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The Monday Roundup: The 19-crash house, the accidental triathlete & more

crash-prone house

Ray Minter’s house in San Jose has a 50-year history of violence.
(Image: Google Street View)

Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:

Crash-prone house: A single San Jose home near an offramp has seen 19 vehicles land on its property since 1960, most recently last Monday.

Accidental triathlete: A British mother of three, out for what she thought would be a “leisurely ride” two weeks after she started riding a used hybrid bike for exercise, unexpectedly found herself riding with a triathlon — whose participants talked her into joining them for the whole 13-mile route. “I kept thinking it can’t be that much further,” she said later. “I’m known for getting myself into odd situations.”

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Job: Bike to Leadership (B2L) Program Manager – Bike Clark County

Buffered Bike Lane with a bike symbol and arrow pointing forward

Job Title *
Bike to Leadership (B2L) Program Manager

Company/Organization *
Bike Clark County

Job Description *
Bike Clark County is a not for profit bicycle advocacy, safety and education organization located in Vancouver WA. We are seeking a dynamic, self starter with good social and communication skills to represent our organization and help launch our High School B2L Program. The Job is part time and begins immediately – the actual H.S. program will begin in the fall.

The B2L program is an after school mentoring and leadership program designed around bicycle maintenance and community service.

The Program is still under development. The Manager is responsible for working with our board of directors and other partners to finish program development. When the program launches in the fall, the Manager will be responsible for smooth workflow and ensuring students and subject matter experts are scheduled correctly and administrative requirements are met. Basic Bicycle knowledge is helpful but not required.

Program Managers must be reliable, pass a thorough background check, have solid administrative skills and work well with our students. Current pay rate is 15-18 per hour based on experience. Required hours are approximately 10-15 flexible hours per month currently, but will likely increase. This is a funded position for 3 years with big potential to evolve into full time work for the right person.

How to Apply *
Send resume with applicable skills to: info@bikeclarkcounty.org

Candidates will be contacted for preliminary phone interview then scheduled for an in person panel interview. Closing date is 30 June.

Tigard, Beaverton, Milwaukie paths get nod for likely state funding

Tigard Get Together-1

A BikePortland Get Together in Tigard in 2010. The city’s trail system consistently ranks highly for state grants.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

As we reported Wednesday, Portland’s proposed Flanders Crossing Active Transportation Bridge across Interstate 405 made the cut for probable funding from a two-year, $45 million state program.

On Friday, the state released a full list of 75 project rankings from the final review committee for the lottery-backed Connect Oregon program.

Of those, 37 fit into the top-priority $45 million worth of projects.

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Comment of the week: Biking with color in a country with history

Prospect Park-6

There are as many ways to be a person who bikes as there are ways to be a person, and just as many ways to be a person of color.

That was part of the thinking shared by BikePortland reader Clement in a comment on yesterday’s post by Taz Loomans about how to get more racial and ethnic diversity into organized bike fun.

Here’s what Clement said:

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Winding roads, wine and an all-women ride: Gal by Bike says Yes, Please

IMG_0248

Maybe it was the wine?
(Photos: K.Laudermilk)

This post is by columnist Kate Laudermilk.

In April, Cycle Oregon’s Chris Knott e-mailed me asking if I would like to cover the first ever women’s only Cycle Oregon ride. At the time, he informed me that they had exceeded their original goal of 250 sign-ups and were at 620.

After visiting the ride’s website, I could tell why so many women were enticed. Wine tasting? All local catered lunch and rest stop snacks? Massage therapy and acupuncture? Yoga? Live music? Widmer beer? AND bike riding!? SOLD!

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Job: Mechanic FT – Western Bikeworks

Buffered Bike Lane with a bike symbol and arrow pointing forward

Job Title *
Mechanic- FT

Company/Organization *
Western Bikeworks

Job Description *
Western Bikeworks is looking for a full-time Mechanic. We offer excellent medical, dental, and vision benefits, generous PTO accrual, 401k, and paid holidays.

