🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏
Whether or not the City of Portland succeeds in its bid for a $40 million “Smart City” grant to advance a collection of ideas about digitally connected transportation, the private sector is already leaping forward on similar lines.
Job Title *
Bike Tour Guide/ Rental Staff
Company/Organization *
Cycle Portland
Job Description *
We’re looking for individuals that love biking, exploring, and sharing our wonderful city with visitors from across the world. Cycle Portland is Portland’s oldest bike tour & rental company providing sightseeing tours, rentals, and repair at our full service shop in historic Old Town/China Town. Most tours last around 2-3 hours and the pace is about 10mph. Here you’ll flow between providing engaging and insightful tours and helping renters and locals with in shop bike services.
The Tour Guide/Shop Hand we’re looking for has:
Excellent public speaking skills with a genuine desire to work with the public and comfortability with large groups
Strong verbal and written communication abilities
A strong sense of craftsmanship
The itch to grow and learn about Portland, its past, present, and its future
A drive for a mix between fast paced summers, and mellow project oriented winters.
Eagerness to work with a bike shop values a fun, supportive, and inclusive work environment.
Requirements:
Candidate must be available to work at least 20 hours/wk starting.
Must be able to work weekends
Previous guide and shop experience is useful, but is not required.
Must be able to lift and maneuver heavy objects up to 55 pounds.
Compensation:
Position is part-time and seasonal with the potential of full time permanent work for qualified applicants. Pay starts at 12/hr with the potential to move up after a 30 day review.
How to Apply *
Interested candidates should send an email to info@portlandbicycletours.com with a paragraph or two stating your interest in this position, and why you would like to be a part of the Cycle Portland Team!
As electric-assist bikes take over more and more of the global bicycle market, they’re growing in the United States and Portland too.
Last year, Portland snagged its third and fourth e-bike specialty stores. Next month, we’ll host the Electric Bike Expo for the first time. And this week, Portland State University is sharing some of the only modern academic research on the domestic e-bike market.
Street Roots, Portland’s first-rate paper about homelessness and housing issues, sometimes asks questions about the closely related subject of transportation.
A questionnaire distributed to the mayoral candidates and published last week includes a quick window into the ways different candidates think about mobility issues.
The question:
Please place the following items in order of priority as mayor.
• Increase parking
• Bike infrastructure
• Low or no-fare public transit
Here’s what they said:
The 2017 Oregon legislature hasn’t even been elected yet, but state House and Senate leaders are getting ready for another try at a transportation bill.
Senate President Peter Courtney, D-Salem, and House Speaker Tina Kotek, D-North Portland, told the Salem Statesman Journal that they’re planning another “bipartisan, bicameral legislative committee” to start negotiating a deal that would presumably include a statewide gas tax hike.
Portland author Joe Kurmaskie says he feels conditions on the Springwater Corridor path have gotten so bad that he might be forced to cancel his popular teen summer bike camp program.
Kurmaskie, who turned 50 this year, is known for his “Metal Cowboy” books that describe his many adventures while bike touring through the United States and around the world (including two cross-country journeys with his wife and five children). He moved to north Portland in 1998 and now lives in Sellwood. For the past four years he’s run the “Camp Creative: No Child Left Inside” summer camp for 9-13 year olds in partnership with Portland Parks & Recreation. The camp is completely bike-based and the main route used to access activities is the Springwater Corridor. This year Kurmaskie says he’s decided to put the camp on hold because of an increase in unruly and unsafe behavior from people he’s encountered along the path.
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.
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.
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.
Hello doers of things!
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
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.