Mike Sanchez was cruising around Fourth Avenue on his 1965 Diamondback cruiser in the hopes he could sell it.
According to Sanchez he added the suspension fork and handlebars. The paint is original, but the wheels were powder coated, which Sanchez said is an expensive process.
He said he was going to go into bike shops to see if they might want to buy it. He said he wouldn’t take less than $150 for it.
Lauren Bouton rides her Clubman bicycle to the University of Arizona for her classes in the Political Science department.
Bouton said she bought it from an older man on Craigslist, who said he couldn’t ride it anymore. The Clubman replaced her older mountain bike.
Bouton said she loves her new bike because it looks cooler and rides better than her old bike.
She said she rides to campus because is better than walking, driving is a hassle, gas is expensive and riding is relaxing.
Victor Noriega and his son Gabe ride their Mercurio bike to and from school each day. VIctor said he got the bike at a garage sale for $100 and rides it almost 20 miles each day.
He said the bike isn’t build for speed, but works great for taking his son to school and picking up groceries.
Editor’s note: Tucsonans and their bikes is a feature I hope to have every weekend.
A BMX rider is stopped for not having lights on his bike.
Several cyclists on the Tuesday Night Bike Ride were cited for various infractions including running red lights and stop signs as well as riding without lights.
Erik Ryberg of TucsonBikeLawyer.com suggested in a recent post that there would be an increased police presence because of a recent incident on the ride in which a dog was run over.
The ride which went south on Fourth Avenue, split into two when a large group of riders waited at the stop light at Sixth Street. The ride regrouped just before the highway on Congress, but quickly split up when riders didn’t make the light under the highway, despite people at the start of the ride suggesting the leaders wait often for the back of the ride to catch up.
The ride turned north on Grande Avenue and then east on St. Mary’s Road. The police showed up after the riders passed under the interstate heading east.
Police used their loud speakers to instruct the group to stay in one lane and ride two abreast.
Ryberg said it could be confusing to tell people to stay in one lane while also telling to them to ride two abreast.
TNBR rider, Ellen Fischler said at one point the police said to ride in the bike lane, but there wasn’t a bike lane to ride in.
Farther up, Fischler said an officer sped around the group and started to move right into a BMX rider to try to get him move over.
“It was like they were trying to herd sheep,” Fischler said.
A BMX rider was pulled over by police for riding without lights. He argued that a lot of people were riding without lights, yet he was the only one who had been pulled over.
At Fourth Avenue and Ninth Street, another rider was stopped for running the stop sign at the intersection. The biker got on the multi-use path, but was followed by the officer who followed him by driving on the dirt next to the path.
Ryberg said the police actions were much more subdued than when the police cracked down on the ride two years ago.
Were you on the ride? What did you see and hear? Leave a comment below.
Editor’s note: Fischler, who is quoted in the post, is my sister-in-law.
Frank, left, leads her second spin class of the day.
In December Susan Frank and Kurt Rosenquist decided to team up and share a rental space in downtown Tucson to house their businesses.
Frank runs O2 Modern Fitness, which features spinning, yoga and pilates classes and takes up the front of the building.
Rosenquist’s FitWorks occupies the rear of the building where he offers clients professional bike fitting and coaching advice in addition to limited bike sales.
The couple said they considered opening their business somewhere else in the city, but ultimately decided they wanted to be downtown and selected a building at Broadway Boulevard and 5th Avenue.
“We both made the decision that even though it felt risky — and sometimes still does, to be downtown — and really try to support what is happening down here,” Frank said.
Frank and Rosenquist said they didn’t know how well the two businesses would work in the same space, but have been pleasantly surprised.
“There have been some magical moments,” Frank said.” I don’t think we actually knew how this energy or magic would happen between the two businesses and it honestly just gets better and better.”
Frank said some of her spinning clients became more interested in road cycling and decide to use FitWorks’ services.
“On the flip side, Kurt will have some clients that come in and get excited about the other opportunities especially the pilates for cross training that can really help to enhance their bike rides,” Frank said.
Rosenquist started FitWorks in 2008 after working in bike shops for more than 20 years. He said he became frustrated with the need to sell products like supplements when all someone really needed was pasta.
“There seemed like there needed to be some other type of business that was all about the cyclists’ body, their performance, their comfort, their positions and training,” Rosenquist said. “I really just wanted it to be a non-bike shop. Really just a studio where people could come in for consultation. From there I would send them to a local bike shop with a prescription of what is going to work best for them.”
