Making Streets Safer With On-Street Bike Parking
January 18, 2012 at 9:36 am | Architecture & Urban Design, Bicycles, Transit & Infrastructure | Tags: 7th Street, Bicycling, bike corrals, bike parking, complete streets, Infrastructure, Near Southside, New York, peer cities, Portland, transportation, urban design
From Streetfilms comes this look at New York’s first on-street bike parking facility:
By installing eight bike racks, DOT created a “daylighting” effect, improving visibility at the intersection. The bike parking is much less intrusive than parked cars and helps everyone at the intersection see everyone else. Oh yeah, and now there are a dozen new places to park bikes without taking away any space from Smith Street’s busy sidewalks.
I’ve thought Fort Worth’s urban villages would be a great place to start doing on-street bike parking corrals, replacing a car parking space at each location, ever since my first visit to Portland, Oregon in 2009 where I saw the tremendous success that city has had with on-street bike parking:
The corrals are good for cyclists (providing more, easier-to-use, and more visible parking), good for businesses (by providing much more customer parking in existing space), good for pedestrians (by freeing up sidewalk space) and – as Streetfilms points out – good for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians trying to cross the street.
Think about the challenges you’ll often face as a driver, cyclist, or pedestrian crossing over streets like 7th or Magnolia when there’s an SUV or some other rather bulky vehicle parked in the last street space before the corner. It’s hard to see around. By freeing up these corners for bike corrals, you’ve “daylighted” the intersection more: opening up sight lines by leaving these corners for small, easy-to-see-past bicycles.
Some of us have talked about doing a bike corral in the Near Southside. The closest we’ve come so far is the curb cut bike corral at Avoca Coffee:
The next step will be to actually reclaim some street space for a bike corral – something I’d very much like to get accomplished.
For more on on-street bike parking, here’s another Streetfilms video about Portland’s: