Event flyer.

Events like Sunday Parkways are known as “open streets” events. But for people who don’t feel comfortable riding in a crowd of people or who don’t have access to a bicycle due to their special needs, the event can feel closed.
[Read more…]

We had a great group for the Kidical Mass ride to Cargo Bike Roll Call on Sunday.
(Photos: Madi Carlson)

I’m incredibly excited to be experiencing my first June as a Portlander, which means my first Pedalpalooza!

Our Family Biking column is sponsored by Clever Cycles.

➤ Read past entries here.

Organized by the all-volunteer Shift, Pedalpalooza is a month-long festival filled with hundreds of bike events, organized by anyone who wants to lead a ride. There’s hopefully something for everyone. Most events are bike rides and most have a fun theme, but anything goes (like Bladepacking, “like bike packing but on BLADES SKATES AND BOARDS. This is an overnight”).

There are so many rides, it can feel overwhelming. Here’s how to navigate it all and find rides that are fun for families.[Read more…]

TriMet’s latest design for stations in the Division Transit Project.

As TriMet inches ever closer to the final design of their $175 million Division Transit Project, the agency once again needs feedback on how best to handle bicycle users at new bus stations. And with protected bike lanes becoming a more common feature citywide, whatever TriMet decides to use could become the new standard.[Read more…]

Just one block makes a big difference. Here’s 82nd near SE Mill on the left and 80th near SE Mill — future Seventies Greenway Route — on the right.

At their City Council meeting tomorrow, Mayor Ted Wheeler and his colleagues will authorize an agreement with the Oregon Department of Transportation to put $2 million into city coffers for the design and construction of the Seventies Neighborhood Greenway.
[Read more…]

(Photos by Aaron Brown)

From the wonky to the wacky, the seventeenth annual Pedalpalooza has shown that Portland’s creative, inclusive, free, and fun bike culture is alive and well.

Here are some highlights…[Read more…]

Coaches at the first Leaders’ Summit held in Portland in mid-April.
(Photo: NICA Oregon Chapter)

If you know a young person in Portland who’s stoked on mountain biking, now, for the first time ever, they can sign up for a team through their school.

The Portland Metro Composite MTB Team is the latest evolution of the fledgling Oregon chapter of the National Interscholastic Cycling Association we first reported on back in December.

In April, over 30 volunteer coaches from throughout Oregon participated in the inaugural Leaders’ Summit held in Portland. Now they’ve fanned out across the state to build their teams in advance of the first races which are set to begin this September.

With a team of certified and insured coaches, NICA Oregon is ready to get rolling. All that’s missing are the students! Let me make sure the Portland area fields a strong team and does us proud! Read below the jump to find out about how to get involved…
[Read more…]

Someone plowed their car into the bike parking structure at Hawthorne and 38th yesterday. Note the “See & Be Seen” poster.
(Photo: Doug Klotz)

Many Portlanders who use our streets outside the relative safety of a steel reinforced cocoon are growing impatient with the timid designs coming out of our transportation agencies.
[Read more…]

Welcome to the week.

Before we get to the best stories we came across in the past seven days, let’s give some love to our sponsor: The Weekender Ride by Cycle Oregon. Grab some friends and head to University of Oregon on July 13-15 for a weekend of riding, relaxing, and reveling you won’t soon forget.

Now, on with the news…

Teach them young: You can help prevent driving abuse in the next generation by exposing young minds to books that share positive depictions of walking, biking, and urban living.
[Read more…]

A middle school student from Springwater Environmental Sciences School displays work for a unit on the Oregon Timber Trail.
(Photo: Gabriel Tiller, OTT)

A school in Oregon City will be rolling on a new fleet of Specialized bicycles next year. The bikes will help them delve further into the natural world.

The Springwater Environmental Sciences School, a K-8 public charter based in a rural area near streams and woods, was one of 37 schools across the country (and the only one in Oregon) awarded a “Riding for Focus” grant by the Specialized Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the global bike company. The grants aim to fund programs where bicycles are integrated into the school’s physical education curriculum.

The students at Springwater caught the cycling bug from an unlikely source: The Oregon Timber Trail, the 668-mile (mostly) off-road trail that spans the entire state from California to the Columbia River. Last summer the school partnered with the Oregon Timber Trail Alliance and used the trail as a vehicle to study the rich geology and history it passes through.
[Read more…]

The Portland Bureau of Transportation released a major update to their Outer Souther Division Multimodal Safety Project today. And as we hinted at back in November, the latest plans (now at 60 percent design) have added more auto parking and have loosened turning restrictions for drivers.
[Read more…]

You upgrade your bike, why not upgrade your job? Your career in Portland’s dynamic bike industry can start with one of the three jobs posted this week.

Learn more about each one via the links below…

–> Customer Service Manager – Stages Indoor Cycling

–> Showroom and Retail Store Lead – Cart Logic/Velotech

–> Shop Assistant with Bike Mechanic Skills – Pedal Bike Tours

[Read more…]

Welcome to our latest roundup of local bike industry news. This column used to be called “Industry Ticker” but I don’t think anyone really understood the “ticker” part, so I changed it.

