Category: Urban Planning

Bad and great bike parking

January 25, 2010 / / 0 Comments

How can you tell the bad and good of bike parking?

By inspecting a few examples! Check out my photos and descriptions of good and bad bike racks and parking spaces. I took all photos of bike parking in Chicago, Illinois, except where otherwise noted. I’m the expert because I’ve installed hundreds of bike racks for my employer, where I also developed an innovative web application, and I’ve locked up to to so many bike racks over the past four years I’ve lived here.

Good

Bike parking is best installed within view of a business entrance, and within 50 feet. If the bike parking is too far away, bicyclists tend to lock their bike to the closest object which isn’t as suitable as a heavy duty U-rack. The U-rack is a great bike rack: it supports the bicycle at two points (no kickstand or juggling necessary) and and users can lock the wheels and frame easily; square tube is best. See the action at Kuma’s Corner, in Chicago, Illinois.

Near the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota, bicycle riders will spot these decorative, but still useful, bike racks in front of a large office building. The post and ring style can still accommodate locking the front wheel and frame. Users should use a second cable or lock to grab that rear wheel.

Indoor bike parking is always the best! This surface-mounted U-racks (arranged in a parallel series on rails) and the wall-mounted bike rack provide multiple options at the Skokie Yellow Line station in Skokie, Illinois. When installing wall-mounted bike racks, always install surface-mounted bike racks because some bicycle riders cannot lift their bikes.

See plenty more examples on my Flickr. UPDATE: Check out John Luton’s collection, Bicycle parking 101.

Bad

It’s hard to tell, but this round-tube wave rack is installed too close to the curb at the base of this wall, preventing a bicycle rider from using a U-lock to grab the bike rack, front wheel and frame. Most bike rack types should be installed at least 3 feet from any obstructing object.

The grill rack (typically seen at elementary and middle schools) is the worst bike rack available. Bicycles fall over. The design prevents users from locking their frame and front wheel to the bike rack. The tubes for locking have a very narrow diameter and thickness. This photo shows the odd ways people use the grill rack – thankfully, everyone locked their bicycles correctly, but not according to the bike rack’s design!

A garbage bin is not a good place to lock a bicycle. The bicycle will likely be in the way of pedestrians or people who want to throw away garbage. Also, as you can see in the photo, bicycle riders can only lock the frame to the garbage bin. This particular location is a strip mall in Chicago, Illinois, that does not provide any bike parking for the thousands of customers each day (a small portion of which would like to ride their bicycles).

There might be more examples of bad bike parking than good. See more photos here. UPDATE: Check out John Luton’s collection, Bicycle parking 101.

Google snaps up another open web advocate

January 13, 2010 / / 0 Comments

I’ve been following the work of Chris Messina (also known by his handle, factoryjoe) for a couple years now. I can’t remember how I found him (maybe it was BarCamp, OpenID, of the Firefox ad), but I know why I follow him. Like me, he wants to keep the web open and data transferrable or transportable.

While browsing the New York Times Technology section Monday morning (my favorite tech news site, hands down), I saw the headline that he now works for Google (Monday was the first day). This kind of shocked me. I feel Google gets a little scarier every week: some of my friends have admitted that a lot of their online life exists on Google servers and feel queasy about what could happen (some call this “the cloud” and have pointed out the devastating possibilities for privacy and business).

Open web advocate, Chris Messina, presents at the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland, Oregon, in June 2009. Photo by Aaron Hockley.

The author pointed out Messina’s history in open web advocacy (he hijacked his high school’s website because of its refusal to allow an ad for a new gay/straight alliance). The article offers some speculative reasons why Messina made the move, but I want to discuss the inclusion of a quote from Eran Hammer-Lahav, who works for Yahoo!.

With Messina, Smarr, [inventor of OpenID and more Brad] Fitzpatrick and others all working for Google, focusing on the Social Web, there is less and less incentive for Google to reach out. Google has a strong coding culture which puts running code ahead of consensus and collaboration. Now with so many bright minds in house, they are even less likely to reach out. Quote continues…

In other words, with all of the open web advocates being Open Web Advocates (Messina’s new title), who will advocate for web users now? There’s me, for sure. And there are folks standing behind Open Government and Government 2.0. People like Barack Obama (he issued the Transparency and Open Government memo), Adriel Hampton (host of Gov 2.0 Radio podcast), Mark Abraham (urbandata on Twitter), and anyone in the government “black box” who’s willing to set government data free.

