Crazy idea: secure bike parking & revenue for city

[Apennine]

Ok, I'm ready to get clobbered by replies but here goes..

This is a suggestion that ties in to these 2 posts:

Secured downtown bike parking?
Should Cyclists Pay for Registration, Road Tax, Insurance ...

What if somebody invented a parking meter system for bikes that locked up bikes for a fee? You pay for XX many hours. At the end of that time, it wouldn't just unlock your bike. (Yikes!) Instead, it would keep your bike "hostage" until you pay for the time you went over to release it.

The meters would have to be designed to be un-hackable.

I imagine some sort of key that you pull out once you lock up your bike, a la rentable lockers in gyms and bus stations.

It could be a win-win: secure parking for cyclists and revenue for local govt.

So...what do y'all think? Would you use something like this? Is there any worse feeling than going back to where you locked up your bike and seeing it's not there? I've had my bike(s) stolen. It's gut wrenching.

[Simple Nature]

Okay... hand over your keys to the forum and leave! You are banished!

Seriously... they kinda have this at the north side of US26/HWY217 parking lot. A big cage for bicycles. Not sure how they operate it but it looks a lot more secure than leaving a bike on the streets of Portland or at a Max station.

Problem with a simple lock system is that bikes are pretty vulnerable to having pieces "removed" while parked.

Max stations also have have the "pet boxes" that you can store your bike in. Unfortunately, my recumbent wouldn't come close to fitting.

[wsbob]

PSU also has one of the bike parking cages...it looks nice..., and the Beaverton Transit Center has one. I've never used either of them. Beaverton Library employees have one.

I've always been intrigued by the 'pet boxes', as simple nature refers to them. I wonder how secure they actually are. In terms of space usage, they don't seem a very efficient way to park bikes. A great number of them might be a visual nightmare.

Front page story some time back featured some minority start-up entrepreneurs operating a monitored bike parking facility, Downtown in the Dekum Building. It would be interesting to hear some recent news about what usage and response to the service they've been receiving.

Maus and the Monday Roundup's elly blue have swung stories past BP readers, about some novel European bike parking strategies, some of them big, multi-level exclusively bike parking structures. Take a lot of demand, and money to justify something like that. As ugly as asphalt wasteland parking lots for cars are, so far, adequate parking for a lot of cars seems to be a whole lot simpler than it is for parking a lot of bikes.

Parking a bike securely, worries me a lot. I'm not commuting regularly by bike. I'd be highly adverse though, to parking a bike downtown on the street...nearly anywhere...even the bike corrals next to a busy bike frequented place like Stumptown on SW 3rd. So, secure parking for a fee might be appealing. Problem is, the city loves it's cash cows, which is what street parking for motor vehicles seems to have become. Hard to keep a ceiling on the fee to park.

Something I've wondered a bit about, is having heard that some businesses...I suppose, involving office workers...won't allow employees to bring their bikes into their offices. I suppose the thing is...many office workers don't have offices, but instead, just the little cubicles. Space is money.

[Dovestrobe]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vK9C9VtCypE (video)

This system is highly compact (underground mostly) and we could put it near Starbucks at Pioneer Square, no problem. It would provide parking for 8 hundred bikes!!! Even the mayor could park his bike here!!! I think money would be more wisely spent on this than those outlandish firework displays on the 4th and on new years!!

Yes! Even Portlandia agrees!
Here she is celebrating a toast with her favorite Port wine atop her favorite steed, riding it the naked way that Portlanders have been known to ride! BTW, she prefers her bicycle over that trident thing she sports downtown.