
(Photos: Oregon City PD)
A reader shared a Reddit post with us that underscores the poor conditions bicycle riders face on the St. Johns Bridge.
From leaves in fall and gravel in winter, to nails and illegally parked cars and delivery trucks — it sometimes feels like we face a constant barrage of hazards while biking around Portland.
That being said, it’s nice to know people care enough to take matters into their own hands and clean things up.
Enough is enough. Someone is deliberately throwing nails in a popular Portland bike lane and we’re tired of waiting for it to stop.
So here’s the deal: BikePortland is offering a $500 $1,000 cash reward for information that leads to an arrest in this case.
It’s taken years of complaints but it seems we’ve finally the attention of city officials on a recurring bike lane safety issue that might have a malicious origin.
Three weeks after we heard our first reports of thumbtacks scattered somewhere around the ramps of the Hawthorne Bridge, fresh reports keep coming in.
Someone apparently scattered thumbtacks across the paths of the Hawthorne Bridge crossing early Tuesday evening. Our latest report of trouble came in at 8:20 this morning.
We heard from one source who said they stopped and picked up more than 40 tacks on their way home last night.
This sort of seemingly deliberate attack is especially hard to understand because it has some potential to put people in real physical danger.
Several dozen roofing nails were strewn in the bike lane on North Williams Avenue last night. We’ve gotten three reports from readers so far and have confirmed three separate locations where nails were found. The development is troubling because this isn’t the first time we’ve covered nails in the bike lanes on Williams (and its couplet, Vancouver).
A recent reader email shared an important perspective from another front in the battle for bike safety on rural roads. If you thought these issues were limited to Portland’s West Hills, rural Washington County, and Sauvie Island — think again.
Below is the letter, which comes from Troutdale resident Russell K:
Are Bicycle Riders Safe in Corbett? (Or on the Old Columbia River Highway?)
I live in Troutdale, OR. One of best things about life here are the amazing bicycle rides that I can do from my front door. Troutdale being right at the mouth of the Columbia River Gorge has immediate access to rides with stunning scenery and challenging hills.
A Portland resident concerned about the recent incidents of tacks being thrown into bikeways on N Williams and Vancouver Avenues, has announced a $500 reward for information that leads to the arrest and conviction of the person responsible.
Mark Allyn, who works at Intel in Hillsboro and rides his bike each day from Southeast Portland, has retained local lawyer Ray Thomas of downtown Portland-based Swanson, Thomas and Coon to handle all the inquiries and to answer any questions about the reward.
Here’s a snip from an email Allyn just sent out:
When I reported about tacks in the bike lane on N. Vancouver Avenue last week, I hoped it was just an isolated incident. They could have even been — as one commenter suggested — debris from a construction site near Legacy hospital.
Unfortunately it seems this isn’t just a random, isolated incident.
I’ve now received several more reports of people getting flats from small, sharp tacks and they seem to all be coming from N Williams Ave (which is one street over and part of a north-south couplet with Vancouver). To date, I have 15 17 separate reports of flat tires caused by these tacks.
Reader Rob Story wrote in to say, “Another day, another handful of tacks thrown on Williams. I picked these up somewhere between Rose quarter and Tillamook”…