Tag / light rail

by Adron

Surly Cross Check

As one may know that reads my blog. I bike, a lot. Even by Portland standards I ride regularly. By the regular lazy American’s standards I probably seem obsessed. Well today I just stepped up the ante again. I purchased a Surly Cross Check from Clever Cycles on Hawthorne here in Portland. Great shop, great service. My Giant will become my “secondary” and “loaner” bike when riding with people in from out of town.

Surly Cross Check in Black

Surly Cross Check in Black

So the Surly Cross Check has some awesome Portland features. What do I mean by Portland Features? Read on and I’ll explain.

1. First off, the bike is a great road bike. With 100% Surly proprietary 4130 CroMoly tubing. TIG welded. Double butted main triangle it’s a brutally strong bike. It’s got more in common with my Redline freestyle bike than my other bikes. But that’s a good thing, ya see, I’m not a soft rider. I ride hard, brutally hard sometimes, and sometimes have a tendency to break really strong bikes. That’s one of the first things I’m stoked about, strength is important.

2. The bike fits (and this is one of those Portland Features) on the bike racks on Trimet Buses really well, and easily comes on and off with a single hand. I don’t have to balance it or hold the bike with both hands, making the movement to hook the front wheel much easier.

3. The bike is much lighter than my current main bike. Making it even easier to mount on a rack on the MAX or mount on the WES racks. Another Portland Feature! This of course also makes it easy to mount up on the racks on the LINK in Seattle and other cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, etc.

4. The bike rides with much less resistance than my current ride. It also has a multi-positional handelbar setup. The setup includes the Cane Creek 40, Salsa Bell Lap, Tektro Cantilever Brakes connected to Tektro Brak Levers. Topping all this off with Shimano SL-BS77s. This makes riding for hours or days possible, without me ending up a bent mess of a human being!

So I’m setup, ready for a long ride. I think I might pull off one of those tonight. Anybody in Portland up for a few dozen miles?  🙂

Cheers!

by Adron

Calling Transit & Bike Portlanders

Hello all, I’m putting together a project that will kick off a set of blog entries across various Portlander’s (or anybody’s blogs for that matter) blogs. I’d like to do the following:

#1
Setup a transit ride on any of the lines that points out some of the best new amenities in the city’s system.

#2
Setup a bike ride on any major route that shows great street improvements, bicycle safety changes or features, and other characteristics.

Combine the results of either of the above into a set of blog entries from each person’s perspective of the trip.

So who is in?

by Adron

The Green Line Gets Car Free

Recently I was hanging out downtown and heard an interesting story over beer. It happens to be that the Green Line has achieved, for some, the ultimate. There are people living in Clackamas that have gone car free by choice! Truly amazing, America is slowly evolving past addiction. It is slow going, but it is starting to grow. Watching this ground swell of change is amazing.

To note, this could have happened with the bus lines, but it was however much less likely. Light rail enables and encourages people to drop their cars and focus on livability in ways that buses cannot and will never achieve. Buses are important, but they are not agents of change.

by Adron

The Transit & Pedestrian Only Bridge in Portland

I’m loving it more by the day! Really looking forward to putting it to use as I suspect thousands of others are.

It’s gonna go right smack THERE!  See below, you can kind of see the inlets and bridge pilings going in.

Click for full size.

Click for full size.

by Adron

Measuring Things…

Portland

Seattle

Other interesting facts are the distance people travelled (shorter is generally better for a more sustainable environment and activities), the energy consumed or expended per passenger, etc. Some of these are hard to find, some are a little easier. King County and TriMet do a decent job providing this data, mostly. TriMet has a vastly easier website to find data on vs. King County’s, which seems to have been forced to use the “how not to build a website book”. I’m sure some bureaucrat had some say in the misguided approach, but the data is there, ya just gotta dig for it.  🙂