Ever wondered how many bike parking spaces the City of Portland has installed over the years? So have I.
After sharing a bike parking/Google Map mash-up the other day, I decided to ask the Bureau of Transportation that question.
Here’s the breakdown according to Sarah Figliozzi, who manages the City’s bike parking program:
- 67 lockers
- 3,235 staple racks
- 46 bike corrals (with 431 staple racks in them)
Add all these up and you get 7,399 bike parking spaces*. Not bad for a city of just under 600,000.
(*That number is only an estimate. Figliozzi points out that when the Bureau of Maintenance installs bike parking, they don’t always input the GIS (mapping) data into the work order.)
How does that compare with the number of car spaces in Portland? According to PBOT spokesperson Dan Anderson, there are about 8,300 metered spaces in downtown and the Lloyd District. I’ve asked PBOT for a more comprehensive number, but haven’t heard back yet — and there’s a good chance they don’t even know. While I was getting this post together, I read on Streetsblog that San Francisco just became the first city to count its parking spaces.
On a related note, Figliozzi says she’s putting together Portland’s first bike parking count. She wants to know how all the new on-street bike corrals they’ve installed are performing. Stay tuned for details on that.
Thanks for reading.
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Does this count include bike parking available in parking garages? And the additional “locked room” bike parking options that are available, for instance, in the Pearl District?
I don’t think this would include any private spaces, either in condo/apt buildings or offered internally by employers. That data must exist through current planning and be on file somewhere, but it is my gut feeling that is not represented here.
The count does only includes bike parking (plain staples and art racks) in the right-of-way — it does not include any spaces on private property, including parking garages, inside buildings, and outside alcoves on private property (such parking is also adjacent to the sidewalk, but if it’s in the building footprint, it’s private property and thus PBOT doesn’t see that part of the construction plans and track those racks.)
Also, I should clarify that all racks eventually do end up getting mapped into the City’s GIS system (which is where the publicly available data is from), but there is a lag from the time the rack is installed per the work order, to when we map it. That lag can vary, of course, depending on how much overall mapping work we have in queue.
Finally, there is no more “Bureau of Maintenance”. That workgroup is now the Maintenance Operations division of the Bureau of Transportation.
Paul Cone
Mapping and GIS
City of Portland, Bureau of Transportation
Seattle just counted bicycle racks. Grand total? Approximately 2,517 city installed racks. 0 bike corrals (the only one was destroyed by a car wreck but should be re-installed soon). The private racks and other bike parking weren’t counted, nor were lockers (and there’s not many of those either).
I envy the ease of finding bike parking in Portland.
continuing to add abundant additional good bike parking throughout the city is the single most important thing the city can do to encourage more bicycle ridership.
Do these figures count MUNI logo look-alike racks as having more than two spaces? If so, then the count is off by up to an order of magnitude.
We have less than 30 ribbon racks in our GIS so the count is not off by much. The vast majority of racks are staples.
Paul
The population count provided above is an undercount of the population demand for parking since Portland’s population swells during the day with workers and shoppers and parking requirements are tied to peak periods…remember all those Vancouverites. 😉