff. What motivates us is bringing greatness to the world both in the bikes we make and in the business that we build. Through in-house design, fabrication, paint, final assembly, customer service, and fittings, we are able to push the envelope and bring a level of detail and completeness that isn’t found in many other places.
Our ideal candidates come with a collaborative mindset, like working hard, and have super high standards. Both expert and entry level positions available. Sound like you, or someone you know? See our employment page for full job descriptions.
How to Apply *
If you feel that you’re a good fit, please apply by email. In the body of the email, state the length of your last two jobs and your highest level of education completed. Also attach a one-page resume and a one-page cover letter describing your life experience as it applies to this job, including three work references and any experience with bicycles or the making of things to: hiring@vanillabicycles.com
Oregon’s biggest pay-what-you-will group ride of the year is three days away. Maybe you’ve heard of it.
Portland’s World Naked Bike Ride will start rolling at 9 p.m. Saturday from Mt. Scott City Park, SE 74th Ave and Knight St., in what’s currently forecast to be a rain-free night after a warm day, with late-evening temperatures in the high 60s and a low of 54 degrees by early morning.
As bike theft has become the only major category of crime in Portland that’s on a long-term rise, cable locks have been going the way of the station wagon and the wristwatch.
The Portland State University Bike Hub doesn’t even sell them. When Mayor Charlie Hales briefly started biking to work last fall, Willamette Week wrote an entire online article about the fact that he used a cable lock. (His wife Nancy, a regular bike commuter, told us at the time that it was because they’d misplaced their U-lock keys that day.)
Apparently the Bike Theft Task Force at the Portland Police Bureau agrees. In a tweet on Wednesday, the team said they’ll be offering a lock exchange program at North Portland Sunday Parkways this weekend: you give them a cable lock, they give you a U-lock.
The paving and safety projects scheduled to be built with Portland’s proposed gas tax will be spread quite evenly across the city.
But votes on the gas tax definitely weren’t.
Of the 81 Multnomah County precincts in the City of Portland, only 19 tallied “yes” votes between 45 percent and 55 percent. In more than half of precincts, the vote on the 10-cent local gas tax, one of the country’s largest local fuel taxes ever approved by popular vote, was a blowout victory or loss by 20-point margins or even more.
Everyone knows Multnomah County is growing, and that most new residents are buying or bringing in cars, too. In all, state records show, 8,709 more passenger vehicles are registered in the county than there were in 2007.
But a review of car registration statistics shows that if passenger vehicle ownership were still as popular in the county as it was in 2007, it would have had to find room for 38,501 more cars and trucks instead.
How many cars are we doing without? Well, if we built a parking lot to hold the 38,501 cars that didn’t show up and assumed a standard 325 square feet per space, we’d need about 287 acres of land. For the sake of scale, that’s everything between NE Killingsworth, Skidmore, Rodney and 16th:
Well, it’s a nice week to be an Ohioan.
Two days after the NBA Championship, the Buckeye State’s capital has apparently scored a $40 million federal grant that’ll be matched by $100 million in private investment to create a model of a future tech-connected city.
Columbus beat out Portland, San Francisco, Austin, Denver, Pittsburgh and Kansas City for the Smart City Challenge victory, an initiative of U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.
Here’s an interesting new local product aimed at people who like to be highly visible on a bike at night but prefer not to resemble a mirror when they get to their destination.
The Portland Bike Reflector, which launched on Kickstarter this morning, is a simple concept: a two-piece “magnetic, removable reflector” that attaches to a jacket, backpack or saddle bag when you’re on the road.
We don’t often publish transit-only posts, but we’ll make an exception for this one.
Portland-based photographer Geoffrey Hiller is working on an all-year project to document the life of Portland through the lens of a single bus line: the No. 75 that runs between Milwaukie and St. Johns via Chavez, 42nd and Lombard.
For a post yesterday, he recruited Portland-based transit consultant and writer Jarrett Walker (who happened to be a teenage intern at TriMet in the 1980s, when the 75 bus was created) to write about the ways the 75 reveals this moment in Portland’s ebbing, flowing life.
The result is a short illustrated essay that is, somehow, both about our city and about good public transit network design. It’s something to behold:
Don’t postpone all your bike fun until the weekend! Here are a few highlights from the Pedalpalooza calendar from the next few weekdays.
Open Architecture PDX
Everybody talks about new building; this ride invites people to do something about it. “We will be touring vacant sites or unused land in the area and inviting our members to sketch their ideas for the site.” 6 p.m. Monday.
Dapper Tandem Twinsies
“We’ll promenade around town looking classy, stop at a classy grocery for classy on-the-go drinks, and play some classy lawn games.” 6 p.m. Tuesday.
For the first time, BikePortland’s reporting has been chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists as some of the best from small newsrooms in the Northwest.
In the annual awards announced Saturday, Jonathan’s December report about the circumstances around the death of Martin Greenough (“Why would anyone ride on that scary stretch of Lombard?”) took first place for general news reporting in the five-state contest among news organizations with 10 staff members or fewer.