Seattle rolls out on-street bike parking

If they had powder coated it yellow they could have dispensed with the unsightly cones . . . makes it look almost as bad (almost) as our less sophisticated version. Are they afraid someone would miss the rack and try to back in?

Making it look like a car is really, really stupid. Less is more, Seattle.

At first I agreed with Blair, why make it look like a car? Then I considered the arguments that valuable parking real estate is being used. Having the car motif clearly depicts the impact/benefit of having ~20 bike parking spots. It also drives home (sorry), in not so subtle ways, that driving a car is an inefficient mode to get around a city. It might make a driver think about their choice.

That design is just too good. It\’s a great way to get the point across that a car off the road equals room for a lot more people on bikes. Ethan\’s right that the rack could use some color, but accents might be better than the whole thing powder coated. People are surely going to be sideswiping it and scraping any finish that might be applied.

I think with some individuals, this installation will have the unintentional backlash effect of reminding them that a car \”could have been parked there if it weren\’t for all those crazy bikers\”.

That said, I agree that it\’s a wonderful illustration of the wasted space taken up by the giant automobile. If everyone drove around in oversized golf carts, the pro-motor crowd would have a little more room for debate.

But hey, this is America – home of the 8-cylinder, land of the hemi. It\’s your patriotic duty to have the largest off-road vehicle out there, regardless of whether you ever actually NEED a vehicle like that.

The other thing this installation seems to provide is a barrier to protect against a car crashing into the bikes parked there. At a high enough speed nothing of reasonable design would protect the bikes from an errant car, but a bit of a barrier would be nice protection. Of course, the curb blocks included in the Portland bike corrals might be similarly effective.

For both corral designs entry can be a bit awkward, particularly for a corral mid-block. A gap between the corral and the adjacent car spaces would help with ingress and egress and would help protect the bikes from cars while they do their parallel parking maneuvers.

It looks like a frowny car! 🙁

Hate to say it, but driver\’s can\’t be bothered to pay attention to traffic, never mind a grey parking structure. Preaching to the choir over here folks, preaching to the choir.

\”I bet Seattle bike thieves are salivating.\”

At least the suit-sporting ones…

8 cents per hr would never pay off the meters, sounds like something Portland would go for. Right now they want to sell the meters for 9 million and lease them back for 12 million and still be responsible for the maintenance…..

Jim, this shows that the space bikes take up is 1/20 that of a car. So a cyclist\’s share for parking and building new roads/trails, etc should be about 5% that of a driver\’s. Now, I think a vehicle\’s weight gives a good indicator as to how much damage a vehicle can cause on the roads. I just read taht the average car/light truck in the US weighs 4,000 pounds. The average Bike? I have no idea but maybe 30 pounds? Let\’s say 40 (which I think is high) to make the math easier and a bike is causing 1/100 the road damage of a car. Since the MAJORITY of funding for all this stuff comes from the common tax fund we all pay into, I would say that bikes are paying way MORE than their share and they ought to get free parking, tax breaks and maybe a donut every morning.

Just looked on smartpark website and didn\’t see any reference to bike parking so I don\’t know if they have any or not? It seems fair that they should. that is for a price of course.

Referring to some of the comments above about bikes not having to pay for street parking: It seems that some people either haven\’t heard, or have forgotten that some city governments actually want people to ride bikes rather than motor vehicles, downtown.

A major reason for this is that such a strategy is simply the easiest, most cost efficient way to address the problem of streets that have reached their capacity for moving people through them by single occupancy motor vehicles. Things like free parking logically encourage more people to go by bike.

At some point, maybe the ratio of cars to bikes on the street will shift so significantly to more bikes that bikes will reasonably be obliged to shoulder more of the expense that motor vehicles currently bear. Until that time comes, I hope to see lots more bike promoting strategies such as those funky looking Seattle bike corrals.

Also, I agree with Eliot in comment #16, that some way should be figured out to give the actual lock-up provision of the racks the 2-point capacity, or whatever is needed.

No, actually I did just read a news story about the polar ice caps melting and those waters are becoming navigable for the first time in recorded history.