Three days into daylight savings time, but instead of ranting about the harm this does to our circadian rhythm, let’s shake it off with a quick little ride in the countryside outside of Albany.
Bicycles have joined toilet paper as an item in short supply during the corona crisis, in Albany as well as across the United States.
 Every now and then, somebody on the Albany City Council will wonder out loud if anything can be done about bicyclists ignoring the traffic laws or otherwise acting stupid. It happened again last week.
Proposals to tax and even license bicycle owners and riders got nowhere in the 2015 Oregon legislature because they were bad ideas, too impractical even for lawmakers who usually don’t mind sticking their fellow citizens with higher fees.
Oregon legislators didn’t give much thought to bicycles this session, and that’s all right. Given lawmakers’ drive to make ever more laws, being ignored by them is not a bad thing. The session in Salem is just about over, and it looks like bikes and their riders are being left pretty much alone.
You can’t look away from the legislature for even a day. If you do, you might miss legislators doing something sensible, as members of a House committee did last week on the matter of bicyclists in traffic being hard to see at night.
Longtime Albany bike shop is closing
Bike N’ Hike, the downtown Albany store where our family has bought bicycles and bike stuff for more than 40 years, is closing by the end of this month.
Tags: Albany downtown, bicycles, Bike N' Hike, bike shop