View Larger Map – Map of bike parking facilities in Portland.
Portlander Darrick Wong has heeded the City of Portland’s call to make useful applications with its mountains of open-source data on city services and infrastructure.
Using the bike parking dataset, Wong has developed a Google Map-based tool that shows the location of bike parking facilities throughout Portland. Users can click one of the map’s red arrows for location and more detailed information about each facility.
In an email to the Shift list this morning, Wong wrote: “At some point it would probably be useful to connect this to smartphone geolocation services so you can see parking near you, but here’s a
first pass to see what sort of reaction this generates, if any.”
So, what do you think? Should Mr. Wong keep working on this so folks can use it on their smartphones? Maybe if enough people chime in with encouragement, he’ll consider turning this into a mobile app.
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That’s overwhelming.
I’d prefer the effort goes into making the stolen bike listings a mobile app. Bike parking availability will not change my decision to go somewhere that I need to go.
This is only useful if it listed bus stop signs and other poles to lock bikes to as well.
there’s really nothing east of 104th?
I am with you Eli, the city really needs to beef up it efforts east of I205. This tools should have them act. There has been several time when I have rode my bike to stores or restaurants in my neighborhood (109th and Stark) and had to lock up to railings, posts or other non-sanctioned parking places.
I think bob #1 is spot on. One of the good things about a bike is that if you have a good lock, then you can “park” pretty much anywhere.
Assuming I get the OK from the City and OSM, I’ll be adding this to OpenStreetMap. There’s already quite a few bicycle parking racks in the Portland area on that map.
@allan #2: Since when is it legal to park in a bus stop? That’s a pedestrian space, often quite cramped at that.
This a great idea. I would love to see it as a smart phone app.
Is it possible to add information to this map? The Lloyd TMA has a detailed parking map of all public bike parking in the Lloyd District with some locations that are not on this map: http://www.lloydtma.org/bike-parking-map
One of the good things about a bike is that if you have a good lock, then you can “park” pretty much anywhere.
Don’t lock your bike to anything that wasn’t designed to be a bike rack. Thieves carry around battery powered ratchets and can remove the head from a typical street sign in a just a few seconds, and lift your bike off the remaining pole, lock and all.
I know this because it happened to me. The cop I filed my report with told me it is pretty common.
@11: My rule of thumb is more don’t lock to anything that has a screwed-on or otherwise easily removable top. Bus poles have a bulge for the map that would prevent this trick for, which is why I have used them 🙂
Never mind breaking the glass gives you access to the screws to remove the schedule panel, which is something I see quite a bit of.
is anyone out there really worried about where they are going to park their bike? The whole thing seams a bit silly to me.
I like natural gas meters/pipes myself (if proper bike parking is unavailable), because I doubt anyone is going to tempt messing around with it for a bike.
If the sci-fi engineer nerds get busy maybe someday we can have instantly collapsible jetson-car style bikes.. just think, press a button and poof bike fits in your wallet.. now where do I find a robot maid?
RE: #4 Eli and #5 Jordan, dearth of bike parking in east Portland.
We at PBOT’s SmartTrips Business hope to change this. We offer free bike racks installed in front of any Portland business *on public property.*
If you are a business owner or a customer that would like to see bike parking at one of the businesses you patronize, contact my co-worker Scott Cohen at 503-823-5345, scott.cohen portlandoregon gov.
You can also contact us online: http://www.portlandonline.com/smarttrips
Our SmartTrips project will also be focusing on a good portion of east Portland this year with our SmartTrips Green Line project: http://www.portlandonline.com/transportation/index.cfm?c=52160
SmartTrips Green Line will offer a plethora of bike and walk events and the opportunity for over 30,000 households to order free carpool, transit, walking and biking resources.
PBOT is holding open houses on proposed bike boulevards in east Portland. The next one is tomorrow night: http://www.portlandonline.com/transportation/index.cfm?c=50519&
Very interesting from a data standpoint, pretty useless from a bicycling stand point.
Awesome. Kudos to Portland for opening up the data, and props to Darrick for putting this together.
All of this free-data, go-make-a-mashup stuff is brand new and still has rough edged but it lays the foundation for great things to happen.
(And to Bob: the mobile stolen bikes thing is kind of already in the works, Keep an eye out.)
@Heather: What license is the Lloyd TMA data provided under? That would be a big factor.
Awesomeness!
PS – one day, there will be a similar map to this created…. but it will be for all the hundreds of traffic diverters located every ten blocks on our bicycle boulevard network. 😉
Le sigh. Well. I can dream, right?
ps – Re” GLV #11
I can attest to this too in some manner of speaking. I had a bicycle stolen from a twelve foot high stop sign!!
The thieves BENT the pole to the ground, and removed the actual stop sign signage, to then slide the bike off. It’s amazing the length a bike thief will go to to obtain a fancy bike.
In light of this, secure bike corrals are a great way to go. Much safer than a flimsy stop sign.
@Adam: openstreetmap already maps traffic calming devices of all types.
It would be cool if SAI, LLC could incorporate this data into their Portland Bike Maps app http://appshopper.com/navigation/portland-bike-maps
I think it would be useful to distinguish Long term secure parking (e.g., lockers, or covered facilities), from short term parking (e.g., staple racks).
That’s an interesting idea, BikeR. OpenStreetMap has something similar already; i suppose a bicycle locker would be considered “private” bike parking. But take a look at this: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:amenity%3Dbicycle_parking
Jonathan –
What is the criteria for inclusion in the data set?
How does one provide info as to existing bike parking that is not shown on the map?
Obviously we need a lot more bike racks in SW Portland. However, I know of numerous locations in SW that already have racks, but are not shown on the map.
In OpenStreetMap, the criteria is that you either got the information from a data set that is licensed compatibly, or you collected the information yourself first-hand.