The winning design in action.
(Photo: NYC DOT)
(Photo: NYC DOT)
The New York City Department of Transportation has picked a winner in their City Bike Racks Competition. It’s an elegant and simple hoop design created by a team from Copenhagen (which is quite fitting).
The NY Times City Room blog has the story:
A simple circle, resting on the ground with a bar bisecting it. That concept, called “Hoop” — the brainchild of Ian Mahaffy and Maarten De Greeve, designers based in Copenhagen — is the winner of the CityRacks Design Competition and will be used as the new standard bicycle rack installed on New York City’s sidewalks, officials announced on Friday. Nearly 5,000 such racks are to be installed over the next three years.
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Phew! I like this one. There were certainly some highly questionable ones in that competition. I like the idea of a city having its own distinctive (but functional) bike rack.
This is very nice! I wonder if it swivels? That would be a cool feature in some settings.
Someone should come out with a rack with an integrated pump. Not every rack, of course, but if there was a pump built into one of the verticals on a staple rack every couple blocks in Portland, a lot of people would be a lot happier.
Well, it’s nice looking, but not the best design mechanically. (I did not see the other designs) It would be better if, for instance, “form followed function”, like some profess to believe. The bottom of the rack, where it meets the ground, is too small. The bolts or other mountings into the sidewalk are too close together, so that pressure longitudinally on the rack will more easily tear the bolts out of the sidewalk than with your simple staple rack. The rounded bottom even provides a “lever” to do that. It also looks like there may not be any doubling of bolting points laterally like the simple staple rack, decreasing it’s resistance to lateral pressure.
In order to be able to resist these forces in the rack itself, it has to be stronger than the simple welded staple rack (perhaps it’s drop forged). Perhaps they do this by virtue of a more carbon-intensive and expensive process. Perhaps it has long studs protruding out the bottom that are epoxied into the sidewalk.
So, if by application of more energy than necessary you’ve solved the problem of strength on the rack itself, you now are faced with the typical 4 inch thick unreinforced sidewalk strength. Because the mounting points are closer together, it puts more stress on the sidewalk. Does mounting this include pouring a new section of sidewalk/foundation?
While apparently going for a “cool” look, perhaps mimicking the letter “e”, the designers have ignored the engineering to get the rack to do what racks have to do with the least effort, including the least rebuilding of sidewalks, etc.
Like much “design” today, the focus is all on appearance, achieved at high inputs of technology, carbon and fossil fuels, at the expense of practicality (or to better phrase that, “sustainability”.) It does look cool though.
A few months ago, my Canadian friend Lyle wrote up a review of all the contestants in the design competition (he was visiting NYC at the time). Lyle’s an engineer and avid bike rider, so took a particular interest. Check it out:
http://projekto-b.blogspot.com/2008/10/rack-attack.html
Doug, if New York orders the rack in bulk, (5000 seems like bulk,) it should be a fairly efficient process to make them. But yes, the rack has a stud and seems to be epoxied (or something) in:
http://nycityracks.files.wordpress.com/2008/10/winner_mahaffy_de-greeve.jpg
You are correct, there is a weakness there, but you are neglecting the same problems in a staple rack. If you push/pull from one end on a staple rack, you are obviously aren’t going to get very far. But if you push or pull on the side, you’d subject the staple rack to very similar stresses as the ones that would defeat the New York City one (if it had bolts instead of a stud.) However, as far as I know, people don’t steal bikes that way, (taking the rack might attract a little more attention than just cutting the lock.) I have seen broken racks though, (in locations where it seems likely the rack could have been hit by a drunk driver or something. For instance, the corner of 26th and Clinton in front of Noho’s) and it looks like the point of failure is the weld between the pipe and the strap that the bolts attach to, not the sidewalk or the bolts themselves. I’ve never seen the racks being installed, but I imagine that the holes are drilled, and then a special bolt is put in, and the hole is filled with epoxy, because the bolt threading doesn’t seem course enough to actually bite into the concrete anyways… And so if four holes have to be drilled and filled, that might be more work&materials than the NYC rack.
Me #3: I knew it had to exist, it is such a simple idea:
http://bikeportland.org/2008/11/17/municipal-bicycle-pump-stockholm/
Now we just need Portland to get some.