Tag: bike parking

Netherlands, day 1 (day 10 of the trip)

June 12, 2023 / / 1 Comment

I arrived to Rotterdam via ferry over the English Channel from Harwich, England, on Wednesday evening (day 9). This part of the travelogue is about day 10. Read other posts from this trip.

Day 10

Thursday, May 11, 2023 – 289 photos taken – find more on Flickr

  • I woke up to have breakfast with my friends, who I was staying with. They were going to their offices in Amsterdam, but rather than travel with them I decided to get ready a bit slower and meet them in the evening for dinner.
  • I left their house at around 10 AM and started cycling, on the OV-fiets shared bicycle, owned by NS, the Dutch national railway company, that I picked up the day before. My destination was Rotterdam Centraal station so I could return the bike and hop on an Intercity Direct high-speed train to Amsterdam (the train runs high-speed between Rotterdam Centraal and Amsterdam Schiphol airport). But I was distracted by the planes landing at the Rotterdam-The Hague (RTM) airport, which is five minutes from my friends’ house.
  • At this point I realized I didn’t really need to be anywhere soon, so I kept cycling. My friend D. had already pointed out a place to spot trains on the “HSL” (high-speed line) so I headed there, which is about 10 minutes north of their house, in between Rotterdam and a suburb called Rodenrijs. Dutch land use is quite compact. The built-up area ends with a hard line and then there’s either agricultural land or nature preserves. The area between their neighborhood and this suburb had a bit of both. From this location I spotted Thalys, Eurostar, and NS’s Intercity Direct trains in both directions.
  • Having enough of this I cycled back to the house to recharge my phone (I had already used half of the battery recording so many photos and videos in two hours). Only then did I cycle 18 minutes to the station and board the next ICD train. ICDs depart every 15 minutes, so I didn’t bother to target a timed departure. I also like to get an “American cookie” at Kiosk, a $5 cold cuts sandwich, and drinkable yogurt.
  • On the train I spotted my trainspotting spot (view it on a map).
Planespotting at RTM
Entering the pasture on a rebuilt cycle path that doubles as a farm and railway access
An Intercity Direct train towards Amsterdam
Snacks for the road
Where I was trainspotting just an hour ago
  • At Schiphol airport station I changed trains to a Sprinter to Amsterdam Zuid (south) station, where I changed to the Amsterdam Metro so I could disembark at Jan Van Galenstraat station. Why? That’s the nearest station to where the bike I own lives. (It lives at another friend’s flat, who lend it to their visiting friends occasionally.)
  • Schiphol airport is a notable station: it has six platforms and trains to everywhere in the country, plus Thalys trains to Brussels and Paris stop here. My friend will sometimes take the train from Rotterdam, disembark here, and bike the rest of the way to his Amsterdam office to ensure he gets enough cycling in that day.
  • I unlocked my bike (which my friend had set out for me the day before) and rode it northeast towards the city center. My destination was the Allard Pierson Museum because I wanted to see their “Maps Unfolded” exhibit. The exhibit displayed maps created by Dutch people and over the last 400 years, showing the Netherlands, places colonized by the Dutch, and maps of the world made by Dutchies.
  • As usual, I missed a turn or two but serendipitously encountered a recent major streetscape change (basically a project that converted asphalt and space for cars to space for people and more landscaping – read about the changes at Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal on Bicycle Dutch).
  • The upper floors of the Allard Pierson Museum gave me great views of the Rokin canal, the shops that front it, the cyclists that ride it, the tourists and Amsterdammers that lunch on the water’s edge, and the tour boats that slowly motor along.
An older Sprinter train
Green transportation city
Sometimes you have to wait for a boat to pass, just like in Chicago
My Giant bicycle (did you know that Giant makes Dutch-style bikes?)
A tram passes through Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal
A disturbing map that shows the inundation areas if sea level rises 1 meter.
An Amsterdam tram travels on Rokin (streets next to canals are named after the canal, and the canal is basically the centerline of the street, with odd number houses on one side and even number houses on the other side).
  • After the museum I checked out the new underwater bike parking garage. Read that again. The Dutch have built an underwater. bike. parking. garage. Watch this 1-minute time lapse video that shows how it was built. A canal area in front of Amsterdam Centraal station was dammed and emptied of water. The garage was built, with a watertight roof and vertical circulation and the water was replaced.
  • This bike parking garage has 7,000 spaces, on double decker racks that use pistons to assist bicyclists in lifting the upper racks up and down. Again, Mark W. has demonstrated this over and over again on his blog. Each of the numbered aisles indicates about how many spaces are free.
