Monthly Archives: March 2007

Milwaukie includes the public in transportation planning

Milwaukie is beginning the ambitious project of mapping out the cities transportation plans that will affect how we get to and through our city for the next decades. And, they made great efforts to get the public involved with provisions of input and in decision making. It started late last year as transportation liaison Gavin Hales worked to get the word out and to interview citizens to find out just what issues were important to them.

Then starting on March 24, 2007 the city began holding planning meetings open to the public. After general meetings were held, groups were broken down according to interest. Issues covered are to include biking/pedestrian, bus lines, light rail lines and automobile.

These are important issues. Of course, the biking issues are of significant interest, and any improvements that can be made are beneficial to all. But, Milwaukie is already a pretty good cycling area, so perhaps the greatest impact of all the transportation improvements will be in the determination of how and where we construct the light rail system that is coming in two different directions from Portland, into and through our city.

Goals of sessions include:

  • Review the list of problems and solutions developed at Workshop #1
  • Discuss specific design solutions developed by staff and the consultants
  • Prioritize solutions.
  • Share personal experience with pedestrian and bicycle routes in Milwaukie.
  • Clearly identify problems with the existing pedestrian and bicycle networks and note the things that work well.
  • Brainstorm solutions for the problems identified
    A second meeting is to be held Saturday April 7th 4:30pm to 6:00pm at Milwaukie Public Safety Building 3200 SE Harrison Street Milwaukie, OR 97222.
    For links to planning documents…….read on.

Continue reading

“Breaking Away” comes broken up.

Its the start of another cycling season, and we need new cycling movies to watch for those times we can’t be riding. So I ordered two videos from the internet. The first one is “2 Seconds”, or, Deux secondes, since it’s a French film, with English subtitles. (Honey will love this). A romantic story of bikes and relationships. I learned of this movie from a post over at Biking Bis. Anyway, the point of this post is that I ordered “Breaking Away” at the same time, since it is genuinely a bicycling movie classic about bike racing in the 1970’s. But when I get the package, its rattling! Why would a DVD case be rattling? breakingaway.jpg Turns out the plastic case was smashed and the DVD itself was dislodged so now pieces of the case were tumbling around inside, and the DVD was bouncing around inside! Continue reading

Cycle Oregon 2007 – Full Ride

Cycle Oregon 2007 celebrates 20 years of Cycle Oregon.
We have registered and training is underway.
This will be my 8th and will be Honeys 5th.co_logo_2007.gif
This years route starts in Sisters and includes stays in LaPine, Diamond Lake, a day at Crater Lake, then on to Dorena Lake, Oakridge, and Rainbow, before returning to Sisters.
Registration is limited to 2,000 and they are now sold out.

Cycle Oregon 2007 Registration is Full!

A posting on The Cycle Oregon Forum reports that Cycle Oregon has reached its 2,000 rider limit, and is now placing new registrations on a waiting list. This years 20th year anniversary ride looks to be a great one. And really, most every year is a great ride. Yet still, it seems that not every year fills up, and I believe very few fill up by March. So this says something good for Cycle Oregon and for cycling in Oregon. Bike Oregon, which is a much smaller ride, filled up in something like 3 weeks. Once again, this year we reserved a tent porter service, (Honey kind of insists on it), and those spots sold out much faster than the ride itself. Cycle Oregon ride details on Events Page.

Color Picker plugin installed.

Newly installed Color Picker will now let me change colors.
I find that pages that make use of many different colors are annoying,
and all it really shows is that ya, I can make a lot of cool colors on one page. But used in a sparse fashion, it can enhance the usability and visual richness in a page.

Sellwood Bridge Survey

The Bicycle Transportation Alliance sent me this post.
“As you know, the Sellwood Bridge has extremely dangerous and inadequate bicycle and pedestrian facilities (a single 4-foot sidewalk on one side only). In fact, the BTA has determined that the Sellwood Bridge is the major barrier to bicycling in the Portland region.
Multnomah County is leading a process to design and build a new bridge. The Sellwood Bridge project team has just released a survey related to cross-section and alignment options for a new bridge. Responses to this survey will be used to narrow down the range of alternatives, including bicycle and pedestrian alternatives.
Please take the survey! And emphasize these points:
Questions 14 and 15: if a 4-lane cross-section is chosen, it will look and operate much like the Ross Island Bridge (as opposed to a human-scale bridge like the Hawthorne Bridge). Please support options that either limit the number of lanes, or that reserve additional lanes for transit purposes.
Questions 16 and 17: support ALL options (bike lanes, sidewalks AND multi-use path).”

Take the survey today!