JOB OVERVIEW: The Mechanic position is often a key component in “Empowering people to achieve their bike-related goals in whatever form they may take.” This role is literally the barrier for many of our customers in getting back on the road, and as such must be prepared to fully investigate the customer’s needs, find efficient solutions to their problems, and own the customer experience from the moment a repair is checked-in until the moment the customer is back on the road.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO:
• Provide higher than expected (by the customer) customer service including but not limited to assisting with removal of bicycles from their vehicle, searching all possible avenues for special order or out of stock product, expediting all service and transactions as much as possible, and able to refrain from offering an opinion on the quality of the customer’s bike
• Operate store Point of Sale equipment
• Assess customer’s bikes for indicated problems and generate an accurate financial and time estimate for repairing the issue to the customer’s satisfaction
• Familiar with all aspects of bicycle technologies, including but not limited to
o Di2
o Campagnolo
o SRAM Red eTap
o Hydraulic Disk Brakes
o Front and rear suspension
• Able to troubleshoot appropriate solutions for systems that do not have readily available replacement parts
• Willing to have service quality held to a checklist of required services for completion of a given type of service
• Prepare the service area for normal operations at opening time and handle End of Day procedures including cleaning up work station and ensuring all continuing work is communicated appropriately
• Answer incoming phone calls and respond to incoming customer email

ADDITIONAL RESPONSIBILITIES/DUTIES:
• Able to assist on the sales floor when required
• Comfortable transitioning a customer to other appropriate staff members when needed
• Interested in providing gratis repair or safety checks at community-support events

MINIMUM JOB REQUIREMENTS:
• No specific formal education is required
• Two years of professional shop experience
• Must be computer literate

KNOWLEDGE, SKILLS, & ABILITIES
• Excellent communication and organizational skills
• Solid knowledge of cycling products
• Strong interpersonal, written, and oral communication
• Ability to be an advocate for cycling in the local community
• Ability to work independently or with others to manage multiple task with minimal supervision.
• Ability to spend time talking to people about bicycles.

How to Apply *
Please apply by clicking on link below:

https://www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/index.php?/jobs&clientkey=F102FCECFB43ED66CAD0C8276CB962A9

Fun for everybody! A 7-point action plan for a more diverse Pedalpalooza

2014 Bike Fair-27

At the Multnomah County Bike Fair, 2014.
(Photos: J.Maus/BikePortland)

This post is by columnist Taz Loomans.

Not long ago, I thought more bike lanes would save the world. In fact, my passion for a better environment for bicyclists and pedestrians was one of the reasons I moved to Portland.

Since then I’ve become disillusioned with the bike advocacy movement, largely because of its lack of racial and ethnic diversity.

According to the recent CNN article by comedian/activist W. Kamau Bell, called Gentrifying Portland: A tale of two cities, “Portland is 76 percent white. That’s a lot, for two reasons. 1) According to the 2010 census, the United States is 72% white, so Portland is whiter than America. 2) Portland is considered a major city. And we don’t associate major cities with whiteness,” he says.

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New Columbia’s Bike Repair Hub wants your help to double its hours

Half the residents of north Portland’s Portsmouth neighborhood are kids, and 80 percent of households with kids live in poverty.

Bikes are simple, inexpensive machines that can be a big part of those kids’ lives — but bikes often need repairs and tuneups, not to mention friendly folks to talk about how and where to ride. Four years ago, the Community Cycling Center opened a Bike Repair Hub in the middle of the New Columbia mixed-income housing community to try and solve that problem.

It’s a shed with tools and a staffer, next to an awesome skills course. But staffers cost money, and the CCC wants to double the number of hours that the Hub can be staffed this summer — enough to fix 50 bikes per week, they say.

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State will likely fund Flanders Crossing of 405, spurring thousands of bike trips in NW

Buffered Bike Lane with a bike symbol and arrow pointing forward
flanders bridge span

The long-proposed span would connect downtown Portland and the Pearl District with the Northwest District.
(Photos: M. Andersen/BikePortland)

A new biking-walking bridge across Interstate 405 at Northwest Flanders has probably made the cut for funding, a state official said Wednesday.

The approximately 250-foot-long, 24-foot-wide bridge would become by far the most comfortable crossing of Interstate 405, an alternative to the existing crossings at Everett, Glisan and Couch. Paired with a proposed neighborhood greenway on Flanders from the Steel Bridge west to 24th Avenue, the span is expected to carry 9,100 trips per day.

That figure, which includes both biking and walking trips, is higher than the summertime bike counts across the Hawthorne Bridge and about five times the daily bike ridership so far on Tilikum Crossing.

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Bike share system apologizes for snafu that made first 400 members’ names public

biketown stock user

One day after it started selling memberships, Portland’s new bike-share system has apologized to its first 400 members for inadvertantly letting any of them pull up a virtually complete list of other members’ names.

In an email circulated to those early members on Wednesday, the city said that no other information had been made public. By way of apology, it also offered an additional free month of bike-share membership to everyone who signed up before the city fixed the problem at noon Wednesday.

City spokesman John Brady said Wednesday that the issue stemmed from the “social function on the website that allows people to look up friends.” But the function also let people search by member number.

“I think what happened is someone realized that the member numbers were sequential, entered member numbers, and was able to get the first members’ names,” Brady said.

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