Today I rode into Portland as I’ve done thousands of times. Today I cycled across the Skirdmore Bridge over I-5, across Mississippi Street area and over to the Vancouver/Williams bike routes. As usual, at the hour I was riding into town there’s a decreasing number of people from the rush hour commute. A few cars, and 2x to 3x as many cyclists plying their way down Vancouver. I passed the New Seasons, made the red light and on through the hospital area onto the part of the route that is a gradual downhill for the next mile or so.

I cut over at Russel Street to the easier to navigate Flint Avenue. I rolled by the Ex Novo Brewery and looked over as a few people dropped of kids at the Harriet Tubman Middle School. I rolled around the parents as they attentively watched myself and other cyclists pass in the through area of the road. I always worry around schools since there are so many parents who tend to become distracted and run over their children, or in some cases pedestrians or cyclists trying to just go by.

As I rolled onward, still on the downhill segment of the ride I came to the mess of construction that has the Broadway Bridge closed to almost every mode (at some point or another it has been at least). Today it was closed to automobiles, streetcars, and any motorized transport, but one side was open for pedestrians and cyclists. So I entered the bridge and began the uphill climb to the west side of the bridge for the Broadway drop into downtown.

Since oncoming traffic lanes were closed to the bridge I went ahead and just veered to the left and cut over at Irving Street. I got a good view of the train station, looking majestic this morning with the wonderful blue sky for the backdrop. I zig-zagged over to Hoyt and then onto 3rd.

On 3rd the bike lane begins at Glisan and now continues all the way to Burnside, which is excellent to have a clear route like that. I continued toward Burnside, and as I came to the street the light turned green and I noticed orange traffic cones on either side of the bike lane. It looked a little odd, but as I rolled further I realized that they were labeled with PDX-trans-formation, which from Twitter I know is @PBOTrans. I rode through and had to stop though, because I wanted some pictures! This was the first time I’d actually found some of the tactical urbanism of @PBOTrans.

After I snapped my pictures I continued on, got some work done, finished several errands, and headed over to a coffee shop to wrap up some more work before the meetup tonight. While there I pulled up twitter to check out the account and lo and behold it seems that there were already a whole bunch of tweets and other people noticing them too! Here’s a few choice tweets below.