BikePortland Podcast

Eva Frazier and Jonathan Maus are back. This episode was recorded January 26th in the BikePortland Shed in the beautiful Piedmont neighborhood of north Portland as rain tapped on the roof and Eva dried out from her ride over.

As per usual, we had a fun chat about a wide range of stuff:

• New Bike Fun app in development by Aaron Corsi
• We have the technology to offer listener call-ins!
• Gravel clean-up gossip
• Eva's fascination with traffic signals
• Diversion on greenways and propagandizing to political candidates
• Fixing Our Streets 3 (local gas tax) quiz
• Good answers to the question: No one is biking, so why should we spend money on it?
• Bad faith BP commenters pushing narratives for political gain have been uncovered by Lisa Caballero.
• Does Jonathan prefer internal hubs or derailleurs? Find out in the lightning round.
• Travel in the BP time machine to 2014 when a railroad official bullied a Portland bike rider on the fabled "Cement Road" of Swan Island, The Oregonian was wrong about bike share, we made our first-ever mention of Green Loop.
• What do the Unipiper and former mayor Bud Clark (R.I.P.) have in common?
• And more!

Thanks to Brock Dittus of Sprocket Podcast fame for our fantastic theme music. Listen in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for listening!

I'm excited to share the inaugural episode with new co-host Eva Frazier! Eva is a co-owner of Clever Cycles, a board member of the nonprofit BikeLoud PDX, and just an all-around quality person who cares about Portland and wants to see cycling thrive.

In what I hope is the first of many "In The Shed" chats to come, Eva and I chat about a wide range of topics. It's fun, free-flowing banter between two bike and urbanist nerds — a change from the more formal interviews and event recaps this podcast has done in the past. I will still do those things, but will make "In The Shed" a regular feature.

In this episode (recorded Thursday, October 12th) Eva and I talked about:

• Life in the shop (squirrels and cats!)
• Eva's preferred route from inner southeast to The Shed in NoPo
• The Street Trust Alice Awards
• Automatic shifting bicycles (Trek's "Lime" bike in Portland 2007)
• Tapas Tuesdays (link to event)
• First bike on Mt. Hood (Mazamas story)
• PBOT SE Hawthorne Blvd Evaluation Report (PDF)
• Broadway Bike Lane Scandal (all BP coverage)
• The first bakfiets in Portland and subsequent Dutch bike invasion.
• and more!!

Episode made possible by BikePortland advertisers, subscribers, and financial supporters. Please become one today at BikePortland.org/support.

After a short break I'm really happy to be back at the mic and cannot wait to share this interview with Oregon State Rep Khanh Pham.

Rep Pham is a former community organizer who's worked with OPAL Environmental Justice Oregon and the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO). Most recently she was a founding member of the coalition that created the Portland Clean Energy Fund and she continued that momentum by playing a major role in passing three clean energy bills in her first session.

You might recall hearing from Rep Pham in a previous episode, when I caught up with her at a Youth vs ODOT rally in September of last year. Back then she was a rookie legislator and just emerging as a transportation reform leader. Since then she's firmly established herself in that role by speaking up with testimony on several big projects and, most notably, by grabbing a seat on the powerful Joint Committee on Transportation down in Salem. It's also worth noting she's recently hired former policy manager from The Street Trust, Andre Lightsey Walker, to be her transportation advisor.

Rep Pham and I talked about all that stuff and a whole lot more in this interview. If you're curious about how a progressive democrat from Portland will impact transportation policy in a highly partisan legislature, what her vision is for a post-ODOT 82nd Avenue, or if you want structural reform of ODOT and the Oregon Transportation Commission, I think you'll love this episode.

Links from the episode:

• Rep Pham on Twitter
• Legislature Home Page
• Our previous (very brief) interview with Rep Pham from September 2021 during the Youth vs. ODOT rally.

This episode was recorded virtually (thanks Covid!) on January 31st.

This podcast is a production of Pedaltown Media Inc., and is made possible by listeners like you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please become one today at bikeportland.org/support. You can listen to more episodes and find out how to subscribe at bikeportland.org/podcast.

Our theme music is by Kevin Hartnell.

As I edited this episode and I work on our stories I often think that bicycling doesn't really matter right now. I mean, I know that riding bikes always matters to some people in some ways... But with so many more serious things going on it can feel not just less important, but talking and creating content about bicycling can even feel insensitive given all the other more serious things going in people's lives right now.

But for many of us who are lucky enough enough to be able to do so, knowing that we can look forward to a bike ride, is one of things that gives us hope, keeps us going, and provides some levity and balance in gloomy times. And if you consider the mental and physical benefits of bicycling, it actually isn't such a trivial thing at all. In some ways, riding our bikes, setting future goals, and having rides to look forward to, is more important these days than it has ever been.

On that note, in this week's episode I wanted to help us all - if just for a few minutes - stop doomscrolling and start thinking about where we'll be rolling on our bikes in the coming year.

Oregon is a paradise for great bike rides, and as spring approaches I wanted to let you know about some of the great rides on the calendar. To help paint the picture of what's to come, in this episode I'll share interviews with organizers of some of the best bike rides in the state. I'm talking classics like Cycle Oregon, the Swift Summit, Oregon Coast Gravel Epic, and so on.

In this episode, you'll get to know:

• Swift Summit founder Trevor Spangle
• Mike Ripley of Mudslinger Events, the man behind the Oregon Coast Gravel Epic, Oregon Gran Fondo, and many others
• Anne Marie Hingley and Chris Distefano from Cycle Oregon, the ride that in many respects is the grandaddy of them all.

So grab a pen, grab your calendars, and let's start planning your 2022 riding season.

More links:

• From Portland to Eugene on Two Wheels - A recap of a ride on many of the same roads used on Swift Summit route.
• Recap of Mike Ripley's 2018 Oregon Coast Gravel Epic
• Cycle Oregon is back, will head to Painted Hills on 7-day ride - Our latest on 2022 Cycle Oregon rides

This podcast is a production of Pedaltown Media Inc., and is made possible by listeners like you. If you're not a subscriber yet, please become one today at bikeportland.org/support. You can listen to more episodes and find out how to subscribe at bikeportland.org/podcast.

Our theme music is by Kevin Hartnell.

Eva Frazier (former bike shop co-owner and now chair of nonprofit Bike Loud PDX) and Jonathan Maus (BikePortland publisher & editor) are back for another fun chat. Eva shares that she's working with a group of folks to bring back the Bike Commute Challenge/Bike Month festivities, I share about my recent visit to the newly reopened Kenton Cycle Repair, we had a visit from my cat "Tito," and much more.