Cycling News & Blog Articles

N Delaware crossing Rosa Parks Way. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

In the coming months there will be a new neighborhood greenway established in north Portland. The project will create a more bicycle-friendly street on a 1.3-mile stretch of North Delaware between Sumner and Terry.

Delaware is already an important north-south street in the bike network, but it’s currently listed on the official city bike map as a “shared roadway” — one step in quality below a neighborhood greenway. Delaware connects the campus of Adidas North American headquarters near Willamette Blvd in the south and crosses important east-west bikeways such as Ainsworth, Rosa Parks, Bryant and Lombard. Delaware also provides direct access to Arbor Lodge Park, Chief Joseph Elementary School, Portland Village School, and Kenton Park.

To make it safer and more welcoming for bicycle riders, the Portland Bureau of Transportation announced in an email to nearby residents earlier this month they plan to begin construction at the end of March.

The plan calls for:

View looking west on SE Stark at 115th. That’s Ventura Park on the right.

One of Portland’s deadliest streets will get major changes with a project set to break ground in the coming months. The Portland Bureau of Transportation announced last week they will repave Southeast Stark Street between 108th and 122nd this spring. In addition to new pavement, PBOT will add protected bike lanes on both sides of the street.

It’s all part of the larger Safer Outer Stark project that launched in 2019. Stark has a gruesome history as a high-speed stroad where people in cars, on foot, and on bikes run a higher than average risk of death or serious injury from a traffic collision. SE Stark and 122nd is known as the highest crash intersection in the entire city. Advocates have pushed PBOT for years to make a large safety investment on outer Stark and the city has responded. PBOT has split the $20 million project into five phases. The first two are complete and the one that will repave and add bike lanes this spring is phase three.

This 0.7 mile section of SE Stark begins just east of the Stark-Washington couplet at Mall 205. The width of the road is about 60-feet and it currently has four general purpose lanes and a center turn lane. The stretch between SE 113th and 117th runs along the south side of Ventura Park and has a 30 mph speed limit. Despite doing a complete repave, PBOT will not reduce the number of general travel lanes. See the before/after graphics below shared in a PBOT video about the project:

This Specialized Haul ST is a Class 3 bike with a top speed of 28 mph. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

Cycling and road safety advocates from across Oregon came together on a piece of electric bike legislation that is now poised to pass the House of Representatives. It’s likely passage is a major win for some e-bike advocates and represents a compromise they hope will lead to a more effective bill next year.

Last week BikePortland reported that a schism among bike advocates had developed over House Bill 4103. That bill was drafted by Bend lawmaker Emerson Levy (D-53) in response to a fatal collision last summer that took the life of a 15-year-old who was riding an e-bike. Levy’s bill sought to do four key things: bring Oregon in line with 41 other states that have adopted a three-class system for regulating e-bikes; make it legal for riders 15 and under to ride “Class 1” models (with a max speed of 20 mph and no throttle); prohibit people 15 and under from riding bikes equipped with throttles (Class 2) and that reach speeds of 28 mph (Class 3); and create a new misdemeanor traffic violation for parents of kids who didn’t comply with the new law.

The bill, known as “Trenton’s Law” was strongly supported by the parents of Trenton Burger, the boy who was killed by a driver while riding in Bend. Bend-based advocacy groups also supported the bill and were happy to see Class 1 bikes become legal for young riders and get more clarity and awareness around e-bikes in general. Since Burger’s death, pressure to do something about teens on throttle-equipped e-bikes has reached a fever pitch in small, high-income cities like Bend, Hood River, and Lake Oswego.

Megan Ramey, the Safe Routes to School manager for Hood River County who penned the “Dawn of the Throttle Kids” story for BikePortland in July 2022, testified at a public hearing for the bill on February 15th that one reason she supports HB 4103 is, “I can’t go a week without a friend, colleague or leader bringing up the ‘scofflaw e-bike teens.'” “The backlash is growing,” Ramey warned. “And it draws the positive energy out of Safe Routes to School.”

“The speeds which people turn here is appalling.”

One man is dead and another man has been arrested after a collision between a driver and a bicycle rider around 3:00 am Sunday morning.

Red arrow points to collision location.

