Importance of Bike Parking

Author of Traffic and transportation blogger, Tom Vanderbilt has an article in the new issue of Slate Magazine talking about the need for bike parking: 

If car parking is often overshadowed in traffic talk, bicycle parking is even more obscure. For many people in the United States it might be hard to imagine what there is to talk about. Why don’t you just stick it in the garage? Or, Isn’t that what street signs and trees are for? But as the share of trips made by bicycle has grown in recent years—in Portland, Ore., for example, bicycle use has grown nearly 150 percent since 1990, and an estimated 5 percent of people bike to work—new attention is being paid to what happens to those bicycles when they are not in motion.

Vanderbilt does a good job spelling out the need for quality end-of-trip facilities, pointing to Portland, Ore. and the high demand for on-street bike parking corrals, the groundbreaking Bikes in Buildings legislation recently passed in New York City, and even gets in a plug for the Bike Station opening at Union Station here in D.C. in the coming weeks.

Parking has been on the minds of the Bicycle Friendly America staff a lot recently. We’re in the process of updating the Bicycle Friendly Community application to include more questions about the various policies and physical accommodations like the ones mentioned in Vanderbilt’s article. The new application will be released in September.