Let's Stop Overlooking Bike Parking

Pointing to Paris's recently announced plan to make the city '100 percent cyclable,' which includes a promise to install 30,000 bike parking stands in the city, plus 1,000 reserved for oversized cargo bikes, and 40,000 spaces at rail stations, Kea Wilson reminds American bicycling advocates to look beyond bike lanes and safe roads to address the similarly important challenge of bike parking and storage. Wilson writes,

The availability of cycle parking is sometimes, but not always, factored into the methodology that leading organizations use to rank the most bike-friendly communities in the country; cities themselves rarely track how many spots they have in any systematic way, much less assess those spots’ quality, convenience, accessibility to people with mobility challenges, or effectiveness at preventing common crimes like theft.

While most American cities still have minimum parking requirements, only some have started to require bike parking in new developments. Yet the lack of organized efforts to provide secure bike parking, Wilson argues, may discourage people from biking at all. A report from Transportation Alternatives earlier this year came to a similar conclusion.

Meanwhile, the rise in the popularity of electric bikes–boosted by the federal infrastructure bill–means cities will have to consider bike charging as an integral part of the sustainable, electrified city.