Here at Portland Transport we’re announcing a new site today, which we’re titling “The Portland Bike Channel”.
You can find it at http://bikechannel.portlandtransport.com.
This is an ‘aggregated’ site. It cotains capsule summaries of the posts to Bike Portland, ORBike and Portland Transport blogs (the bike category only from the latter). The idea is to create a one-stop shopping location for folks who want to keep track of bicycle news in our region. One of the best features is that it allows subscription to an RSS feed that also blends the RSS feeds from those sites.
The site features graphic backgrounds from the Flickr photostream of Bike Portland’s Jonathan Maus. Thank you, Jonathan, for making your photos available under a Creative Commons license.
We’re open to suggestions of other sites with RSS feeds that we could add to The Bike Channel. We’re looking forward to SHIFT getting a feed so we can include them!
6 responses to “Announcing the “Bike Channel””
Awesome!
Unfortunatly the transparent foreground and background changing every few seconds make the site almost impossible to read…
So would you prefer that we:
1) Slow the rotation of images
2) No rotation at all
3) Ditch the transparency
?
I was just checking out the bicycle advocacy groups for Asia and Oceania to see who possibly will show up at the UN-HABITAT Forum in Vancouver BC.
But its the Northern countries that probably need the most innovative ideas. How does one bicycle in the ice and snow and wind? Here’s a thought….When a new highway is built would it be too expensive, then, to add a bicyle tunnel underneath it? Possible considerations: lighting, access to above ground routes via ramps, flooding risk, going under or around sewer or utility lines,etc. How could the cost be kept palatable to municipalities that have to pay for it? And how does one assure safety for its users
Considering the cost of a new highway, adding some kind of below ground route of what is no more than a single car lane, couldn’t be too expensive, could it?
Guess I answered my own question: Here is a new highway with a bicycle tunnel: http://www.xs4all.nl/~kazil/ogbentun-nieuw.html
Very cool!
By the way, I vote #3: ditch the transparency. Put some rotating photos up in corner instead… my two cents.
Evan,
We have been fortunate in the Portland area that the costs of putting in paved bike paths has been very negligible. However, the costs of blacktopping an existing roadbed versus digging a route under a highway are vastly different. I wish that there could be an inexpensive way to do it, but I would wager that highway engineers would throw a fit at what I might propose; there fore I am trying to think of ways that it could be made cost effective.
A freeway, to last, must be reinforced concrete; a county road can be much simpler. But I would guess that most new urban routes will be more higher quality than less. So an engineer would want any tunnel to have relatively thick walls to help support the above roadbed. The ceiling would also have to be stout and probably have a lot of structural steel (besides the reinforcing bar within the concrete pour). So how to get around it?
1. Perhaps a buried bike path next to the highway, not under it. 2. Go deeper with the bike path so that the soil helps support the roadbed. 3. An arched ceiling would support more load. 4. Cement board is a good substitute for a concrete wall (but has practically no strength to withstand a cave-in). 5. Put a tunnel under a sidewalk so that the sidewalk does double-duty. 6. Maybe a large metal culvert would work, combined with a flat floor. Sort of a prefab tunnel. E.g.The culvert could be split lengthwise–like a quonset hut. Or half of a culvert on top of straight walls. 7. The floor could be simple blacktop. 8. Ventilation to the outside would be needed. 9. Lighting could be solatube or fluorescent 10. Moisture proofing would be necessary to prevent ice formation.
Excavating via open trench is far cheaper than tunneling with a machine. I suppose the quonset hut model could work above ground, too, maybe as part of a continuous berm. Might be the cheapest and most aesthetic.