According to the Portland Police Bureau, 22-year-old Shane M. McKeever was driving southbound on Southeast Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd and then turned left onto SE Belmont. Right after the turn, as he drove eastbound on Belmont, McKeever allegedly struck 49-year-old David Bentley. The Oregonian has reported that Bentley was sitting on his bike with his back to the road prior to the collision (a report by KOIN TV said Bentley was in the bike lane when it happened). One witness told The Oregonian that, “a car came flying through.” The impact reportedly threw Bentley’s body 40-50 feet in the air.

This comment made me smile. Writing in response to our post about a survey, which noted that Portland struggles with increasing the number of women on bikes, Paige stood a truism about biking on its head.

So many people talk about how riding a bike brings you closer to your environment, whether it’s the cityscape or out in nature. Riding a bike has an immediacy which traveling in a car just doesn’t.

But as Paige noted, sometimes you don’t want to interact much with your immediate environment — and a bike helps with that too!

Here’s what Paige had to say:

James Emond, the owner and dedicated heart of The Missing Link bike shop in the Woodstock Neighborhood is going through a major medical situation and folks are rallying support around him and his shop.

“Changes in the vertebrae in my neck have caused a narrowing of my spinal canal to the point where my spinal chord has been abraded,” Emond wrote last week on the shop’s Facebook page. “The overall feeling of this is a lot like what I imagine having a stroke would feel like-difficulty doing anything with my hands, trouble walking, balance issues, dropping things, difficult getting myself up from a seated position. I’m determined to get over this but I need help getting through the next couple months to keep myself and the shop afloat.”

According to a GoFundMe page set up by River Croney, a member of the shop’s riding club, “The good news is his brain is unaffected.”

“James isn’t just a shop owner; he’s a mentor, a friend, and an irreplaceable part of our cycling lives,” Croney wrote. Croney is a member of “Rolling Thunder,” the shop’s cycling club that competes at races throughout Oregon.

Welcome to the week. It’s going to be a great! Let’s get started.

Here are the most notable items our community came across in the past seven days:

Cougar attack: Friends riding bikes together on a trail near Fall City, Washington heroically fought off a cougar that attacked a 60-year old woman. Cyclists used their bike to pin down the cougar until wildlife officials arrived. (KOMO)

Less pavement, more life: Portland’s very own Depave leads this article that profiles the growing worldwide trend of removing pavement and replacing it with plants in a bid to improve lives and battle climate change. (BBC)

There’s a new candidate for Portland City Council’s District 2 (N/NE) and you might have already heard his name. Or should say, seen his name on the side of cider cans in stores and gatherings throughout our city. After 12 years building his Reverend Nat’s Hard Cider business from his basement to his garage in the Woodlawn neighborhood, and then to stores and refrigerators all across the globe, Nat West wants to make change at City Hall.

West rolled over to The Shed a few hours ago on his beefy Radwagon cargo bike and we had a wide-ranging conversation that gives you an excellent introduction to this interesting candidate. I wasn’t around when former pub owner Bud Clark made a surprising run for mayor and became a local folk hero, but I’ve started to think of West as this election’s Bud Clark. Don’t expect him to do a bunch of media interviews, to sound like a politician when he speaks, or to attend all the obligatory campaign events. He won’t run a typical campaign and he plans to spend his time meeting people at small gatherings and happy hours around the city — as well as continue his new day job as a TriMet bus driver.

In our interview today (listen below), after sharing a list of the bikes he’s owned throughout his life and the story about how he started his cider business by collecting apples from trees citywide by bike, West told me how the 2020 George Floyd protests and a public fight with the City of Portland lit his fire for political activism.

West was on the front lines of the protests and he and his teenage kid suffered serious injuries from munitions fired by federal police officers. I asked West how the protests have impacted his positions on issues like policing and racism, and if he has any regrets about showing up on the streets week after week (he doesn’t). Other topics we covered include:

Here are a few excerpts:

Mingus Mapp on April 21st, 2023. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

Portland Transportation Commissioner Mingus Mapps wants to make one thing clear about the revenue generated from the local gas tax: it will not be spent on bike lanes. Unless you’re a bicycle rider who loves bike lanes. Then in that case, yes, revenue from the Fixing Our Streets program will definitely fund bike lanes.

