[Updated: 8/15, 2:51pm]
Blues Festival in 2005.
(File photo)
If you tried to park your bike at the recent Waterfront Blues Festival or the Bite of Oregon (after Bridge Pedal), you might have expected the BTA to be there, providing free valet bike parking like they have in years past.
But many people have been surprised to not find the BTA at these events. Here’s what one commenter had to say about their experience with the (lack of) secure bike parking at the Bite of Oregon last weekend:
“My one gripe: the “secure” bike parking wasn’t. The last couple of years, the BTA staffed the bike parking nearest the Salmon Street Fountain… This year, no staff. Just a roped-off area with the traffic barricades set up to lock bikes to. Not many people utilized this area… Oh well.”
Earlier this summer, the BTA pulled out of their agreement to park bikes at the Waterfront Blues Festival (a benefit for the Oregon Food Bank) just 10 days before the event. They typically charged $400 for the service, but when they asked for $4,000, event organizers said no thanks. Luckily, Dragon Boat team members stepped up to do it for $100 a day.
To find out what’s going on, I asked the BTA’s events and outreach coordinator, Michelle Poyourow.
Michelle said they’ve decided to put their bike parking services on hold until they figure out a more effective and financially viable approach:
“Bike parking has always been a really expensive program for us. It probably costs us about $30 hour to put on and, depending on the event, we were getting paid about $8-$10. It used to be justified because it was a service we provided our members but last year we did an informal survey of the folks who came and parked and very few were BTA members.”
She also said there were concerns about security:
“It wasn’t very secure. I felt pretty nervous about it last year. Having people go in and out of the lot to park and unpark their bikes does not make it a very secure lot!”
Besides the financial and security concerns, Poyourow says that she feels their current service isn’t up to snuff:
(File photo)
“If I thought the service were creating more bicyclists I’d be very happy to do it at a loss — our members pay us to make them safer, and a great way to do that is to get more bicyclists on the roads — but a snowfenced area of scratchy A-frame barricades not far from other vertical structures (such as the Waterfront Park seawall) is not creating very many more cyclists.”
Instead of doing away with the program entirely, Poyourow would rather revamp and improve the service. That change would cost events more than they’ve paid the BTA in the past, but Poyourow says it would be well worth it:
“I do understand that the better service, since it will be more expensive, might be a shock to events who have gotten our underpriced service in the past. But I am confident we’ll be providing something of sufficient value that, if they try it, they’ll conclude it was worth the price! Event organizers in San Francisco have certainly come to that conclusion.”
The system in San Francisco she refers to is run by the SF Bike Coalition. Poyourow says they’ve researched that service and hope to do something similar:
“SFBC has a super-secure full valet service that do at around 70+ events in San Francisco every year, including film festivals, farmers markets, music festivals, etc. People can leave their bags, lights, helmets, all of it on their bikes and just hand them over and walk away. We’d like to adopt SFBC’s higher quality and higher security program and start offering that level of service, at the appropriate cost, at Portland-area events.”
Poyourow also points out that a San Francisco city ordinance mandates that all events over a certain size are required to have supervised bike parking. No such ordinance exists in Portland.
So for now, bike parking at big events will continue to be spotty. (I see a real opportunity for entrepreneurs here. It’s clear there’s a very high demand for secure, on-site bike parking at events. hint, hint.)
By next summer, hopefully the BTA will be back in business with an improved service, and hopefully event organizers won’t balk at the price.