🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏

City wants taxpayers to finance $26 million hotel parking garage next to light rail

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An architect’s rendering of the proposed six-story parking garage in the Rose Quarter.
The viaduct on the left is Interstate 5.
(Renderings via NextPortland)

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.

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Recap: Wonk Night heads to 82nd and Division

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APANO Board Member Anita Yap speaks while
community activist Steph Routh and Portland
Off-Road Cycling Master Plan Advisory Committee
member Carrie Leonard listen.
(Photos © J. Maus/BikePortland)

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.

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Wonk Nights work! 30 months later, city kicks off bike parking reform

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Bike Parking Wonk Night-7

The crowd of problem-solvers in 2013.
(Photos © J. Maus/BikePortland)

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.

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Bikes should rank beneath mass transit in city hierarchy, says Commissioner Fritz

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Commissioner Amanda Fritz.

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.”

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PBOT: Rotate the stop sign on Monroe and Rodney

During the construction of the NE Rodney Bikeway, which has been talked about way to much for a simple project, PBOT made one bad compromise. There is a stop sign at NE Rodney and Monroe streets that was briefly (for 2 weeks) turned to face east and west allowing traffic on the greenway to flow north and south without stopping. Everything worked smoothly, and 2 of the corner neighbors want the stop sign to be put back in this configuration, however we reverted back to the original configuration of north/south stop signs.

This causes 2 problems:
a) a degredation of the NE Rodney bikeway below the standards recommended by the NACTO guide for bicycle boulevards http://nacto.org/publication/urban-bikeway-design-guide/bicycle-boulevards/minor-street-crossing/
This guide says that there should be 1/2 mile between stop signs on the greenway ideally.

b) traffic on NE Monroe street (a local street) is allowed to go 1000′ (.2 miles) with no traffic calming at NE Rodney from NE MLK,Jr Blvd to Williams Ave. This has the effect of cars going quite quickly by the time they are the middle of the stretch.

PBOT- please obey your own design guides and turn the stop sign at NE Rodney and Monroe street

Bike Loud PDX is getting louder

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Bike Loud’s meeting Sunday in southeast Portland.
(Photos: J. Maus/BikePortland)

Bike Loud PDX — Portland’s upstart, all-volunteer bike advocacy group — is not going anywhere. In fact, they’re growing, maturing, and likely to get much louder in the coming months and years. I attended their general meeting on Sunday to see what they’re up to and get a feel for what the future might hold.

Bike Loud launched in August 2014 with a single comment by Alex Reed. “Anybody interested in starting a louder voice for cycling in Portland email me,” he wrote under a BikePortland post about the state of the Bicycle Transportation Alliance. “If we get a few people, we’ll meet for drinks and a ride sometime soon!” The emails happened. So did the meeting and the ride shortly thereafer. 18 months later Bike Loud hasn’t slowed down and they’ve chalked up an impressive string of successes.

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2016 Active Transportation Summit will tackle freight, housing, the Gorge and more

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A plenary session at the 2013 Active
Transportation Summit.
(Photo: J.Maus/BikePortland)

Once a year, Portland’s biking, walking, transit and public-space wonks gather to share what they’ve been learning and thinking lately.

The Oregon Active Transportation Summit, which runs March 13-15 at the Sentinel Hotel in downtown Portland, isn’t cheap to attend, unless you compare it to almost any other conference. But it’s a feast for the brain, and this year’s agenda has quite a few interesting sessions.

This year’s keynote speakers will be Lynn Peterson, Washington’s recently ousted state transportation secretary; Seleta Reynolds, general manager of Los Angeles’ transportation department; and Jim Sayer, executive director of the Adventure Cycling Association.

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The wait is over- Free Coffee for Bicyclists, Tomorrow: Tuesday, 2/23, 7-9:30am

Come join the Pedal PT crew tomorrow (Tuesday) morning for our Monthly FREE COFFEE for Bicyclists Event!

What: Free Coffee for Bicyclists, pedestrians and passers by with Pedal PT. Coffee From K&F Roasters, our neighbor on the corner of SE 26th and Clinton.
When: Tuesday, 2/23 7am until 9:30am
Where: SE 25th and Clinton
Why: At Pedal PT, we’ve been doing these monthly Free Coffee events for bike commuters now for over 3 years, and our office looks forwards to it every month, as a fun way to give back to the cycling community that gives us so much back!

. . .Now, we just gotta get Jonathan to come down one of these mornings 🙂

So plan leave a little early tomorrow for the morning commute down Clinton – – – We’ll see you then!

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