BikePortland

The Monday Roundup: What people think bikes look like, IKEA bike, ‘textalyzers’ & more

What one bike sketch would look like if it were real.
(Image: gianlucagimini.it)

This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by Green Zebra Grocery, celebrating the grand opening of their new store in the Lloyd District (808 NE Multnomah) on April 21st!

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

Funny bikes: A designer asked dozens of people to draw bicycles from memory, then created 3-D renderings of the sometimes pretty creative designes they offered.

“Textalyzer”: A New York State bill would let police easily check phone records to see if someone was texting before a crash.

Ikea bike: Look out, world. It’s priced at $797 and arrives in August.

NW Cornell road just below Upper Macleay Park.
(Photos: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Part of NW Portland Week.

How often do you just bike around the city and take the time to slow down and see everything? Not just traffic or street signs but everything. These special weeks when we focus on one part of the city give us the opportunity to let a place soak in. Over the past five days I’ve discovered lots of cool stuff about northwest Portland (I hope you have too!). I’ve found new shortcuts I never knew existed, made a few new friends, and have gained a much deeper understanding of this beautiful, historic, and thriving part of our city.

2018 NW Everett Street, built 1910.
(Photos: M.Andersen/BikePortland)

Part of NW Portland Week.

Portland’s “huge population boom” and “explosive growth” have driven such a painful housing shortage that it’s not uncommon these days to hear Portlanders wish the city would stop creating so many jobs.

Since 2008, the city’s population growth rate has been about 9,000 net new residents per year, or 1.5 percent.

But when many of the buildings that continue to define northwest Portland were built, Portland’s population was growing by 7 percent every year for years on end. In the decade of the 1900s, the city that started at 90,000 residents added 11,679 new ones every year on average.

Tweed ride (they call it a “run” to be more British-sounding) is Sunday.
(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Hello doers of things!

Buffered Bike Lane with a bike symbol and arrow pointing forward

Looking for a new place to spread your cycling wings? We’ve got four great job opportunities that just went up this week.

Learn more about each one via the links below…

–> Operations Manager – Motivate International (operator of BIKETOWN)

–> Women’s Outreach Lead – Sales Associate – Western Bikeworks

–> Associate Attorney – Forum Law Group LLC

–> Tour Guide – Everybody’s Bike Rentals & Tours

NW Couch where it crosses I-405. Riding through here you must keep your head on a swivel and scoot quickly across three intersections (two of which have no traffic signal).
(Photos: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Part of NW Portland Week.

Eight years ago, when former Mayor Sam Adams made his case to re-use the old Sauvie Island Bridge as a new crossing of I-405 at NW Flanders Street, one of his chief arguments was safety. Adams and Portland Bureau of Transportation staff convinced Portlanders that the nearby crossings at Burnside, Couch, Everett and Glisan, were inherently unsafe for bikers and walkers.

(Photos: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Part of NW Portland Week.

Here’s what cycling — and the people who do it — look like in northwest Portland.

Dragonfly Coffee House on NW Thurman.
(Photo: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Part of NW Portland Week.

Thurman Street is the last neighborhood north where you can find the sort of stuff that, for a lot of people, make Portland Portland.

One block north of the Food Front Cooperative Grocery and the gluten-free bakery Dessert Labs, you hit the Holiday Inn Express. Then come the railroad tracks, warehouses, gravel distributors, floodplains and eventually just trees to the end of the earth, or at least to Scappoose.

Walking down Thurman Street itself is so rewarding that one of Portland’s most famous residents wrote a whole book about it. They keep a copy behind the reference desk at the branch library on NW 23rd and Thurman: Blue Moon over Thurman Street, published in 1993 by the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin and the photographer Roger Dorband.

Can you see the potential in this decommissioned railroad right-of-way on NW Front?
(Photos: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Part of NW Portland Week.

I’m not going to sugarcoat it: riding a bike in the Northwest Industrial District is not for the faint of heart. I enjoy it only in an Escape-from-New-York-get-my-adrenaline-pumping-urban-assault kind of way. But if you stop and look and allow yourself to dream you can see vast potential.

As part of a new neighborhood greenway, a small biking-walking bridge here would be expected to carry five times as many people a day as Tilikum Crossing’s average weekday bike count.
(Photos: M. Andersen/BikePortland)

Part of NW Portland Week.

Someday, quite possibly two months from tomorrow, northwest Portland will finally land the biggest bike infrastructure investment in its modern history.

The Flanders Crossing bridge across Interstate 405 came close to reality eight years ago, then died amid shifting details and election politics. But it’s too good an idea to stay dead — and events of the last few weeks suggest that it may be on the edge of a breakthrough.

Hidden in this street is an important lesson about bike transportation in the United States.
(Photos: M.Andersen/BikePortland)

Part of NW Portland Week.

Almost every map or chart you will ever see of “where people commute by bike” is incomplete.

Nineteen times out of 20, it’s based on only half of the picture: the locations people commute from. In the United States, we make almost no effort to calculate where people are bike-commuting to.

Little-known fact: according to the best data available, almost nowhere in Portland brings in a larger percentage of its commuters by bicycle than the lower section of Northwest 21st and 23rd, between Marshall and Burnside.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqUKWnk_ug0
Welcome to this week’s roundup! I had over 80 videos in my queue to watch and share this week. There aren’t 80 videos below, but it’s certainly a bumper crop for the Wednesday Video Roundup. Here’s a short snippet of rider/messenger Chas Christiansen riding a proper fixie on the streets. I’m not sure what is scarier- climbing the hills or leg-braking down them.

The Monday Roundup: What people think bikes look like, IKEA bike, ‘textalyzers’ & more

NW Portland’s best secret routes, hang-outs, and other cool things

Portland’s best model for population growth without catastrophe is right in front of us

Weekend Event Guide: Biking class, Bike Swap, circuit race, Tweed Run, and more

Jobs of the Week: Motivate/BIKETOWN, Western Bikeworks, Forum Law Group, Everybody’s Bike Rentals & Tours

New Flanders Bridge or not, crossing I-405 is about to get easier

People on Bikes – NW Portland edition

A lost scrap of NW Portland history: How a fortune cookie helped save Thurman Street

Exploring biking’s potential in the Northwest Industrial District

The Flanders Crossing could be the city’s best bridge project in many years

The lower Northwest District is Portland’s invisible capital of bike commuting

Wednesday Video Roundup: SF, Chicago, racing, and PBOT

Latest Headlines

BikeCraft makes triumphant return with festive fun for everyone

Escape into far-flung adventures at bike touring slideshow

Local gas tax will fund two new crossings on SE Division

Guest article: ‘High crash’ intersections and what Portland is doing about them

From the Archives

Portland’s invisible machine: Behind the scenes at the World Naked Bike Ride