Cleinman’s exclusion for biking through Waterfront Park after midnight. Matt Cleinman was biking back home at 4:30 am last night after his shift at Whiffies pie cart in SE Portland when, like most nights when he commutes by bike, he crossed the Hawthorne Bridge and then cut north along the multi-use path through Waterfront Park. […]
Bikes
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Calling Carfree Activists! There’s a New Advocacy Group in Town.
Whiteboards are the new megaphones: bike activist Ben Foote Under the watchful eyes of three reporters and a filmmaker working on a documentary about “Portland’s post-Critical Mass bike activism”, a dozen alternative transportation enthusiasts worked around a table in a downtown art gallery last night to discussing what kind of pro-Bike Master Plan message could […]
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Seven Up-and-Coming Bike Cities that Aren’t Portland
MmmMiami. 70 degrees and bikey. You know how I’m always yammering about how Portland will fall behind other cities in bike-friendliness if we don’t pony up significantly more money for bike infrastructure projects? Good magazine has a cool article about seven North American burgeoning bike cities—basically a run down of the places that are going […]
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Free Breakfast for PSU Bikers (Plus, an Idea for Portland State Bike Sharing)
PSU BIKE SHOP Portland State’s brand new bike co-op Cyclists can get their pastry fix at Portland State this week. Students are giving away free Boy Gorilla coffee, pastries and fruit outside the school’s brand new Bike Hub on 6th and Harrison from 9-11 AM today through Thursday. The students are also selling raffle tickets […]
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Bike Helmets for the Non-Dweeb
Today in “ideas I wish I had thought of”: Danish designers Yakkay have come up with these sah-weet helmet covers that will transform your drab helmet into something way more stylish. They come in a variety of styles from houndstooth to stripey to fuzzy to smart to adorable, and as far as I can see […]
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KATU Hillbilly Parade: Sellwood’s New Bike Boulevard
With the agreement of the esteemed Mr. Frank Cassano, I’m paraphrasing his “Imbecile Parade” title to throw the spotlight on the city’s most ignorant hillbillies, the commenters on KATU’s website. The station covered yesterday’s grand opening of Sellwood’s “Bike Boulevard” which essentially makes SE Spokane a lot more bicycle friendly by adding “pinch point” intersections. […]
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Judge: No Bike Lane? No Legal Protection.
BikePortland posted a story today that riles my nerves. BikePortland editor Jonathan Maus gives a rundown of a traffic court case where a driver right hooked cyclist (and city employee) Carmen Piekarski at the intersection of SE 10th and Hawthorne. The driver admitted that she did not check her blind spot before turning, witnesses supported […]
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Portland is Bike Friendly Because… We’re White?
BikePortland just posted a link to a LA’s Westside Bikeside blog, which features a somewhat bizarre discussion about bikes, race and Portland between LA’s bike planner Michelle Mowery and City Councilman Bill Rosendahl. LA hired Portland’s much-lauded Alta Planning to write up its bike plan but, at least according to BikeSide and Rosendahl, the bike […]
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Cars as Deadly Weapons, Seattle Version.
“If you want to kill somebody and get away with it, you should do it with your car,” said bike lawyer Ray Thomas last month, discussing the tragic cyclist and pedestrian deaths that shook Portland this fall. This isn’t just a Portland problem. Seattlites tried to strengthen their laws relating to death and injury caused […]
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Hipster Activists Repaint Bike Lane in NYC
Check out the crazy bike lane activism going down in Brooklyn, where a Hassidic Jewish community pressured the city to remove a 14-block bike lane through their neighborhood, in part because they objected to the immodest dress of female cyclists (to be fair, there were also complaints about parking). After NYC caved to the pressure […]
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Japan Wins…
…the proverbial weird-bike arms race: Image lifted from Wonderhowto.com “My name is Dekochari. My father was a pinball machine and my mother was an ATM.” These clunky things are called Dekocharis, which essentially means “art-bike” in Japanese. They look a lot like props from sci-fi flicks— which isn’t surprising, considering that the Dekochari is a […]
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Biking in Heels
Woah. I am one of the many women in Portland who frequently rides a bicycle in heels (the issue is really whether the shoes can take it, not the rider, am I right?), but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pair of high heels made specifically for biking. But Jeff Mandel of ExIT Shoes […]