  • The garage replaces two other garages on the south side of the station, and is part of a long-term project to “clean up” the areas around the station. (The project includes enlarging waiting areas for the tram platforms, reducing lanes for cars, preventing vehicles that aren’t taxis and mobility transit from getting close to the station entrance, and decluttering bikes.)
  • Everyone who uses the garage must check in their bike using their OV-chipkaart (public transport smart card) or a contactless bank card or smartphone wallet. This way the garage automatically tracks that everyone who leaves with a bicycle was also tracked as entering with a bicycle (although the system doesn’t check that it’s the same bicycle).
  • The bike parking garage has a direct entrance to the Metro station and the train station (where one can board trains to anywhere in the country, as well as to Belgium, France, Germany, Poland, and I think Czechia).
Entrance to the underwater bike parking garage at Amsterdam Centraal
Heading down the travelator into the underwater bike parking garage
Walking the bikes to the checkin barrier-free turnstile
The columns indicate space availability
Double decker bike parking
A view of the vertical circulation into the underwater bike parking garage
  • The next new thing to see is the IJboulevard, an extension of land into the former bay called the IJ on the north of Amsterdam Centraal. (I really don’t know what to call it now, the Wikipedia article calls it a “body of water”.) The IJboulevard is a kind of linear plaza that’s as long as the train station shed, a new public space. It wasn’t hot when I was traveling, but I’ve recently seen complaints on Dutch Twitter that it’s oppressive without landscaping.
  • Also on the north side of the train station is the bus station, which is on level two (or level one if you’re European). It’s been there for many years, but it’s impressive due to its operations and the architecture.
  • The ferries are also on the north side of the train station. This station is truly a multimodal hub. It’s one of the most fascinating and bustling places to be in the city. There are two ferry routes here for pedestrians and bicyclists to the north side of the IJ, and another ferry route a quarter mile to the east. All the ferry routes are free and operate 24/7 because there are no bridges or tunnels for pedestrians or bicyclists (even if there were they would be sorely inconvenient because of their length and depth or height). Since 2018 there has been Metro service to the north side of the IJ; this allows bicycles but there’s a fare and doesn’t operate 24/7.
  • Ferries are designed to walk and roll on and go back and forth; they don’t need to turn around. They leave on a schedule – pay attention to the countdown screens at each dock – but must yield to boat traffic already in the IJ, which I got to watch.
Bus station at Amsterdam Centraal
Ferry waiting for cargo ship
Ferry proceeds after the cargo ship has passed
The IJboulevard (two ferry routes are in the background, and a third ferry route is behind me)
  • It was time to move on, towards the restaurant where I would be meeting my Rotterdam friends. I biked to Vondelpark, Amsterdam’s main park. Vondelpark is surrounded mostly by housing so it connects to side streets, but it’s crossed by a main street and buttressed at the south end by a main street separates it from Rijksmuseum and Museumplein.
  • Because of how it’s connected to so many side streets, and a couple main streets, Vondelpark makes a greater “intersection” for through-routes. But it’s also a wonderful place to cycle for people watching, recreation, or to cycle in circles, like I did. Using my new handlebar phone mount I recorded some video and captured this awesome scene of three bicyclists riding side by side by side all turning at the same time!
11-second video of what appears to be some very fluid and coordinated cycling in Vondelpark.
Cycling next to a tram
Bridge in Vondelpark
Cycling under Rijksmuseum to Museumplein
  • We ate dinner at a vegan burger restaurant called Vegan Junk Food Bar that dyed their buns hot pink as a fun gimmick (some of the food was good and some of it was mediocre) and afterward had beers at Brouwerij ‘t IJ (Brewery of the IJ).
  • From the brewery we walked about half an hour to Amsterdam Centraal station and boarded the next Intercity Direct train back to Rotterdam Centraal, and took the Rotterdam Metro back home – this time with my personal bicycle so I could have it for the next five days in Rotterdam, and a special ride around Texel island (in a future blog post).
Brick Expressionism (this is the Amsterdam City Archives building)
Ugly residential architecture
Koploper train, in the distance
Booking.com office, and an ICE train
Daniel and I walking in Amsterdam
The crappy bike area in the Intercity Direct trains (soon to be replaced by ICNG trains)

#protip: Businesses must tell their customers that a Divvy station is out front

July 31, 2013 / / 0 Comments

I bet you want a Divvy station in front of your business. 

