Cycling News & Blog Articles

Flyer by Portland for All

Hope everyone’s having a good Tuesday and enjoying a bit of sunshine and dry skies. This is just a quick post to share a thing I’m doing on March 19th with some great folks on an important topic. I’ll be on a three-person “Policy Talks” panel hosted by local nonprofit Portland for All. The title of the panel is, “Creating streets safe in every community.”

Portland for All is an all-volunteer group that is organizing around ideas. Their website says they were, “born out of conversations folks were having with friends and neighbors concerned about the challenges facing our City, and all of the negative rhetoric about this place we call home,” and that they believe, “there is a hopeful, positive, and inclusive future that’s possible for our City.” This is the third event in their Policy Talks series. The first two were about public safety and homelessness.

Joining me on the 19th at this virtual event will be two folks you’ve read about a lot on BikePortland over the years: former Oregon Walks executive director and current Metro Councilor Ashton Simpson, and veteran community advocate and current Portland City Council (D1) candidate Steph Routh. It just so happens I’ve already had both Ashton and Steph on our podcast. I spoke with Ashton in March 2022 during his run for Metro Council and I shared an interview with Steph from Bike Happy Hour back in November.

To give you a sense of the focus of our upcoming panel, here’s the blurb from Portland for All:

New visualization released yesterday.

The folks working on a new Interstate Bridge and expansion of I-5 between Portland and Vancouver released new visualizations yesterday, including our best view yet of the potential new bike path.

The new drawings were released at a meeting of the Executive Steering Group, one of several committees formed to garner feedback on the (estimated) $6-7.5 billion Interstate Bridge Replacement Program. The ESG is made up of agency leaders and elected officials from Portland and southwest Washington. ESG members have already adopted a set of desired outcomes for the future bicycle and pedestrian facilities. Among them are that the new bikeway must “feel safe” and be “separated from moving vehicles” and that the path environment is “visible and connected.” They’ve also expressed a desire for bikeways to be “high quality,” “convenient,” and to “connect to important destinations.”

The ESG and IBRP team are currently finalizing their Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (Draft SEIS), which is due out later this spring.

IBRP Administrator Greg Johnson presented the visualizations at the meeting (where he also said they’re working on new videos that will explain how bicycle riders and walkers will make their way through the corridor). Johnson stressed that the drawings shown yesterday are not final and are, “Not for decision-making or narrowing options.”  “These are just to give perspective on the size of the bridge as related to, if you’re standing on the ground on Hayden Island or on the Vancouver Waterfront.”

ODOT concept drawing of the new intersection.

West Linn, a city about 20 miles south of Portland, will be one of the first places in the state where the Oregon Department of Transportation builds a protected intersection. Protected intersections are considered the gold standard of protection for bicycle riders and walkers because they come with raised corner curb islands, physical separation from other road users, better visibility at crossings, and other safety elements.

The Oregon Department of Transportation is in the final design stage of a protected intersection on Willamette Drive (OR 43) at Marylhurst Drive/Lazy River Dr. The $7 million project is part of a larger streetscape project that includes a continuous cycle track and other safety updates on Willamette Drive between Mary S. Young park and the city’s northern limit near Marylhurst University.

Here’s more about the project from a recent ODOT update:

Protected intersection designs are intended to extend the safe environment for bicyclists and pedestrians through use of raised corner islands, forward stop bars for bicyclists, and well defined marked crossings. These defenses make it clear to all users where bicyclists are, provide physical protection in the queuing area, and further increase bicyclist visibility by allowing them early entry into the intersection ahead of right turning vehicles.

An e-bike? Or a commercial vehicle? How Oregon regulates trikes like this one is just one issue the bill would tackle. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

With just 10 days left in the legislative session, e-bike advocates are making a big push to get a key bill over the finish line. Typically the formation of an official state task force isn’t something folks get excited about. In fact, pushing an important issue into a committee is something many of the advocates lobbying for House Bill 4067 might, in other circumstances, fight tooth-and-nail.

But what HB 4067 would do, establish a new Oregon Department of Transportation Task Force on Electric Mobility, is considered a vital step forward in the effort to legitimize e-bikes, scooters, and a range of promising lightweight electric vehicles. Since BikePortland first reported on this bill before the session began back in January, its importance has grown considerably because of its close connection to another e-bike bill, HB 4103.

When HB 4103 passed the House this week (note that both bills originated in a joint committee and therefore aren’t subject to deadlines like single chamber bills) it was stripped of its most consequential provisions. Heralded as a compromise between lawmakers and advocates in Bend and Portland, there was a general agreement that its substantive proposals needed more debate and discussion so that a more comprehensive and effective bill could emerge next year. E-bikes are so popular and their impact on the mobility of Oregonians could be so vast, the thinking goes, advocates want to make sure any new laws or new regulations help reach that potential instead of kneecap it.