In addition, new websites are up and running that remix and mash up government data into useful applications that can promote, through the web, a different level of ownership of one’s community. Or websites that provide useful and relevant information for residents. Websites like SeeClickFix (identify problems in your neighborhood to get city politicians and staff to take notice), or the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Housing and Transportation Affordability Index.

And don’t forget that the Chicago Bicycle Parking Program liberated its bike parking data into Excel, KML, and GIS-compatible formats in 2009.

Screenshot of the Advanced Search page in the Chicago Bike Parking Public Interface web application from which you can download bike rack installation data.

Rialto Theater in downtown Tucson, Arizona

January 12, 2010 / / 0 Comments

The Rialto Theater was built in 1919 and now sits on the National Register of Historic Places. As you can see from the photos and mural, some big bands play at what was originally a movie and Vaudeville theater. Read more at Wikipedia.

Upcoming shows at the Rialto Theater at the time I took this photo (December 26, 2009) included Clusterfck Dance Party and Sonic Youth. Clusterfck Dance Party is a dance party and “a post-modern mish mash of rock-n-roll subculture” (more information about that event).

Artist Joe Pagac (University of Arizona graduate) painted this mural to advertise the upcoming Sonic Youth show on January 4, 2010. The mural faces the theater parking lot, and busy Toole Avenue. According to Joe’s website, other clients include Trader Joe’s and the Tucson Jewish Community Center. He also traveled through India and Southeast Asia teaching art and English to children.

Tucson is a great city for bicycling. The City of Tucson provides on-street bike parking at several locations around town, including downtown in front of the Rialto Theater. There are even four parking spaces for motorcycles.

I’m still uploading photos from my day trip to Tucson, but the rest are on my Flickr. Check out the bike boulevard on University Boulevard at Stone Avenue.

TOD doesn’t have to be fancy

December 27, 2009 / / 38 Comments

Developers and real estate workers like buzz words. They’re a great way to grab attention. But a development doesn’t need “TOD,” “near trains,” or “transit friendly” written on marketing materials, or subsidies and tax breaks from the municipality, to pass as Transit Oriented Development.

A photo of the Los Angeles Gold Line light rail passing the Mission Meridian “transit oriented development” (above, top) and marketing materials for the project (above, bottom).

Sometimes you just need a stairway and a sidewalk.

Townhomes on Carey Trail (view in map) in Wood Dale, Illinois, have easy access to the Wood Dale Metra station on the Milwaukee District West line. Look at the map to see how the neighboring developments fare in access to the station.

Video: Bicycling next to Phoenix Valley light rail train

December 23, 2009 / / 0 Comments

UPDATE: View overhead photos of all of the bicycling treatments on Jefferson and Washington streets (the one-way couplet) between 7th and 24th Streets in Phoenix, Arizona, courtesy of the Coalition of Arizona Bicyclists.

My dad and I rode our bikes in the inside left-hand bike lane on eastbound, one-way, Washington Street in Phoenix, Arizona (purely to take this video).

The left-hand travel lane is for home and business access while the one-way light rail track (and its stations) run in the middle of the street. The lane is here so that there aren’t gobs of driveways and track crossings – it’s a safety feature. I think the bike lane is here instead of on the right side of the street (and next to the curb) because less traffic drives here. Also, there are few opportunities for right turns in front of the bicyclists.

Eventually, though, going east, the bike lane moves over to the right side through the use of a “perpendicular bike lane” adjacent to a crosswalk in a signalized intersection. The perpendicular bike lane looks like a bike box. This happens at 24th Street because the left-hand access lane disappears and Jefferson Street merges into Washington Street, between 25th and 27th Streets, which becomes a two-way street with the light rail tracks dividing the travel directions. (I would add links to Google Maps, but the imagery is outdated and doesn’t show the 1-year old train line; it does show some construction.)

I would call all of these features innovative designs and good solutions. I think tomorrow I will ride the area again (probably alone) to get a better feel for how it works and how safe bicyclists would perceive the design.

The video is sped up by 20% to be less droll. The audio drops out a few times because I was talking (giving my dad directions like a movie producer), but you can still hear the electronic sounds of the train as it approaches and departs the station. I didn’t have my camera’s bike mount so I held it in my hand. I want to come back to take photos instead of video. It was fun to make this video!