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New York City Bike Parking

New York Bicycle Shelter

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an article on the lack of bike parking in New York City. As an occasional bicyclist, I empathize with the need for parking for bicycles. However, as Judd and I advocated in our proposal for increased bicycle safety, I think any parking for bicycles in public space should be metered.

This article points out that right now there is a huge bicycle parking shortage in the city:

At a time when, city officials say, the number of people cycling in New York is soaring and the city has been implementing a plan to create 200 miles of new bike lanes, one glaring problem for those who want to cycle to work is the shortage of parking, particularly in areas like Midtown Manhattan.

“It’s one of the biggest missing links preventing New York from being a world-class bicycling city,” said Wiley Norvell, a spokesman for Transportation Alternatives, an advocacy group that promotes bicycling. “It’s the No. 1 reason that serious, savvy cyclists don’t use their bikes to get to work.”

I absolutely agree that the city needs to provide parking for these cyclists, especially considering the prospect of theft.

In a city inhabited by bike thieves so crafty and notorious that the bicycle lock company Kryptonite calls one of its locks the New York Fahgettaboudit, many people are loath to leave a bike chained outside, where it can be stolen or quickly stripped of parts. So riders who are not as fortunate as Mr. Martinez end up improvising.

Some commuters, who park on the street, try to throw off thieves by choosing a different spot each day or by moving their bike during lunch. Others depend on the good will of local business owners who might be willing to squeeze a bike into a shop corner at no charge.

This is unacceptable. Like everyone else, bicyclists deserve a legitimate and safe place to park. Right now the city is trying to address this need by installing new bike shelters – covered sheds (think bus stops) that can shelter about eight or nine bikes – throughout the city.

Here’s my problem with this – the city is only installing 37 of them throughout the city. That’s 333 spaces. That’s moronic. Give these people the space they need for parking. The mayor’s plan calls for 1200 new bike racks by 2009 and requiring commercial buildings to require bike storage. Mayor Bloomberg needs to get the city moving on this initiative.

Some property owners are resistant to the idea of allowing bicycles on the premises, preferring instead to confine them to racks outside.

“Bicycle racks are available outside for the convenience of bike riders,” said Maya Israel, a spokeswoman for Tishman Speyer. “Bicycles are not permitted inside, for the safety of all our tenants and visitors.”

I think it’s fine if these people want to ban bicycles from inside the buildings, after all, its private property, but I think they should provide safe parking in their garage somewhere. If this causes an issue because of the cost, simply charge the bicyclists a proportionate share of the space they use. This works for everyone. The property owner doesn’t have to allow the bike inside, the bicyclist has a safe place to store his bike, and even when paying for a share of a car’s space, riding the bike would still be far cheaper than driving.

Pay up.

The city should also move quickly to expand its bicycle parking. They should finance it by charging fees for bikes similar to those for cars who use on-street parking.

Street parking prices vary by location and time of day, but let’s say you get 20 minutes for twenty five cents (that’s a pretty standard DC rate – I’ll assume New York is the same). You can probably fit a bike rack with space for ten bicycles in the equivalent amount of space for one car. (I realize you could fit more, but you don’t want to jack up your bicycles – the bicycle parking shelter picture in the New York Times article shows ten bikes in about the same space a car would take up) Divide the cost of one car in the space by ten bikes – we get two and a half cents. For an hour of parking, it would cost a bicyclist seven and a half cents. Let’s cut them a break and make it five cents for an hour since seven and a half cents is hard to carry around. That means it would cost 40 cents to park your bike for an eight-hour day. Compared to the $6 a driver has to pay for the same amount of time, that’s a steal, and the city still makes up the value for the public space the bike uses.

With these kinds of revenues, we would raise $11,268 per day from New York’s 28,170 bicycle commuters. Over the course of a 260 day work year, that would raise $2,929,680. (or if we want to make the bicyclists pay their fare share and give them no break on the price, we could raise $4,394,520 by charging the full seven and a half cents per hour) We should also consider that we will probably raise more fees than this since this only covers the 8-hour work day, and some people will work longer or do other things after work. That’s a lot of money to put toward expanding bicycle infrastructure in the city.

As some of our readers have pointed out in the past, subsidized parking masks the true costs of transportation. If we expect cars to pay for the infrastructure they use, we should expect the same from bicyclists. That is both reasonable and fair. Those bike sheds and racks aren’t free, and bicycles impose costs on the rest of us, including the risk of serious injury and death.

The city of New York is in the midst of a plan designed to add 200 new miles of bike lanes by 2009 in hopes of reducing congestion and encouraging more people to ride bikes.

As less people drive, there will be less revenues coming in from fees, tolls, and taxes traditionally paid by automobiles. The money to support this new infrastructure needs to come from somewhere, and who better to pay for it than the people who will exclusively use it?