That’s why The Street Trust and its partners put out an action alert yesterday urging members to contact lawmakers and telling them to pass HB 4067. After it passed the Joint Committee on Transportation alongside HB 4103, the task force bill was referred to the Joint Committee on Ways & Means. Why? Because all bills that have a fiscal impact on the state budget must be approved by Ways & Means.

(Source: City of Portland Bureau of Transportation)

Map of project area looking north.

It’s not everyday that plans for a new street come across my desk. Read that again: Not new plans for a street. Plans for a new street! Yes, the Portland Bureau of Transportation will finalize designs this year and break ground next year on new streets in Old Town. Specifically, they plan to extend NW Johnson and Kearney Streets from where they currently end at NW 9th about one-tenth of a mile east to NW Station Way/Union Station.

The work is part of the Broadway Corridor project, a redevelopment of the 34-acre former US Postal Service distribution site being led by Prosper Portland. Not only will this site be home to new commercial and residential units, it will also be a key link in the future Green Loop, a biking and walking path that will eventually ring Portland’s central city. The Broadway Corridor has been in the planning stages since at least 2015 and reached a major milestone last month when demolition of the USPS facility was completed. Now that the slate has been wiped clean, it’s much easier to get excited about building on top of it. It’s even more exciting to see what type of street design PBOT will build when given the chance of starting from scratch.

On a new website for the NW Johnson & Kearney Street Extension Project, PBOT gives us our most detailed view yet of what we can expect. The conceptual cross-section drawing shows a street with two general lanes, an on-street parking lane, and a wide sidewalk separated from a two-way cycle-track by large trees.

My cap doesn’t lie. (Erin Bailie – BikePortland)

Our route.

My husband and I recently took advantage of the weather and went for a “fun ride” – that is, a ride without a specific timeline or destination in mind. I’d call it a recreational ride, but the distinction between commuting and recreating is a blurry line and I don’t want to enforce a false dichotomy. Our plan followed our typical formula for a weekend outing: see something neat (the trails at Powell Butte) and eat something tasty (lunch at the Mercado carts in Foster-Powell). The dose of vitamin D from the sunny skies was an added bonus. 

During the ride, my husband and I marveled at the many different types of infrastructure we encountered, and the nuances between them. 

Our ride started in our neighborhood, Sullivan’s Gulch. We zig-zagged on neighborhood greenways through Laurelhurst, North Tabor and Montavilla neighborhoods. In Montavilla, we transitioned from greenways to our second mode, a designated bike lane on East Burnside, where the MAX tracks occupy the center of the road. 

Sarah Risser with the family of Jason Ruhmshottel at a ghost bike installation earlier this month. (Jonathan Maus / BikePortland)

Imagine losing someone you love deeply in a traffic crash. Now imagine being seated next to them when it happened. That’s the tragic reality Portland road safety advocate Sarah Risser experienced in January 2019.

I talked to Risser this week to learn more about the work she’s doing to help families deal with grief and to help our community acknowledge the crushing toll of traffic deaths. But before I asked Risser anything else, I asked her to share the story of her son 18-year-old Henry Zietlow, who was driving their car on a snowy road when “a clearly negligent and reckless” driver coming the opposite direction crossed the centerline and slammed into them.

“It was just heartbreaking,” Risser recalled. “He was a beautiful beautiful young man. Just coming into his own.”

That crash radicalized Risser. “It didn’t have to happen. It was preventable,” she shared with me. And in a moving essay she published last fall, Risser wrote, “Once I began to see how much we’ve sacrificed to our auto-centric lifestyle, I couldn’t unsee it.”

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 Belmont across Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. People in green vests are standing near where Bentley was struck. (Jonathan Maus/BikePortland)

Violent and allegedly intentional actions led to the death of 49-year-old David “Dino” Bentley on Southeast Belmont in the Buckman neighborhood early Sunday morning. What initially seemed like the result of a dangerous street design mixed with the inherent risks of people who live in homes made out of fabric and thin wood pallets on the sidewalk, now seems to have been something much different.

I spent time at the scene Wednesday afternoon, I’ve reviewed the court documents, and have watched and read local news coverage to try and understand what happened, and why.

Here’s what I know so far…

The man who drove his car into Bentley, 22-year-old Shane McKeever, is currently being held on charges of Manslaughter in the First Degree and Reckless Driving. The probable cause affidavit filed at the Multnomah County Courthouse on Monday relays a harrowing tale that began with what one witness described as an argument. “The suspect [McKeever] walked into the camp and started to argue with everyone,” one man told a Portland Police officer who responded to the scene. “It seemed like the suspect was looking to cause issues.” There was also an allegation from someone in the adjacent encampment that McKeever “threatened to run over their camp.” Then McKeever allegedly got into his car and made good on those threats.

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)

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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.