Yaquina Lighthouse Century

Today we registered for the Yaquina Lighthouse Century bike ride in Newport, starting, wait for it…… at the Yaquina Lighthouse. The ride is organized by the Yaquina Wheels Bicycle Club, and we really like the route that follows the coast and then heads inland to Elk City. Today I have also added an Event Calendar where we will post events such as the rides we would like to ride. So, naturally I have posted an event for the Yaquina Lighthouse Century. Which also has links to our ride reports for past rides. And now this post about the Yaquina Lighthouse Repair project appears at KGW.com. Continue reading

Paul deLay – a great musical talent

Paul died this morning at Providence Portland Medical Center from end-stage leukemia diagnosed just days before. He was 55. Paul had defined the blues movement in the Portland area. Anyone lucky enough to have seen him perform marvel at the energy levels, and range of emotion that this large man can convey. I harbor a level of admiration for this man in ways beyond the admiration his musical talents and his gift with the harmonica. It begins with his late-night blues lifestyle that pulled him down, culminating in his arrest for cocaine and subsequent imprisonment. My respect in him comes from his forthright admission of his problems, and his openness in his continual ( and seemingly successful) efforts to clean up his life, which he talked of often. His struggles against his own personal demons is often trivialized and misunderstood. Check out Paul deLays official website to learn more of this man. Better yet, check out any of his dozen albums and then you might begin to understand a little more about this man. “Nice and Strong” and “From the Turnaround” are two of my favorites. Those that knew his father could understand him even more. His father Alan deLay was an amazing man himself. The man was a news photographer in the Portland area for many years, photographing such historic events as the Vanport flood and the Beatles concerts in 1962. An avid Boy Scout for over 75 years, he spent 6 years as an adult leader in our Boy Scout troop, and he did much to teach our boys about many things such as starting a fire, in the rain, with no matches. Plus he also had an amazing musical talent. He could play the musical saw. We heard him many times and it is truly a memorable experience. Here is a pretty good little piece on Alan. His musical CD, “Allan deLay – Sawing through the memories” is still available at some web outlets.

60 degree Sunday

A sixty degree Sunday in early March is usually a sign that spring is on its way. I try to reign in my enthusiasm in thinking that spring is actually here, since as soon as that happens the gray, wet cold front rolls in. Nonetheless, it is here, and it is a good day for a bike ride. Honey and I fore-go church this week in order to fit in a ride and make our other commitments for this day. Theme for today’s ride is “In Search Of”. Over at Cyclotram there is a post of a “Bridge Diner” constructed as an old time diner, as a movie set for Untraceable.
Thinking that it was under the Morrison East ramp, we head in that direction. We didn’t find it, since as it turns out, it is under the Broadway West ramp. We weren’t so close. But we did find a DrumLRSDDrummers.jpg group. As we approached the area were the I-5 Marquam Bridge crosses the Morrison, we began to hear this thundering beat, sounding much like semi trucks rumbling over steel plating. Turns out it is this group of drummers that have assembled in a vacant lot, and they were pounding away. The beat resonated through our bodies and sounded really awesome. The bass drum displayed L.R.S.D, don’t know yet what that means. (Update: Last Regiment of Syncopated Drummers of Portland. They are an organized professionsal group, which explains why a just a bunch of drums can sound so good.) Defeated on our Diner search we began the search for the March Art Walk in the Ladds addition. Locating a map that showed the locations we rode through the Ladds Addition. The circles that will later be full of blooming roses, are now just freshly trimmed rose branch stubs. And the art was mostly inside of houses turned art shops. Disappointed that there were not more outdoor art displays, and not wanting to leave our bikes, we continued on our way. On the ride we crossed overJohnsonCreekx.jpg the Johnson Creek Bridge of the Springwater Trail. The creek is a little muddy and high, and the leaves of the trees are still bare.  One more subtle reminder, that spring is not yet here.

John Belushi died 25 years ago today.

On March 5th, 1982 John Belushi died of a drug overdose. His soaring comedic success as well as his free-fall into the addictions that took his life are well documented. Here is what I think about when I see John. First of all there are his classic performances on Saturday Night Live. But mostly I remember my college days at the University of Oregon when the film crews burst in to town to film “Animal House” in and around the campus. It is still great to see so many locations used in the film where I spent my time when I was in college, as well as in Cottage Grove, and Dexter, where my mother grew up. It was during this time that John met Curtis Salgado, a great local blues musician in the Eugene/Portland area. It was Curtis that taught and inspired Belushi and Akroyd in creating their legendary Blues Brothers empire. It is these local connections and influences that contributed to his success, that I think of when I see John Belushi, and not the darkness that surrounded his fall shortly thereafter.