Over the course of the last week, Mapps told different audiences different things about the renewal of the Fixing Our Streets program (FOS) that Portlanders will vote on May 21st.

At a meeting this past Tuesday with Laborers’ Local 483 (a chapter of LiUNA, Laborers’ International Union of North America, the union that represents about 280 maintenance and operations employees at the Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT)), Mapps showed up in hopes of earning the group’s support for the measure. “I’ve come here today to ask you for your support… Ultimately, I sure hope that we can get LiUNA’s endorsement on this,” he said.

After telling a hybrid online and in-person audience that the failure of the ballot measure would, “Be bad for PBOT, bad for the people of Portland, and an outcome we very much need to avoid,” Mapps opened up the floor to questions.

Hosts Rick Potestio (center) and Jonathan Konkol (right) with the low-density building table in the foreground. (Lisa Caballero/BikePortland)

Game on!

Armed with only a bag of legos and a table-sized map of district properties, you and your team have a couple hours to insert 600 new residences into Portland’s historic Irvington neighborhood.

The group which gathered last Saturday at the Broadway McMenamins seemed up to the task and happy to spend a rainy afternoon talking about density and zoning. Their hosts were urban designer Jonathan Konkol and architect Rick Potestio, and the event was a dry run of the duo’s Dynamic Density process, a new method of accommodating growth which empowers neighborhoods.

I bet you think you know where this is headed.

Bike traffic on North Williams Avenue: May 4th, 2016. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

When City of Portland Transportation Planner Sean Doyle presented the 2023 PBOT bike counts at a meeting last week, he pointed to one figure in particular he feels is, “an important indicator of the quality of our bike network.” That figure was the number of women who ride.

Now, BikeLoud PDX is sharing a Women Biking in Portland survey that aims to learn more about women and cycling with an aim to achieve gender parity.

While a 50/50 split of men and women riding is the goal, Portland has never come close to that. When PBOT first began counting bicycle riders in the 1990s, the number of women on bikes was estimated to be about 20%. The number grew steadily, and between 2003 and 2021, PBOT found that about 31-32% of all riders were women.

But for the past two years, the number has dropped several percentage points and is now at around 29%, its lowest point since 2006. East of I-205, PBOT’s latest counts found that only 17% of bicycle riders are women. “Since the start of the pandemic, the gender split in people biking widened,” states the PBOT report.

One proposed change would carve out a different class for cargo bikes to allow them to have larger motors. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

The debate around electric bikes at the Oregon Legislature is heating up ahead of a work session and possible votes on Friday. 

As BikePortland reported last week, House Bill 4103 has split opinions among cycling advocates. Now the debate has escalated to a national level as industry group People for Bikes has entered the fray. 

PFB has written a letter to leaders of the Joint Committee on Transportation urging lawmakers to make several key changes to the bill. The letter, dated Wednesday 2/21, was written by PFB’s Electric Bicycle Policy & Campaign Director Ash Lovell, Ph.D. The letter had been co-signed by Portland-based nonprofits The Street Trust, BikeLoud PDX and No More Freeways. National bike advocacy group the League of American Bicyclists has also signed on. 

The letter says Oregon is at risk of falling out of alignment with federal regulations if the bill does not include language in its definition of “electric bicycle” that clearly stipulates a maximum motor size of 750 watts and the presence of pedals.

(Jonathan Maus)

Hi everyone. I’ve been out of town for the past two days, so I apologize for the tardiness of this post about tonight’s Bike Happy Hour (BHH).

I don’t think we’ll have any local political candidates in the room tonight, but you never know who might show up. What I do know is that we’ll save some time on the mic to highlight the great work of our friends at BikeLoud PDX. This scrappy-yet-mighty nonprofit has come a long way since their first meeting in August 2014 and I’ve never felt more confident in their trajectory.

Let’s come together and let BikeLoud know how much we appreciate their work!

If you’ve been to Bike Happy Hour there’s a good chance you’ve met a BikeLoud member or one of their leaders. They’ve supported the event since the start and I’ve really appreciated the ways we’ve leaned on each other to make our community stronger.