Gabe Klein, commissioner of transportation in Chicago, said on WBEZ on Monday that (paraphrased) “business owners are calling us to say ‘we’d like to buy a Divvy station to put in front of our restaurant’“.

Excellent.

Regarding my headline, I’m talking about telling customers on websites that, in addition to “where to park” and “which highway to take to access our location”, the website needs to give more diverse transportation directions. It should say how to get here by bike, and where the nearest Divvy station is.

When I worked at CDOT – I left before Klein arrived – I had the responsibility of increasing the number of visitors to the Chicago Bicycle Program’s website. I developed a set of strategies including making the content more searchable, adding more content, diversifying content types (like uploading photos staff took to Flickr), but also by increasing the number of inbound links. To satisfy that strategy I listed organizations where biking should be encouraged, like train stations and museums. I contacted many museums individually and asked them to include “bike here!” text on the webpage that otherwise told people to drive on I-290 and exit some place. I gave them sample text and even mentioned where the nearest city-installed bike racks were.

Several museum websites were updated as a result of this effort, but now I cannot find the evidence on Shedd, Field, or Adler websites.

Heck, forget the web. When your customers call, forget the assumption that most people drive and just start giving them directions as if they’re going to arrive in this order of transportation modes:

  1. Walking
  2. Biking
  3. Transit
  4. Scooting
  5. Running
  6. Taxi
  7. Ride sharing
  8. Pedicab
  9. Driving

Every mode requires different directions because people move about the city differently. Here’s an example: I’m giving directions to someone who’s going to drive from my house in Avondale to our friend’s house in the same neighborhood about five blocks away. I tell them, well turn here and there, and then drive through the alley to cross over this one-way street in the “wrong” direction… and “wait, those are directions on how to bike there. With all the one-way streets in my neighborhood, I honestly don’t know a good way to drive there, so ask Siri.”

“My” new bike racks have appeared at CTA and Metra stations

April 26, 2012 / / 0 Comments

I received some exciting news last week in the form of a photo a friend posted to Twitter. He took it at the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) Loyola Red Line station and it features a double deck bike rack from Dero.

Photo by Erik Swedlund.

Erik didn’t know this, but that bike rack was installed there because of a project I worked on at the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT) in 2009. The working title was something like “bike parking RTA ICE grant”. That means an Innovation, Coordination, and Enhancement grant from the Regional Transportation Authority. It was also known as round 2 of transit bike parking. You might know round 1 as the project that put hard-to-use double deck bike racks at four CTA stations: Midway Orange (well used), Sox-35th Red (mostly well used), Damen Blue (not used), and Jefferson Park Blue (mostly well used) – all opened in 2008. Round 1 was paid for by CMAQ funding CDOT received in 2003.

The scope of my involvement was limited to finding stations “at which sheltered, high-capacity bike parking will be used most effectively”. Looking back, that should probably have said, “will be most used”. What does “used most effectively” even mean? The scope did not include deciding what the bike parking area would look like, or how many spaces there would be. That was up to an engineer who was managing the overall grant and project – I just recommended stations.

Summary of my methodology

I developed my own method (after researching the method for round 1 selections, and other methods) to select several train stations geographically distributed around the city where bike parking would be most used. I developed a spreadsheet and inputted the station attributes my method required. The formula then ranked the stations. The outcome I wanted was essentially a number that represented the likelihood of people cycling to that station. I tweaked the formula many times based on what rankings it came up with and whether or not the top ranked stations fit expectations I came up with for a station that would have a lot of people cycling there (access mode data didn’t exist at all for CTA stations, and was old for most Metra stations).

For example, if my formula ranked Pulaski Orange very high, did that station fit the expectations of a station that attracted a lot of CTA passengers to arrive by bicycle?

After coming up with a “top 30” of geographically diverse CTA and Metra stations, my boss and I rented an I-GO car to visit 15 of them to record measurements of physically available space, take photographs, and discuss things like how people might access the station with their bicycles (it wasn’t always clear, and many stations turned out to have sufficient bike parking for the amount of people who cycled there).

To make this project respect geography, and to do it as simply as possible, I divided the stations into north and south categories, separated by Madison Street. Stations in the south category were compared only with fellow south stations. I don’t know if this was an appropriate to consider geographic equity, but I had limited time and resources to develop a method and complete this project. In other words, I did the best I could and I think I did a pretty good job. Hopefully time will tell and I can learn from successes and mistakes with this project. That it’s actually being constructed makes me very happy.