If you’re new to town (or to BikePortland), you might not realize that in addition to a lot of cool bike events and people riding bikes all over the place, we have a ton of bike-related businesses here. We have companies that make bikes, some that sell them, others that design cool things to attach to them, and much more.

Get to know a few of these companies in the roundup below…
[Read more…]

Visual from DEIS that shows Barbur Blvd at the Barbur Transit Center.

The SW Corridor Project has reached a major milestone with the release this week of its Draft Environmental Impact Statement — a required step for the estimated $2.8 billion, 12-mile TriMet MAX light rail project to receive federal funding.

The plan has been seven years in the making and once complete (possibly around 2027), the new line would go from downtown Portland’s transit mall to Tualatin via Tigard. As proposed, the route would go along Barbur Boulevard until the Barbur Transit Center (at SW Capitol Highway) and then cross over I-5 on a new bridge that would run southwest along the freeway to Tigard before crossing Highway 217 and heading south to Bridgeport.

When the Portland region has built previous light rail lines, new bike lanes followed. The Yellow Line up Interstate got us new (albeit crappy and narrow) bike lanes, and the Orange Line came with an unprecedented investment in bikeways. Throughout planning for the SW Corridor, active transportation advocates have watched closely and sat on advisory committees to make sure the project would result in not just a new high-capacity transit line; but high-capacity bikeways as well.
[Read more…]

Buses need dedicated lanes too, so something’s gotta’ give.
(Photo: Jonathan Maus)

When the Portland Bureau of Transportation (or any government agency for that matter) doesn’t have the public and/or political will to do something they know needs to be done, they will often create a plan. Once adopted, plans give the agency the foundation of policy and information needed to bolster their case both internally and externally. Such is the case with their Enhanced Transit Corridors Plan, which is now complete and headed to City Council for adoption on June 20th.
[Read more…]

(Photos: Jonathan Maus)

The Weekend Event Guide is sponsored by Abus Bike Locks. Thanks Abus!

How’s your Pedalpalooza going so far? By all accounts the rides have been great with big turnouts and leaders who’ve kept them interesting and fun. Of course we’re just one week in so hopefully you have paced yourself to keep up with all the action.

If you’d rather escape the city, we suggest heading for wine country for the Joyride (by Cycle Oregon) or the Whiskey Run MTB Festival.

And we’d be remiss to not share a special shout-out to Dan and Dave’s Wedding Ride on Saturday. This dynamic duo of bike fun will tie the knot while pedaling around Ladd Circle!

Get all the details below…

[Read more…]

Projects in all 11 school clusters in Portland. See the interactive map here.

In what they’re calling a “major milestone,” and for the first time since the program began in 2006, the City of Portland has identified and published a list of Safe Routes to School projects that are funded and queued up for construction.
[Read more…]

[Publisher’s note: I’m happy to introduce a new column — Adventures in Activism — to highlight more of the vital, in-the-trenches work of grassroots activists. The column will be edited by BikeLoudPDX volunteers Emily Guise and Catie Gould; but they won’t be the only writers. If you’re working to make streets better, please get in touch so we can share your voice. In this first post, Emily and Catie share how they got involved. Stay tuned and thanks for reading. – Jonathan]

——

Emily Guise.
(Photo: Jonathan Maus)

➤ by Emily Guise

My bike advocacy career started on North Williams Avenue. In 2011, I was living in inner north Portland, had just started a new job downtown, and was going to school in Gresham. I rarely rode during rush-hour before; but now I was part of the pack going in-and-out of the central city. I began to hate my bike commute: people behaved dangerously, traffic was noisy, and I felt scared riding in skinny bike lanes. Riding up Williams was the worst. Its thin bike lane was sandwiched between impatient rush-hour commuters in big SUVs and parked cars whose drivers obliviously flung their doors open. Having to be on high-alert just to get home safely was exhausting. I disliked how angry I felt while biking and I knew I couldn’t continue this way.
[Read more…]

Plenty of room for kids and bikes on a weekend train.
(Photos by Madi Carlson)

[Read more…]

People coming together in the streets is a time-honored Portland tradition.
(Photo: Jonathan Maus)

Just yards away from the horrific hit-and-run last month, and in a society where we are building walls around each other instead of breaking them down, a group of Portlanders plans to reboot a 50-year-old idea: A free, “inclusive Portland picnic”.

“In the wake of intense discord, we’re gathering to connect,” reads a media alert sent out by organizers. “In recent weeks we’ve seen a spate of incidents that have deeply affected our community, including the shooting of John Elifritz; the suspicious circumstances around PSU student Aaron Salazar’s injuries; the vehicular assault of three women on PSU campus; and just this weekend, the conflict between alt-right and anti-fascist factions.”

The plan is to reclaim one block of SW Montgomery (an idea that really isn’t that radical) street between Broadway and 6th from 11:00 to 1:00 pm today. Organizers say they want to create a positive event. There will be invited guests to “collectively imagine what an inclusive Portland might look like and feel like.” There will also be an open mic. [Read more…]

Saturday’s inaugural Gateway Green MTB Festival confirmed what many advocates have known for a long time: When the right trails are put in the right place, off-road cycling can reach people with a very wide range of ages, cycling abilities, and backgrounds.
[Read more…]