🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏
Whether it’s doing Sunday Parkways or just riding to the store or a friend’s house, biking is a huge part of summer for many Portland families. So are summer camps. Fortunately you can combine the two and enroll the kid in your life in one of several bike-focused camps.
The white bicycle memorial to recent Reed College graduate Mark Angeles, 22, was wrecked late Monday or early Tuesday, apparently by the wheel of a motor vehicle.
The collision tore through the flower bouquets that had been piled on the bicycle at the corner of Southeast Gladstone Street and Cesar Chavez Boulevard, leaving piles of stems and pedals behind.
Photos after the collision were shared by Josh Chernoff on his Twitter feed Tuesday morning. Chernoff said he lives next door.
“It would’ve been somebody going south on 39th and turning east on the Gladstone crossing over oncoming traffic,” Chernoff wrote in response to our questions. “I hate to say but it looks intentional. … It’s kind of hard to tell.”
Portland’s annual Pedalpalooza festival starts on Thursday and will wrap up June 27 with Oregon’s biggest pay-what-you-will bike ride of the year, which also happens to be the largest clothing-optional bike ride in the world.
The 2015 edition of Portland’s World Naked Bike Ride will begin gathering in Colonel Summers Park, at Southeast 17th Avenue and Taylor Street, at 8 p.m. The roll-out will start at 9 p.m. and the ride is so big it usually takes an hour or more before all of the participants are moving.
Though Portland has been justly praised for regularly making it through many calendar years with zero deaths of people biking, it is clearly the most dangerous of the four cities recognized as the nation’s bike-friendliest.
For the years 2009-2013, Portland’s fatality rate per bike commuter was 75 percent higher than the officially listed average for the League of American Bicyclists’ four “Platinum” cities: Portland; Fort Collins, Colo.; Boulder, Colo.; and Davis, Calif. Its reported collision rate per bike commuter was 94 percent higher.
Sacha White, the southeast Portland-based maker of fine bicycles who has sat among the top American framebuilders for years, has just released a new bike: the Urban Racer.
Southeast Portland has always been the heart of Portland’s biking culture. But as the last few weeks have made horrifically clear, it’s still full of problems.
In an article published Friday on the Southeast Uplift neighborhood coalition’s website, a new member of that organization’s board laid out three concrete and seemingly achievable suggestions for making the area a bit better — as well as a perceptive theory about the recent problems on Southeast Clinton Street.
This post is sponsored by Cycle Oregon, who’d like to remind you that their Weekend Ride is coming up on July 10-12 and there are still spots available.
Do you remember your first time riding in a group? When you finally got up the nerve to ride a bit closer to someone’s wheel and managed to cheat the wind?
Portland has won a grant related to bike share — but the news isn’t what you might expect.
The Better Bike Share Partnership, a collaboration between The City of Philadelphia, Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO) and PeopleForBikes, announced $375,000 in grants this morning all aimed at furthering the group’s mission to “increase access to and use of bike share in underserved communities.”
The money was divided among six cities: Brooklyn, Charlotte, Boston, Austin, Chicago, and Portland. All of those cities — except Portland — will use the money to improve their existing bike share systems. Here in Portland of course, we don’t have a bike share system to improve. Instead, our $74,986 slice of this grant pie will go toward research that will benefit Philadelphia’s bike share system.
Oh, the irony.
— This week’s Monday Roundup is sponsored by the Ride for Schools, a ride to raise money for Oregon’s public schools that takes place in Hillsboro on June 27th.
Here are the bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Time capsule: What did it feel like to run a bike shop in the middle of Oregon’s 1971 bike boom? “They’ve taken all the fun out of the business,” complained Portland retailer Pat Patterson in this newspaper article from that spring. Leading the activism charge at the time was the late PSU English professor Sam Oakland, who said “We want to redesign Portland to make it a city for people — particularly in the downtown business area — instead of what it is now, a giant, smelly parking garage for commuters.”
Kerry’s cycling: Secretary of State John Kerry, who broke his femur while biking in France on Sunday, is quite an athelete. “If he raced in his age category, he’d be one of the top riders in the U.S,” says former pro racer Jonathan Vaughters, who’s ridden with the 71-year-old politician.
Portland Mayor Charlie Hales and City Commissioner Steve Novick have just announced an “urgent meeting” that will take place next week at City Hall to discuss bike safety following a spate of collisions that has sparked widespread concerns.
Novick is the commissioner in charge of the transportation bureau, which has committed to the concept of “Vision Zero” which is a policy and set of actions that aims to eliminate traffic deaths.
Here’s the official word about the meeting that just came down from Novick’s Transportation Policy Advisor Timur Ender:
As hundreds of people take to the streets in an expression of frustration about unsafe biking conditions in Portland, the Oregon Department of Transportation has just announced plans to install new left turn arrows at SE Powell and 26th Avenue — an intersection where two people have sustained serious injuries in collisions this month.
This announcement comes as a surprise and is very likely a response to the collision that happened at the intersection today and the resulting public pressure that has come from it. ODOT rep Shelli Romero told me back on May 11th at the protest event at Powell and 26th that they want to “redo this signal” but no one expected such a quick timeline.
Sex crimes are horrific, and — despite the concerns of some about civil liberties — many states respond to their horror by publicly shaming people who commit them.
Maybe traffic crimes should be punished similarly, BikePortland reader invisiblebikes suggested in a comment Wednesday beneath our post about the newly launched Vision Zero PAC, which aims to put a spotlight on politicians who defend unsafe driving. As invisiblebikes describes it, the government wouldn’t even be involved.