A bike rider enters NE 72nd Drive at Tillamook, where they’ll be able to ride without worrying about drivers buzzing by. (Michael Mann)

Location of Jersey barriers. See close-up of section circled in white below. (BikePortland)

After incidents of extreme vandalism last month, Portland Bureau of Transportation crews returned to Rose City Golf Course over the weekend. They wanted to send a clear message that drivers are no longer allowed to drive northbound on Northeast 72nd Drive between Tillamook and Sacramento. And this time, they were not messing around.

In a bid to prioritize bicycling and walking on this section of the street that’s considered a lynchpin of the 70s Neighborhood Greenway, PBOT installed signs and poles late last month. But anti-PBOT local residents repeatedly destroyed the infrastructure and used power tools to saw off heavy-gauge traffic poles and signs.

PBOT spent weeks planning the new approach that was installed over the weekend, and the new infrastructure has significantly hardened the changes. There are now four concrete Jersey barriers at the site — one in northbound lane of 72nd at Tillamook, another about 300 feet north adjacent to the cafe and golf shop, and two more at the northeast corner of the golf course parking lot (to prevent drivers from exiting the lot onto 72nd, a movement that would endanger southbound bicycle riders). The signs are adorned with “Do Not Enter”, and “Road Closed: Except Bicycles” signs.

With my usual co-host Eva Frazier on vacation (hope Italy is amazing Eva!), I welcomed a special guest into the shed this week: Stephen Green! Stephen is a multi-talented business advocate and community builder you should probably know about if you care about the future of Portland. Why?

For starters, Stephen is executive director of Business for a Better Portland, the nonprofit organization founded in 2017 as an antidote to the Portland Metro Chamber. In his role at BBPDX, Stephen helps 400 member businesses navigate everything from city politics to building social capital. Pitch Black, now in its eighth year, is an annual event that connects BIPOC entrepreneurs with funders. “It’s Shark Tank meets America’s Funniest Home Videos,” is how Stephen describes it. He also sits on all types of important advisory committees and boards, including the Governor’s Central City Task Force.

Stephen’s superpower is connecting people to information and resources and using his knowledge and experience to help others. That’s my kind of guy! We haven’t spent a lot of time together over the years, but I feel like we’ve both known about each other for a long time. I’ve watched him from afar with respect and knew that eventually our circles would cross. Now they have!

In this episode, Stephen and I chat about all sorts of stuff; but mostly local business and politics (especially our new form of government). He tells stories about Portland’s Black history (did you know “the Pearl” district was named after a Black woman?), we dish on what we think makes Portland tick, why bike riders tend to love Portland so much, how to talk to business owners about bicycling and transportation reform, and much more.

Thanks to Brock Dittus of Sprocket Podcast fame for our fantastic theme music.

Hi everyone, I’m starting the week being with family in Grants Pass (southern Oregon) today and tomorrow so this roundup will be a bit quick and short. I won’t be back in the Shed until Tuesday night, so please adjust your expectations as we settle into the week.

Here are the most notable items our community came across in the past seven days:

Pedestrian-less in Seattle: ” If I paid attention to drivers as well as they paid attention to me, I’d be dead by now.” (Seattle Times Opinion)

Feeling validated: I’ve long pointed to how the decline in cycling in Portland has tracked with the increase in road fatalities. Now there’s research that might back that up. It shows that in cities with high cycling rates, traffic safety for all users is generally better. (Journal of Cycling and Micromobility Research)

As two bills addressing e-bike regulation wind their way through the Oregon legislature, BikePortland readers responded with a slew of strong comments to last week’s article which focussed on one of them, House Bill 4103

Comments came in with a wide variety of opinion, commenter Eric even remarked, “I find it fascinating that I kind of agree with every perspective voiced so far in this comment thread.”

In her statement to BikePortland, Sarah Iannarone, director of The Street Trust, introduced the issue of transportation independence, “we have seen time and again how the transportation needs of teens in particular are regarded as a nuisance…”

Expanding on that thought, commenter Al Dimond got to the heart of what is really at stake — how auto-mobility has restricted the freedom and independence of teenagers. What you think is normal, or how things should be, is “both about when we grew up and where.”