🚨 Please note: BikePortland is currently on hiatus and only publishing guest articles. Learn more here. Thank you. - Jonathan 🙏
This article was written by Andy Jansky, a volunteer trail steward with the Northwest Trail Alliance.
It’s time to start a new cycling movement. I call it the “Dirt Roots Movement” and it’s all about getting more kids on mountain bikes.
After four summers loaded with all the paperbacks you can fit on a cargo trike, Portland’s most public library is rolling merrily forward.
What happened to Portland? Did we really deserve to lose our spot atop the podium of America’s best bike cities? Is this whole stagnation thing for real?
As Portlanders puzzle over why local bike, bus and rail transportation has stopped rising, last week’s Census figures show another trend continuing to reshape the city’s population.
New construction in the central city hasn’t come close to relieving one of the country’s harshest rental housing shortages.
For structures built before 1940 — the bungalows and walk-ups built before the age of automotive planning that cover most of the land between the Willamette River, 82nd Avenue, Powell and Lombard, including many of the most bike-friendly neighborhoods in North America — median rents rose 19 percent in the two years from 2011 to 2013, Census estimates show.
Since 2005, when the City of Portland’s population growth began to dramatically outpace its supply of new units, rent in these central-city buildings has risen 47 percent.
What happens when you mash together two of Portland’s best fall bike events into one, big, blowout weekend party? The Handmade Bike & Beer Festival.
Since the first Bike to Blazers we organized back in 2006, our goal has been to showcase cycling for the Trail Blazers organization, the team, and their many fans. We’ve made solid strides toward that goal, but we’re still hoping to make the biking/Blazers connection much stronger.
I’m happy to say that this year, the Blazers reached out to us early wanting to re-energize the Bike Night event and make it bigger and better than ever. As many of you know, I happen to think biking and the Blazers go great together, so I eagerly accepted.
Let it be known that Sunday, November 2nd is Blazers Bike Night at the Moda Center!
This is Rebecca Hamilton’s second article in a series about her introduction to cyclocross racing. Read last week’s installment here.
It’s Week 2 of the Blind Date at the Dairy cyclocross series and here I am again, back for more.
Here are the great bike-related links from around the world that caught our eyes this week:
Seattle’s showcase: Downtown Seattle’s new two-way protected bike lane, which replaced a one-way door-zone lane, seems to have immediately tripled bike traffic on the street.
Cop impersonator: In Palo Alto, a man seemingly impersonated a police officer while ordering two kids in a bike lane to ride single file instead of side by side. He then flashed a weapon at one of them.
Kerry Kunsman, a 67-year old bicycle safety instructor and board member of the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition is in critical condition after being hit from behind by a pickup driver while riding near Tillamook yesterday.
According to the Oregon State Police, Kunsman, a resident of San Diego California, was riding westbound on Highway 131 between Tillamook and Netarts Bay (map) when he was struck from behind by 74-year old Oceanside (Oregon) resident Frank Bohannon, who was driving a Ford F350 pickup.
The collision occurred at milepost five in the apex of a right-have and curve. As you can see in the photos below, Netarts Hwy has two lanes in this location and no paved shoulder. The posted speed limit on this highway is 55 mph, but there’s an advisory speed of 35 mph posted for this specific corner. The investigation into the collision is ongoing and no enforcement decision has been made. Kunsman is suffering from a brain injury and is being treated at Legacy Emanuel Hospital in Portland.
This is the latest in an alarming spate of rear-end collisions involving bicycle riders on rural Oregon highways in the past month.
The new transit/bike/walk bridge opening across the Willamette next year has become one of Portland’s go-to examples of how we continue to do great things. And it’s certainly true that it’s a massive investment in active transportation.
But as reader Ted Buehler argued in a series of comments this week below our story about the apparent decline of biking among PSU students, Tilikum Crossing was so close to being so much better.
The Tilikum Bridge isn’t going to help all that much, because Tilikum to PSU will still be crap. Whereas MAX has a long flyover from the west end of the Tilikum Bridge to SW 4th and Lincoln.
If they had funded a mixed use path on the MAX bridge, you’d be able to go straight from OMSI to here: http://goo.gl/maps/LLiVp without playing fender tag with cars on surface streets.
Yesterday I took a short ride downtown and it was the perfect illustration of something I’ve known for many years: cycling in a city where a (relatively) significant amount of people ride bikes can* be a very social form of transportation.
Frustrated by city officials’ estimates that it’d take several years to even consider a major redesign of 3rd Avenue through Old Town, a group of neighborhood businesses is teaming up with a team of livable streets advocates to create their own three-day demo of what a better street could look like — two weeks from today.
Inspired in part by the “pop-up” street projects that have helped reshape New York City in the last five years, organizers say Old Town’s three-block project will be one of the country’s largest such projects ever.
It’ll use wooden planters in the street to create more than a thousand square feet of new pedestrianized space between NW Davis an SW Ash, a protected bike lane, a series of new sidewalk cafes, a marked crosswalk and a huge new public plaza in front of Voodoo Doughnut adjoining Old Town’s thriving Ankeny Alley.