Portland

When I heard that Bicycling Magazine gave Chicago second place in its “America’s Best Bike Cities” ratings, just behind New York and two slots above Portland, I was puzzled. However, I’m starting to warm up to the idea that our city and NYC deserve credit for taking bold action to improve cycling.

Disabled parking placards used to be ubiquitous in Portland. Until very recently, the city provided unlimited free street parking to placard holders, estimated at a $2,000 annual value. Many cars bearing these placards would remain in prime spots for weeks or months without moving.

You've heard the expression "driving while black?" Perhaps "walking while black" is a thing, too.

The contenders in today's Parking Madness competition prove parking craters can happen anywhere, even in progressive metro areas where the regional economy is booming and transit is a solid travel option.

A Portland woman whose son was killed by a drunk hit-and-run driver has proposed a new method to apprehend motorists who flee the scene of a deadly collision. She hopes to bring an Amber Alert-like notification system to Portland to help nab the bad guys. The proposal is based on a system that's already up and running in Denver, reports Michael Andersen at Bike Portland:

It isn't window dressing. Or a "hip cities" thing. Bike infrastructure -- not the watered-down stuff, but high-quality bikeways that get more people on bikes -- is becoming a must-have for cities around the U.S.

In a new report making the rounds this week, “More Development For Your Transit Dollar: An Analysis of 21 North American Transit Corridors,” the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy does two things.

On Monday, the month-long Dinner & Bikes tour, featuring bicycling author Elly Blue, writer and filmmaker Joe Biel, and vegan chef Joshua Ploeg, documented by Chicagoist contributor Aaron Cynic, made its final stop at Chicago’s Heritage Bicycles and Coffee. The event featured a vegan buffet prepared by Ploeg, a discussion of transportation planning and utility cycling by Blue, and a screening of Aftermass, Biel’s documentary about the history of bike planning, advocacy and activism in Portland, Oregon.

Not surprisingly, Portland, Oregon, leads the nation in on-street bike parking corrals, with 97 installed since 2004 and about 20 more going in each year. San Francisco, which installed its first corrals on Valencia Street in May 2010, now has 32 of them. New York City, which began installing corrals in August 2011, currently has 12. But Chicago, which debuted its first on-street racks, in front of Wicker Park’s Flat Iron Building, a month before New York, only has four corrals so far, with a fifth slated for Logan Square’s Revolution Brewing this spring.