Nike’s new corporate bike share system seems to be plenty popular with users of the nearby Beaverton Creek MAX station:
The picture above was taken by a reader, who writes:
Since this program started, that main rack has been totally consumed (pic was taken on a Friday morning 10ish), with evenings so bad that extra orange Nike bikes are either locked to the parking signs or just floating near the rack with front wheel ulocked to the frame.
TriMet spokeswoman Angela Murphy acknowledged the new problem in an email Friday, though she added that it’s “a good problem to have.”
“TriMet is supportive of Nike’s current efforts in promoting bike share as a viable option to make first and last mile connections to transit,” she wrote, informed by a conversation with TriMet active transportation planner Jeff Owen. “We are working together with our partners at Nike to more closely monitor the number of bikes at each MAX light rail station. … We currently have additional bike racks on order, to be delivered in early June, that will provide more bike parking capacity at stations throughout our entire TriMet system, including Beaverton Creek MAX station.”
Murphy also sent a different image of the same rack from last Monday morning:
“Sometimes there are many, sometimes there are few,” she wrote in an email.
Until more racks are installed, of course, the variability of the supply doesn’t improve things much for users of the system. Nobody gets on a bike-share bike thinking that they hope they’ll get lucky when it comes time to park it. They want the parking to be mostly hassle-free on a reliable basis, or at least for problems to happen at predictable times of day.
As we reported on the site last month, TriMet is also a strong contender for a state grant that would create a (presumably paid) long-term bike parking facility at Beaverton Creek MAX station, plus an easy trail connection to Nike’s main campus. If they secure that grant, there’ll be more places to park a bike at the station — at least for those willing to pay a couple cents per hour for the space.