Last night’s Blazers Bike Night was a lot of fun and — despite the weather and the score not turning out like we hoped — we managed to boost the biking spirit at the Moda Center.
You know you want to ride it.
The Tilikum Crossing bridge has been seducing your eyes for months now with its elegant lines that span the Willamette, its carfree promise, and its 14-foot wide bike/walk path.
When Bridge Pedal registration opens today at noon, you can reserve your spot to be one of the first people to ride a bicycle across it. Well, you and 20,000 others.
Here are the great bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Shared street: Early next year, four blocks of Chicago’s Argyle Street will be rebuilt in a “radical experiment” with no sidewalks, crosswalks, curbs, lane markings, or signals and almost no signs.
The birth of ‘cross: Could this French biking newsletter from 1901 have the report of the very first cyclocross race?
It’s one of the maddening paradoxes of the bike world: biking is so cheap and efficient that it’s a blip on almost every chart.
Biking infrastructure is so easy to build that there’s no army of contractors to lobby for it. Biking education is difficult because it’s so easy to just buy a bike and start riding. And bike theft doesn’t get penalized because a bike can be the most important object in someone’s life even though it’s only worth $50.
Reader Todd Hudson captured an aspect of this problem in a comment beneath this week’s post about a Portland cop who’s leading the fight against bike theft from the front lines.
It might be peer pressure. It might be geometry. It’s almost certainly some of each.
But following up on a study that found that (as we reported last year) 94 percent of observed bike users in Oregon stopped for red lights, a Portland State University civil engineering student has also found that every additional person waiting next to you on a bike makes you 78 percent less likely to run the light on your own bike.
This is a guest opinion piece by A.J. Zelada, a longtime biking and walking advocate who chaired the Oregon Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee from 2011 to 2013.
Intoxicating amounts of alcohol are at the death scene of 36 percent of walking fatalities and 32 percent of biking deaths.
So why does today’s street safety movement seem to trivialize it?
Last year, I listened to Oregon’s Safe Routes to School manager proclaim new safety issues to protect pedestrians. The ideas were great, but one was missing: She did not mention alcohol at death scenes. Vision Zero is being considered by many cities, including Portland and New York City, as a backbone policy for reducing road deaths. New York City’s new Vision Zero policy has one paragraph about alcohol.
We’ve had three excellent job opportunities posted this week. Learn more via the links below…
Welcome to your menu of weekend rides and events, lovingly brought to you by our friends at Hopworks Urban Brewery
Things are getting a bit lean on the various ride calendars… Except, that is, if you are a cyclocross fan (and can get to Bend). If you aren’t into racing and you’ll be in Portland this weekend… Might I suggest joining 100 other BikePortland readers for Blazers Bike Night on Sunday!?
Of course, Halloween is tomorrow and we all know that the streets will be full of folks headed to parties and filling up panniers with candy and treats.
Have fun!
This morning, Clackamas County’s commissioners are considering whether to urge the Portland region to attempt to fight climate change by adding more lanes to its freeways.
The people have spoken, and they say that in most of Portland, it’s getting harder to park a car on the street:
Since the central-city building boom resumed, residents of every part of the city except East Portland are more likely to say it’s annoying to find a car parking space.
But this is interesting: they say something else, too.
As a follow up to our story a few weeks ago about Multnomah County’s project to remove the rumble strips and revamp the bus stop/bike lane on the westbound approach to the Hawthorne Bridge, I just got an email update on the project from our friends at Multnomah County…
I wanted to update you on our project on the westbound Hawthorne Bridge ramp, where we have widened the bus stop above SE Water Ave. The concrete work at the bus stop is done and the bus stop has reopened. We are waiting for supplies and dry weather to complete the pavement striping and lay down about 40 feet of ADA raised bump pads along the curb edge at the bus stop. When those tasks are completed we will remove the speed humps in the bike lane approaching the shared use raised path and bus stop. All this work should be completed in November.
There’s a strong feeling among many in the community that the Portland Police Bureau simply doesn’t care about bike theft. I hear this sentiment all the time, and I agree that the bureau needs to step up and make this growing problem a higher priority.
In the meantime however, it’s good to know there are some PPB officers going out of their way to battle bike thieves. Officer David Sanders is one of them; but unfortunately he’s doing it inside a bureau that has yet to join him in the fight.
I met Sanders last week at his headquarters office in Old Town.
As he led me into a conference table, I noticed about 8-10 bikes strewn about. They were just the latest batch that Sanders and his partners have taken off the streets and now hope to connect with their owners. Sanders is one of six members of the the downtown Bicycle Patrol Unit (four of which are paid for by Portland Patrol Inc., a private security company that contracts with the PPB), whose job is to keep the peace on the streets. The bulk of his day is responding to low-level disputes and establishing relationships with downtown residents and business owners.
But whenever he can find a few extra minutes, his attention turns to bike theft.
