The Missing Link: Where’s the bike garage?
In the past 15 years, New York City’s number of bike trips per day has tripled to nearly 490,000. And as we add more protected bike lanes — against the loud objections of some — we can expect this number to keep growing. But as we keep pushing for more safe bike lanes are we doing enough for their parking and storage?
If you live in NYC, you’ve probably noticed many bike racks full with delivery and abandoned bikes, leaving little free space for others. This dearth of good bike “parking” leads people to lock up their bikes in places with precarious safety like against fences, posts, and trees, which often ends up lowering the sidewalk quality. And to exacerbate the issue, bike rack installations have slowed down in the de Blasio administration.
To achieve Vision Zero, we need to reconsider our biking initiatives to also include safe and reliable bike storage to accommodate new bikers. If cars get to enjoy garages and parking in dense urban settings, then why can’t we do the same for bikes? To encourage more people to make use of our new bike lanes we need to make the biking experience seamless, which means both safe streets and reliable bike parking.
The great thing about this is issue is that we already have plenty of live solutions fit for NYC. For example in London and Brussels, both cities offer bike “boxes” where residents can safely store their bikes outside their building. But before we can roll any solution out, we first need to look at the data to determine which neighborhoods to first target. After all, the first roll out of both new bike racks and long-term bike storage will have to show that there’s an appetite for this infrastructure to be built if we want to keep building more.
The only thing missing in this bike issue is initiative. If we truly want to scale up beyond a few crowded bike racks, we will need to get more people invested in better biking infrastructure. The more voices demanding change, the more political force we will have to take back our streets from cars to better the quality of life of our residents.
