(Photos © J. Maus/BikePortland)
The Portland Bureau of Transportation (PBOT) has announced the installation of their 100th on-street bike corral. This milestone comes nine years after the first one was installed in north Portland in 2004. The 100th corral is installed at the New Seasons Market on SE Hawthorne Blvd.
In a press release, PBOT says their bike corral program, “has helped Portland businesses increase on-street customer parking ten-fold.”
To date, the corrals have allowed businesses to swap 163 auto parking spaces for 1,644 bicycle parking spaces. Fewer car spaces has led to more customer access and a healthier environment.
While these days it’s hard to keep up with bike corral installations, the program got off to a slow start back in 2004. The first ever location was on North Shaver at Mississippi in front of Fresh Pot. After that one went in, it took over two years for PBOT to install another one. The delay was caused because PBOT couldn’t settle on a design they were comfortable with replicating all over the city.
However, once the design became finalized, PBOT has struggled to keep up with demand. From 2004 to 2009, PBOT had installed just 20 bike corrals. Now they’ve done 80 in the past four years and there are currently another 98 bike corral applications under review. What accounts for the big backlog? As we reported in 2011, PBOT handles each request on a case-by-case basis and not everyone location gets the OK.
The map below (created by PBOT), shows all 100 of the current locations (you can also view a list of all 100 locations and the businesses responsible for them)…
Here’s more about the corrals from PBOT:
Bike corrals are groupings of six to 12 bike racks installed on-street. While most of Portland’s bicycle parking is provided on sidewalks, in a growing number of commercial areas the high demand for bicycle parking is exceeding sidewalk capacity. In other cases, local businesses simply prefer bicycles in the parking strip rather than autos in order to attract and serve customers as travel patterns shift from auto use.
In addition to increasing customer parking, bike corrals also free up congested sidewalks, and improve visibility at busy intersections for those on foot or behind the wheel.
Today, bike corrals dot many parts of the city (but there are still large swaths of Portland that have zero corrals)…
If you’d like to know more about Portland’s bike corrals, browse our archives: We’ve been covering the program since 2006! (Who can forget KATU-TV’s feeble attempt to turn them into a “bikes vs. cars” issue?) You can also get the official word via PBOT’s Bicycle Parking Corrals page. Streetfilms was also in town last week and they shot a short video to mark the 100th corral milestone.