The #2 reason people don’t ride their bikes in big cities is a lack of secure bicycle parking.    The availability of bike parking can have a profound effect. Even the best lock and chain won’t help if there’s no place to park your bike, and we have a severe shortage of dedicated bike racks in New York City. It’s a gamble whether you can bring your bike indoors, and outdoors it isn’t always clear where it’s best (or legal) to park, so that can also be a gamble.	#2

Policies and Possibilities in New York City

    

A strong chain and a good lock,

but what do I lock my bike to?

New York City does have efforts to increase bike parking, indoors as well as outside, and there’s also an effort to combine bike parking with street tree protection. On the other hand, we have a really bad bike theft problem, compounded by city employees sawing through locks and seizing bicycles.

In other words, we’ve got good news and bad news.

Which do you want to read first?

New York City’s bike parking facilities and policies should encourage people to go by bike. Right now, we don’t have that. TIME’S UP! has visited cities with good strategies, which could be implemented here. (And when they are, we’ll put them on the “Good News” page!)

Berkeley, California, made safe space in the street for bikes to park in (left, above).

Berkeley on a much larger scale: So many bikes are in use in Amsterdam (right) that they had to reclaim a block of streets just to park them.
Amsterdam again. These bike racks (right) have two tiers, which make it possible to stagger the bikes’ handlebars. This way, more bikes can fit in a given area.

Bike racks are so numerous in Portland, Oregon, that some people make unusual, customized ones. This bookstore (right), which has more dedicated bike parking than most city blocks in NYC, has racks arranged like books on a shelf, each with the title of a book about bicycles.