Considering the stations

Lots of u-racks at the 55th-56th-57th Metra station in Hyde Park. Photo by Eric Rogers. 

I recommended that bike racks for the 55th-56th-57th Street station be installed at 57th Street because it has more space than the other entrances. Here’s what else I said about the space:

North side of 57th St, east of station house

This space is very large like Space C, but it’s extremely grungy and dank. The restaurant in the station house is currently storing its garbage bins here. The space receives natural light all day because of a gap in the viaduct. There’s an attendant at this station house on weekdays from 6 AM to 2:30 PM, but this person has NO view of the space. 57th St is one-way east of Lake Park Ave, and two-way west of Lake Park Ave.

Sheltered, except for gap in the viaduct roof.

I’m happy to report that the situation has been improved over the description in my “station profile”: the sidewalk concrete was replaced, and the walls and pylons were cleaned and painted white. The restaurant’s garbage bins were moved east in the open air (not under the viaduct). Another change was at Loyola Red Line station: I recommended they be installed in one of two outdoor locations but the bike racks were installed inside the station house.

The other tier 1 locations in my recommendation were Western Orange Line and 95th Red Line (both CTA). Howard Red Line was a tier 2 station (and is built), along with Ravenswood Metra and Logan Square Blue Line. I found out later that the Howard Red Line station also received some double deck racks. Ravenswood station is being completely replaced soon so I understand why that didn’t get any new bike parking as part of this project. I don’t know why Logan Square Blue Line didn’t receive any, if Howard did. It might be that there wasn’t enough money in the $375,000 grant, or that someone has other plans for the CTA station.

A sixth station was part of the project, but not part of my recommendations. The Clybourn Metra station (2001 N Ashland, serving both the UP-North and UP-Northwest lines) was already in planning and design phases and was included in the RTA ICE grant round 2 project to complete the funding arrangement. The bike parking area at Clybourn was to be paid for by Chicago TIF funds; combining the TIF funds with the RTA ICE grant would provide the local match the RTA ICE grant needed (requiring a local match is typical).

See more photos and information on Grid Chicago.

BikeLock app based on dataset I opened up

April 4, 2012 / / 0 Comments

Bike parking at Daley Plaza, downtown Chicago. 

It’s really cool to see work you did “go places”. A friend of mine who works at Groupon just linked me to an iOS app called BikeLock that finds bike racks near you on iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. It’s based on bike rack location data in the City of Chicago’s Data Portal. (The data on there is old, while the data in the public API I built is real time.)

Download it from the iTunes Store for 99 cents. The developer is Mike Jahn, another Groupon staffer. You can get the same information for free, though, on my mostly mobile-friendly Can I bring my bike on Metra? web app, and a website I made for the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT).

A screenshot of the Can I bring my bike on Metra? bike rack finder website. 

That data comes straight from the Bike Parking Web Application I started developing in 2008 soon after I started working in the Chicago Bicycle Program. It was good that my supervisor had the same perspectives I did about open and transparent data and work. But it didn’t start like that; here’s the full story:

My first job at the Bicycle Parking Program was to deal with abandoned bikes, get them off the street. I was taught the existing method of keeping track of my work, but I used my programming skills (in PHP, MySQL, and with the Google Maps API) to develop a web application that tracked it faster and mapped out the abandoned bikes I had to visit and tag with a notice. I was using this for a few days or few weeks and then show my boss. His reaction was something like, “Great! Now make one for bike racks!”

Why? Well, let’s take this quote from Judy Baar Topinka, Illinois comptroller, speaking Tuesday about her office’s new website, The Ledger, which lists the state’s unpaid bills among other financial data.

“The object of the exercise is to make everything that we know of in the comptroller’s office public. If we know it, you’ll know it.” WBEZ

I made one for bike racks. I created two environments, one for private administration at the office (“Bike Parking Web Application”) and one for the public (“public interface”). A later feature I added to the public interface was the Advanced Search. This allows you to filter by Ward, Community Area, and Status. You can then choose your sorting method. A map will appear above the results. You can download the results as either an XLS file, and XLS file that’s designed to be imported in GIS programs (like QGIS), or a KML file.

I’m aware of just one other app that uses this data set: MassUp.us. I don’t know if MassUp uses the real-time API that my Metra bike rack finder uses.