(Rendering: GBD Architects)
The 657-apartment project opening next year in the Lloyd District will include an on-site bike valet that’ll be free to all residents and workers in the area, developers said last week.
Other bike amenities at Hassalo on Eighth, which sits between 7th and 9th Avenues and Multnomah and Holladay streets, will include showers, multiple bike repair stations, a vending machine for replacement bike parts, a bike wash station, a special parking area for cargo or recumbent bikes and a charging station for electric bikes.
It’s the most impressive combination of residential bike-related amenities we’ve yet seen in Portland, probably rivaled only by the Central Eastside Lofts, which last year introduced the city’s first bike wash station and has some other similar features.
Most of the amenities will be in a “bike hub” below the existing office building at Northeast 7th and Multnomah. The facility will be accessible by keycard and the driveways leading into the basement garage, as well as by elevator from the lobby above. Though design decisions aren’t made yet, GBD Architects has subcontracted with an Austrialian company specializing in bike parking to come up with a concept:
Wade Lange, the local executive for developer American Assets Trust, said Monday that the company’s goal is to create a ground-level bike shop that would also serve as the staging area for valet bikes. Lange said the bike valet would probably share staff with the garage’s car valet, and that his working assumption is that the bike valet will operate from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m.
It’s not yet clear whether it’d be possible to get a bike in or out of the valet outside operating hours.
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For bike users, the benefits of a valet would include time savings — Lange hopes that eventually valet workers will be able to accept and return bikes at surface level, ferrying them in and out of the bike hub in an elevator. The valet would also reduce theft and make bike parking more space-efficient.
“We recognize the need and the marketability of having bicycle access,” Lange said.
In addition to the 1,000 or more residents expected to live in the three new buildings, the city blocks adjacent to Hassalo on Eighth employ 9,000 people, including hundreds of occasional or frequent bike commuters. Lange said the bike hub would be open to Lloyd District workers, too.
Here’s a working floor plan of the basement-level “bike hub”:
I asked Lange whether he had any plans for preventing something we’ve heard about in many of Portland’s bike-friendly apartment buildings: people who rarely use their bikes hogging the prime bike parking spaces.
new buildings will be 21 stories.
(Photo: M.Andersen/BikePortland)
Lange said there are no plans to charge for prime spaces, but that the apartment management company would help people choose bike parking spaces based on a sort of entrance interview with every tenant.
“When they move in, we’ll talk to them about their bicycle needs,” Lange said.
Lange’s plans for an on-site bike shop are vaguer at this point, in part because they await remodeling work required on the existing office building.
The valet would give the Lloyd District the second permanent bike valet service in the Portland area, after the Go By Bike valet and shop at Oregon Health and Science University, and certainly one of the largest such services in North America.
“The whole purpose is to let the Lloyd District use the bike hub,” Lange said.
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