A close-up look at the best business bike parking in Portland

portland aerial tram has the largest and best bike parking in north america!

I guess the businesses that allow you to park your bike inside your office, and reduce visibility, would be the best, in my mind. I’ve worked for many such companies. It reduces the need to sit there and lock, carry a lock, and allows your bike a nice place to dry.

But I guess rows of bike stalls for customers is nice, too.

Love the inner tube vending machine.

This is most impressive. New Seasons on Hawthorne missed a huge chance to do something just like this, but they caved and built rooftop car parking instead. Everyone who shops there whether they get there on foot or bike or drive is paying for that unnecessary expense. Dumb.

I think covered, secure, close bike parking is great.
I think staples are so so, if a bit better than waves/ribbons and certainly better than wheel bender/toaster style.
Even better are roll in/roll out, keep the bikes orderly-style parking like:
http://www.creativepipe.com/lightning_bolt_LR_series_racks.htm
or
http://www.parkabike.com/varsity-bike-dock
And not much more expensive once you build covering and everything.
Dreaming of great parking….

Their pedestrian parking is pretty reasonable, too.

I thought the entire north end of the block would be auto parking… in the photos you were careful to only shoot to the end of the building, but it looks like the parking continues… how much of that previously vast slab of asphalt is part of the Green Zebra development? my guess is that they developed 2/3 of the block and left the 1/3 of the block to the north as an abandoned parking lot to be sold off later for redevelopment…

I like the bike parking INSIDE Western Bike Works. I can have a beer and gaze lovingly at my lock-free bike.

Nice! My only quibble is that the slats on the store side of the bike parking area provide thieves with more cover. I would have it open on the store side so people can better see it from inside.

“… it reminds all customers that the store respects — and expects — bicycling.”

This seems like perhaps the best aspect of all of this. More often than not biking accommodations, whether parking or paths or how PBOT/ODOT/googlemaps wants to route us, are the kid version, sub par, something tacked on, more often than not with a few gaffes built in, or a watered down variant on the original design. To see something that seems to have been done so well, where the folks paid attention to details, upheld high standards not just in the design but also in the execution, gives me hope. Maybe others, who dabble in infrastructure, will take note and stop cutting corners. I hope so.

The shelter is good work. I’ve been there once to check it out, and was impressed by what they have done.

No dispenser for tubulars!

An entry for the flip side: Powell’s newly-renovated entrance at Burnside and 10th is lovely… But it appears there’s no more covered bike parking.

WHAT!?!?!? What happened at Powells? I am going to make an assumption that they have covered parking elsewhere now, but what a sad statement if they have removed the iconic covered parking with the (albeit not extremely functional) book shelf parking racks!

and what-do-ya-know…. of course bP has already done a story covering this during the design phase. http://bikeportland.org/2013/10/16/renovation-at-powells-books-will-move-iconic-bike-racks-95632

I wonder if there is a follow up story that I have not yet seen?