Rosenquist said his goal is to make cycling more pleasant for riders by focusing on their technique and position.
O2 Modern Fitness was an idea Frank had been mulling over for a while, but decided to go for it when her previous design business was bought out.
“I kept saying, ‘Well maybe I should do a spinning studio slash yoga studio to bring the the two things that I am really becoming very fond of together,” Franks said.
Frank who will often ride the Tuesday morning Fairwheel Bike Shop ride and then teach three spin classes later the same day, said she has seen a big difference in her own cycling because of spinning.
“Spinning classes have really taught me to how dig deeper because I don’t have any distractions,” Frank said. “It is just me and my bike and a coach.”
“All of the classes that we have here are intensely built around road workouts,” Rosenquist said. “You are doing it here where you don’t have the distraction of a light or a potholes to worry about.”
Frank said all of their spin instructors are cyclists or triathletes and bring that knowledge and experience to their classes.
“We are all really coming at it from the foundation of cycling,” Frank said. “That is the root of what we’re doing.”
According to Frank, spinning gets a bad rap in the cycling community, but because of the connection to Fitworks some road cyclists start attending classes.
“Believe me it has been tough getting cyclists in here,” Franks said. “They come though here to get a bike fit and they see us on the spinning bikes and they start to think maybe this is something I should consider adding to my training.”
Franks purchased trainers to allow cyclists to bring their own bikes to the spin classes to allow them to train on the bike they will actually be riding in races.
Customers who pay for their first O2 Modern Fitness class receive a card good for a free week of classes to try out all the different spin instructors. Check out their schedule here.
According to Rosenquist and Frank, they also have plans to add a retail component to the businesses focusing on cycling apparel and shoes.
“We really feel like, in general, Tucson doesn’t really have a great offering in those two categories,” Franks said.
Check out the rest of the photos and a short video from one of Frank’s spin classes.
Check out the video and images from the BMX jam at Barrio Trails on Saturday. The jam was organized by Rocky Serna who started the unofficial BMX park. Barrio trails is one of the only places in the city for BMX riders to try out their tricks.
Arriving in Portland, it doesn’t take long to realize you are in the biggest cycling city in the United States.
From the bike repair/assembly stand in the Portland Airport, to the estimated six percent of the population riding bikes — Portland has earned it’s reputation.
It is hard to go anywhere in the city without encountering bikes.
Our trip to Portland was a family vacation, but I managed to squeeze in a few rides and got to do a little work while I was there. My daughter went on her first utility bike ride and I managed to tour Portland with three bicycle planners. Check out the route.
Tom Thivener, Tucson’s bike and pedestrian program manager, happened to be in Portland with his daughter for some of the same days we were there and organized a ride with Greg Raisman, a City of Portland bicycle planner and Steve Durrant, a planner with ALTA Planning and Design. Durrant specializes in non-motorized transportation and works with the city on many projects.
I’ll try to share some of the unique observations I noticed from riding, walking and driving in Portland.
Even on a Sunday morning in an otherwise dead downtown, there were still dozens of people riding the streets and the river path bordering downtown.
Another thing you notice right away is that all of the streets are much smaller. You don’t often see a street with more than four lanes and the neighborhood streets are often only wide enough for one car to get through because many people park on the streets. The narrower streets make it easier to cross because you have less lanes to navigate and it slows drivers down.
Portland has far fewer dedicated pedestrian and bike signals, but the drivers we encountered were far more courteous. Several times, drivers stopped to let cyclists cross the street. It wasn’t just a few times, but dozens. I even had a bus give me a friendly honk and stop the traffic behind him to let me cross. Because most of the streets were one lane in each direction you didn’t have to worry about the other lane stopping too.
It appears Portland uses their bike lanes more as a way to get cyclists onto their lower trafficked streets that utilize sharrows, which are pavement markings indicating both bikes and cars should share the lane. Download Portland’s bike map to see how bike lanes and bike boulevards connect to each other.
Raisman said the city is trying to make a complete transportation system and is working on buffered bike lanes, cycle tracks and bike boulevards.
“In my view you want a complete transportation system,” Raisman said. “You are not getting people to teleport from their house to the esplenade. You need a full network and it has to be a diverse network. If they are going to a restaurant, they’ve got to get to the reastaurant. Sometimes you can provide a bike corral in a strategic place and they might walk a block. A lot of times you need a bike lane, a cycle track or buffered bike lanes for that part of the trip, so it has got to be a complete system.”
