Comments on: AAPD: Please Move Your Bicycle

By: Annie

Annie — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 13:22:18 +0000

Amsterdam has great solutions for bike parking in general. They have large separate bicycle corrals at various point in the city. At coliseums they have parking available for 100s of bikes and closer than car parking. Ann Arbor could easily provide better solutions for biking commuters. My solution was to get one of the lockers, but they are limited. Before I got that it was problematic to find a good spot. Now I typically see available spots inside the garage at 4th & Williams (on the 4th st entrance)

By: Dave Askins

Dave Askins — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 17:46:36 +0000

The hoops at the 4th & Washington structure are now bike-free.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 19:16:48 +0000

For the life of me, I can’t figure out why people have bikes left unattended for months on end. In some cases, I have seen some classy-looking bikes turn to piles of rust because the owners have left them behind, locked to a bike hoop (usually on campus). It’s like any other property — if you store your belongings where they belong, you shouldn’t be left for someone else to deal with. I am all for the ordinance. I bike when it’s not winter, and when not being used, the bike is in my garage.

By: Joan Lowenstein

Joan Lowenstein — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 16:01:12 +0000

Ed, I think it’s much more important to have adequate hoops for bicycle commuters than to have city-owned storage for bikes. The ridiculous bike pile-up at 4th & Washington has meant that cyclists who brave the ice and frigid weather to bike downtown have almost nowhere to safely secure a bike. Most of the outside hoops are in snow mounds. The 48-hour policy has been enforced continuously at the Maynard structure because the Republic Parking employees have been vigilant and now they are going to pay more attention to 4th & Washington, too.

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 18:23:12 +0000

@Ed: Is that near one of the U of M libraries? My guess is that those are student bikes bought at a cut-throat^W^W^W^W^W^Wrate bike shop and abandoned after Fall term, rather than permanent resident’s bikes “stored” for the winter.

The *last* thing I want is some parking-lot attendant ferrying my bike around. What if they knock it over and damage a derailleur? What if it gets stolen while in their custody (or by them)? Are they walking them up the ramp, or riding them? If they’re riding, how will they be equipped to handle various brands of clipless pedals?

“Permanent” covered bike parking = A Good Thing™, Valet bike parking = Not worth the hassle/risks.

By: Edward Vielmetti

Edward Vielmetti — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:31:09 +0000

I can understand bicycles being stored in the public right-of-way for an extended period of time, if the owner lives somewhere that doesn’t have private storage for the bike, and if the owner doesn’t ride the bike in the winter.

If you wanted to improve downtown property values by making it attractive and desirable for people to live near downtown, walk in one of the most walkable cities in the country, and ride their bicycle instead of driving, then you’d want to be sure that there was some place obvious for winter bicycle storage or self-storage. Instead, you get bicycle graveyards like this which Spencer Thomas photographed last year:

Flickr Link

The city’s guide to bicycle storage for businesses says:

“Class A
Medium to Long-term Parking
Enclosed storage lockers.
Enclosed bicycle parking shed.
A room within a building, which
contains individual storage lockers or
rack spaces
Individual private garages.
Approximate cost for one bike locker =
$2,100 without installation. ”

Now, there’s lots of free parking spaces in some of the DDA garages; not 4th and Washington, which fills up at peak times with beer drinkers, but places like 4th and William which often has 100s of spaces free day and night. If you build something that did long term storage for 20 bikes and housed it securely on some upper level of some garage, it shouldn’t cost more than $40,000 (and probably a lot less; you can rent portable self-storage easily). Rather than valet parking your car, the existing valet attendant would valet park your bike, and you’d get a ticket that you could redeem when the ice melts for the right fee.

Seems straightforward enough to me, and the DDA already employs all of the contractors necessary to start this up today; all you need to do is tow in one lockable storage unit and occupy one parking space and you can do the rest with staff you already have.

By: Matt H

Matt H — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 23:26:41 +0000

They should be donated to the East Quad Bike Co-op, http://eqbc.org/. They have an annual spring event where you can come in, help repair a bike (learning how along the way), and ride it out for free.

By: Tom Brandt

Tom Brandt — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 21:58:35 +0000

I have never figured out why there are so many expensive-looking bikes secured with expensive-looking locks which have been clearly abandoned all around town.