With $10 million in new venture funding, Ride Report CEO optimistic amid challenges

Ride Report works with cities and scooter/bike share operators.
(Photo © J. Maus/BikePortland)
Ride Report works with cities and scooter/bike share operators.
(Photo © J. Maus/BikePortland)
A popular smartphone app created in Portland that tracks cycling trips and allows users to rate their rides will shut down at the end of August. Local tech entrepreneur and CEO of Ride Report William Henderson says he’s shifted the focus of his business and Ride App isn’t in his company’s future plans.
Ride App was a free ride-tracking-and-rating app that ran on users’ Apple or Android smartphones. It would automatically (and anonymously) log bicycle trips and give users the ability to quickly rate their rides. The idea was to not only understand which bikeways people preferred, but their general level of satisfaction with them.
Ride App has recorded over 12 million miles of trips since its launch in 2015.
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When we first profiled Knock Software in 2015 we said their small device that counts bicycle traffic would “change planning forever.”
Nearly four years later that device is no longer part of their business, but the company itself has more than lived up to the headline.
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Only when most people arrived by bike could you have a parking area that actually contributes to the pre-event mingling.
(Photos: Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)
“The Alice Awards are cool again,” said an attendee at Friday night’s Alice Awards gala hosted by The Street Trust.
The annual gathering has been a staple for many years; a date circled on the calendar of agency staffers, activists, electeds, industry leaders, and civic do-gooders. But there have been times in recent years when the event seemed to have lost its mojo. It started when the pendulum swung too far away from honoring advocates and too close to raising money. Small decisions like announcing winners weeks before the event in hopes it would lead to more ticket sales (if you know you’re going to win you want to make sure your friends/family are there to see it right?); not allowing winners to make speeches; and an overwhelming number of auction items (and the time — and blaring auctioneer — needed to sell them all), sapped the fun away.
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Portland’s bike planning is about to get smarter.
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For the first time, BikePortland’s reporting has been chosen by the Society of Professional Journalists as some of the best from small newsrooms in the Northwest.
In the annual awards announced Saturday, Jonathan’s December report about the circumstances around the death of Martin Greenough (“Why would anyone ride on that scary stretch of Lombard?”) took first place for general news reporting in the five-state contest among news organizations with 10 staff members or fewer.
Everybody who bikes in Portland has opinions about the best and worst streets to bike on. But there’s no clear way to combine those opinions into the sort of information that officials can actually use.
Enter the new mobile app that’s currently available only in Portland: Ride Report.
Launched as an iPhone app this week (with an Android version in the works), Ride Report provides an extremely simple way for users to answer a single question about each bike ride they take: Thumbs up or thumbs down?
One of Portland’s most interesting tech startups is about to move into its next phase: attempting to recruit thousands of local bike users to become rolling bikeway evaluators.[Read more…]
Do bikes count?
A three-person Portland startup that hit a jackpot with its first mobile app is plowing profits into a new venture: a cheap, tiny device that could reinvent the science of measuring bike traffic — and help see, for the first time, thousands of people that even the bike-friendliest American cities ignore.
Tomorrow, Portland’s city council will consider a proposal to become their first client.