Although the system needs to be complete, Raisman said the fastest growth will be in bike boulevards.
“As of last year we had 29 miles and had 24 percent of houses within a half mile [of bike boulevards],” he said. “Within five years we will have 130 miles that have 85 percent of houses within a half mile.”
Raisman attributes much of Portland’s bike traffic to the addition of their bike boulevards.
“It is our bike boulevards that are driving that volume because it serves such a wide swath of our community,” he said. “It is kids, seniors, families and guys that are road bikes riding fast. I think that it is huge for driving demand.”
But Durrant said it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition when it comes to deciding whether to build bike boulevards or bike lanes.
“It is like saying, ‘Should we not pave the neighborhood streets because we are paving arterials.’” Durrant said.
At this point, I’ll post some photos of the interesting Portland bike sights and explain what they are.
There are bike corrals everywhere. Some of the streets that are similar to Tucson’s Fourth Avenue had more than 10 on a street.
City employees park their bikes in the parking garage below their offices
According to Raisman in addition to using bike boxes to increase safety, in some locations they are using bike boxes because there are so many bikes lining up in the bike lane that they can’t get through a single light. Now they are also using the bike boxes as a place to store the bikes during the red light.
Pedestrians and cyclists share a path over the Hawthorne bridge out of downtown.
Green paint calls attention to a particularly problematic crossing. According to Raisman, drivers have been trained to look for cyclists at this intersection. This particular driver waved at us as we went by.
Raisman calls this a truck apron, which moves the pedestrians and cyclists farther out so that they can be seen and have a better view of oncoming cars. He said it is designed so that trucks won’t take out the curb with their wheels.
Durrant, left, Thivener and daughter Saskia, center, listen as Raisman explains the truck apron.
Portland utilizes these signs that tell you how far destinations are both in distance and in time. Durrant said he likes that they added the time because some people think three miles is really far, but 17 minutes seems easy to do. According to Raisman the time is based on a 10 mile-per-hour average.
This is a left turn bay for bikes. The idea is to make it easy for bikes to turn onto the bike boulevard, but prevent cars from accessing it.
Portland uses sharrows to tell both drivers and cyclists that they are on a bike boulevard.
They also use this small marking with a directional arrow to show the cyclists which way the bike boulevard continues when it comes to a jog in the road.
The city built a path along the river that is popular with cyclists and pedestrians.
At the end of the bike path along the river, Portland has created a designated bike crossing signal that allows cyclists to cross the street diagonally and connect to a popular route out of downtown.
Portland created a two-way route for cyclists to help navigate a tricky intersection leading into and out of downtown. It also serves the Rose Garden where the Trail Blazers play.
A collection of cyclists wait for the light to change. After the light changes many of the riders will sprint up the hill to beat the next light which is apparently timed in such a way that slower cyclists will miss it and will have to wait again.
This is a bike lane that Durrant, left, worked with the city on to widen.
The city uses a few bridges over the freeway to connect bike boulevards to one another.
These cutouts allow cyclists and pedestrians to cross one lane of traffic when it is clear and wait for a clearing in the second lane of traffic.
My impression of Portland is that the infrastructure helps get people to ride, but that the real motivator is that driving in Portland is a pain. Because the roads are small and there are several choke points getting into and out of downtown, it makes cycling a time saving and cheaper option.
The city of Portland is about 50 square miles smaller, but has roughly the same number of people living in it, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It is clear, though, that they haven’t build their city and their roads to handle more and more cars. Instead, they have decided to build infrastructure that supports a mix of transportation modes.
Portland appears to be thinking about the future, while Tucson is often thinking about the here and now. We can do everything Portland has done, we just have to have the political will and the support to get it done.
View all the images from trip HERE.
Yesterday was the first day weekday in Portland and I can see why it is the envy of cyclists everywhere. There were so many people on bikes, it was almost overwhelming.
Check out the photos from yesterday. I’ve added captions to them to explain what they are.
First off, thanks to everyone who submitted photos and voted for their favorite images. We had a lot of great shots to choose from.
When voting ended last night, Mark’s sunset photo and Christian’s wine bottle holder were tied with 23 votes each.
I decided to let my daughter pick the winner. Watch the video below to see who won and how the photo was chosen.
Congratulations, Christian — I’ll get you your book soon.
