Tag: portland

A quick primer on “smart dock” vs “smart lock” bike share systems

Bike share finally came to Portland, Oregon this week, and the system has already proven to be popular. At this point, bike share in the US is no longer a novelty, as successful systems are integrated into the day-to-day life of dozens of major cities.

However, not all bike share is created the same, and Portland’s new system has the distinction of being the largest “smart-bike” system in the country. This is in contrast to most large systems which rely on “smart docks” instead.

The primary difference is the location of the electronics. In a smart
dock system, everything is handled by the dock and an attached kiosk. On
a smart bike system, the bicycle itself carries all the technology.
That means you can lock your bicycle to anything. You use a pin code to remove the built in lock and when you’re done, you reattach the lock to the bicycle (and another fixed object of course). Built in GPS ensures the company knows where the bike is. Click to read more!

Do nearby food trucks increase demand for office space?

An article from Portland earlier this week caught my eye.

As firms pile into downtown — it’s the most crowded commercial real estate area in the city (PDF) — researcher Patricia Raicht of Jones Lang LaSalle
has stumbled on a surprising trend. Downtown office buildings, she
says, consistently fill up faster when they’re close to food carts.

In the first six months of 2013, Raicht said, 92 percent of net
demand for high-quality downtown Portland office space occurred within
two blocks of a food cart pod.

“When our brokers are out talking to tenants, what they’re hearing
over and over again — and particularly with creative tenants and tenants
that have a younger demographic — is that there are a lot of things
that are really important to them,” Raicht said in a July interview
about the trends in net absorption rates for Class A and Class B office
space.
Bike Portland Click to read more!