Tom Vanderbilt (Traffic) explores how decent bike parking could revolutionize American cities:
The most high-profile instance of this is the so-called “Bicycle Access Bill,” recently signed into law after a New York City Council vote of 46-1. The measure will require the owners of commercial buildings with a freight elevator to allow people to enter the building with a bicycle — though what happens from there depends on the building. (See this useful summary of the bill.)While the right to enter a building with a bicycle may seem minor, the bill potentially represents a huge de facto increase in the city’s supply of bicycle parking, which is currently estimated at 6,100 racks, many of these outdoors. What’s more, New York’s City Council also passed a bill mandating that commercial parking garages provide spaces for bicycles — one bike space for every 10 cars, up to 200 cars.
Why do these measures matter? Because parking helps make commuters — a lesson long ago learned with cars. Studies in New York found that a surprisingly large percentage of vehicles coming into lower Manhattan were government employees or others who had an assured parking spot. Other studies have shown the presence of a guaranteed parking spot at home — required in new residential developments — is what turns a New Yorker into a car commuter.
On the flip side, people would be much less likely to drive into Manhattan if they knew their expensive car was likely to be stolen, vandalized, or taken away by police. And yet this is what was being asked of bicycle commuters, save those lucky few who work in a handful of buildings that provide indoor bicycle parking. Surveys have shown that the leading deterrent to potential bicycle commuters is lack of a safe, secure parking spot on the other end. (In England, for example, it’s been estimated that a bicycle is stolen every 71 seconds.)
A number of American cities are now waking up to the fact that providing bicycle parking makes sense. Philadelphia, for example, recently amended its zoning requirements to mandate that certain new developments provide bicycle parking; Pittsburgh’s planning department is weighing requiring one bicycle parking space for every 20,000 square feet of development (admittedly modest compared with the not-uncommon car equation of one parking space per 250 square feet); even the car-centric enclave of Orange County, Calif., is getting in on the act, with Santa Ana’s City Council unanimously passing a bill requiring proportional bicycle parking when car parking is provided. In Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities, pilot projects are investigating turning car-parking meters — once semireliable bike-parking spots, now rendered obsolete by “smart meter” payment systems — into bike parking infrastructure.
Few cities are doing more than Portland — which has been experiencing a particular boom in bicycle commuting — to increase bicycle parking. In September, for example, the City Council will vote on code changes that would require residential buildings to have the same bicycle parking requirements as commercial buildings. Granted, Portland, Ore., is an unusual place for the United States: a place where business owners actually petition the city to build “bike corrals,” or collections of racks that tend to swap one or two car parking spaces for a dozen bike spaces, in front of their establishments, and where residents casually drop lingo like staple, meaning the type of bicycle parking structure that looks like a staple stuck into the concrete. And in a move that is sure to give John McCain fits, the city is spending $1 million of federal stimulus funds on bicycle parking at transit hubs.