Welcome to “Bikes at Work,” our ocassional series that looks into the people and companies that use bicycles to get work done.
If you have been wanting to be a part of Oregon’s bicycle making industry, two jobs posted recently on our listings could be the opportunity of a lifetime. Learn more about each job via the links below…
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Biking refugee: “Soon I want to ride along the Berlin streets like the locals,” said a law student, pushed by warfare near her home in Syria to seek asylum in Germany, after a bike ride with a group of wecloming Berliners.
Highway origins: One hundred years ago this month, an auto-industry-backed road trip movie kicked off the 40-year campaign to build an interstate freeway system.
In a splashy report on KGW.com last week, the much-loved Portland chef Andy Ricker of Pok Pok lamented the recent lack of off-street auto parking on the street where he built his fame.
Developers of Portland’s future Division Streets are “going to need to lose some commercial space to parking,” Ricker told the news channel.
If that were to be the case, it’d be a big shift for future players in Portland’s nationally famous restaurant scene. Of the 93 Portland restaurants in Willamette Week’s “Restaurant Guide 2015” list released this month, 74 — Pok Pok among them — chose to set up shop in buildings that don’t have any car parking at all.
A fire in Oakridge early this past Sunday morning has completely destroyed the headquarters of Planet-X USA. The company sells bikes under the Planet-X, On-One and Titus brand names and is owned by its parent company which is based in Sheffield, England. Vincent Rodarte, the company’s operations manager, moved the business to the mountain biking mecca of Oakridge on August 1st of this year. Planet-X USA opened in Portland in 2011 and expanded significanly in 2013.
Planet-X’s Portland location had 10,000 square feet (we visited them back in 2013), but much of that inventory had been crammed into the 1,200 square foot showroom and office in Oakridge. Fortunately the company is insured against fire, but it’s a huge blow to Rodarte and his effort to strengthen the U.S. business.
Rodarte, who lives in Portland, just published photos of the damage and his thoughts about the fire at ORBike.com:
Multnomah County Commissioner Jules Bailey has told the Willamette Week that he’ll enter the mayoral race.
This surprise announcement means current candidate Ted Wheeler won’t have the easy ride into City Hall many expected when Mayor Charlie Hales recently decided he wouldn’t run for re-election. Bailey, 36, has a significant political background from his stint as an Oregon state represenative and he’s very well-known among many Portland voters — especially voters who care about active transportation issues.
The “single, supple mesh of mobility” that the government of Helsinki is hoping to use to “make car ownership pointless” by 2025 may be arising spontaneously and gradually in Portland.
For people reading between the lines, an announcement Tuesday from the North American Bike Share Association could lead to Portland becoming the first U.S. city where a single mobile app will be able to let you plan a trip and buy a ride from a bike share service, transit agency, carsharing company or ride-hailing service.
Welcome to today’s pre-Thanksgiving video roundup! I’ve been riding around town but the fancy carbon bike is relegated to the trainer right now. Still, there are plenty of great videos to inspire us. We start with the European Bike Stealing Championships 2015 video above. The audio is a little busy, but it’s worth watching (action begins past the two minute mark).
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The Portland Bureau of Transportation just flipped the switch on new traffic signals at Northwest Couch and Broadway, 10th and 11th Avenues. The signals on Broadway are on a major bike route where they were first flagged as necessary four years ago. At the intersection of Couch and 11th, PBOT has installed Portland’s first ever “pedestrian scramble signal.”
The Portland area has invested $4.8 billion in a regional public rail network, and currently spends $313 million a year to hold down ticket prices on the system.
Another several million dollars each year go toward expansions of the region’s biking network.
Despite that investment, at least one Portland city council member has been arguing in the lead-up to a hearing next month that the public should also be subsidizing downtown car trips.
His reasoning: some of the people who drive downtown are poor.
Looking to make his famous holiday fruitcake last even longer, Portland’s representative in the United States Congress, Earl Blumenauer, has issued a citywide challenge: He wants Portlanders to help provide 1,000 bikes for kids in the month of December.