his bike parking laboratory.
(photo: M.Andersen/BikePortland)
Indoor bike parking rooms are becoming standard in Portland’s offices and apartment buildings. But when square footage is scarce, sometimes plastic-coated hooks just won’t do.
That’s where hanging horizontal racks come in. These two-level metal models cost hundreds of dollars per bike space — but they also make a bike parking area 50 to 100 percent more efficient per square foot.
Their systems of shocks and hinges also make it easy for someone with a smaller frame or less muscular arms to hoist a bike into place. To get a better look at the state of the industry in bike parking, I visited local expert Scott Mizée of Alta Planning and Design. Alta’s employee bike parking room — a.k.a. “Bike SPA” — on Portland’s inner eastside doubles as Mizée’s test lab for the industry’s best bike parking products.
I asked Mizée to give a brief introduction to each of the main horizontal rack products he’s testing.
First, here’s the one Mizée describes as his own favorite, the $475 Dero Decker. (He couldn’t recall the price in the video clip below.) It stands out, he says, for its elegant operation and durable craftsmanship.
Next, here’s the Saris Stack Rack, which goes for $350 to $375 per bike. It’s the one used by TriMet’s paid bike-and-ride structures, for which Mizée led the design:
Here’s the Urban Racks Double Stacker, which costs $300 per bike and has a nifty automated lifting mechanism:
Finally, here’s the most spectacular solution, the Urban Racks Wheely-it, which takes up more wallspace and is marketed more to individual consumers than to businesses:
“I’m really anxious to see where this goes in the next few years,” Mizée said. “They’ve been doing it in Europe for decades already, and we’re just now getting it to appear in North America.”
Expect to see more about the deployment of this hardware in future Real Estate Beat coverage. For more stories like this, browse our archives.