There’s been much discussion in the city of Detroit lately about adding more bike parking.
And during that discussion, we were sent this interesting link from Wayne State University. It shows bike racks on campus and around the perimeter. Clicking on the rack icon makes a window pop up with additional location information. Neat.
A new custom-built bike rack at Eastern-Market
Desiree Cooper made an interesting post on her blog called, The Road to a renaissance is lined with bike racks.
Last month I attended one of the Detroit Mayor’s neighborhood forums on the re-imagining of the city. I was amazed at the diversity at the huge gathering (translation: many white people were there). When the residents started voicing their complaints, I heard many of the predictable gripes: Stop the foreclosures! Get rid of abandoned buildings! Fix the public schools!
And then one man raised his hand to be heard. He was young, white and a new Detroit resident. “Where are the bike racks?” he asked indignantly.
The room went silent for a minute. You didn’t hear one “Amen.” With all that faces the city, were we really going to haggle over places to park a Schwinn?
The surprising answer is yes; Detroit’s future might just lie in bike racks.
Of course, the city’s future is not literally dependent just on bike racks. If it were, we’d be one fat CMAQ grant away from solving our problems.**
No, Detroit has many concurrent issues, but the point being the increase in young people moving to the city and adopting bicycling had added one more issue to the list.
Cooper’s post goes on to highlight a Port Huron family that moved to the city. She had a great family photo on bikes.
And in a similar vein, Metro Parent has an article called, Raising Kids in the City of Detroit.
The article covers the serious challenges Detroit families face. One focus is on Lisa McNish. McNish works at the Wheelhouse Detroit so it’s not surprising she got a little plug in for biking in Detroit.
Biking is definitely catching on, [McNish] says. “Detroit doesn’t have as much traffic, per say, so it’s a lot easier to ride and a lot more flexible,” she says. “And you see things that you hadn’t seen before,” like little shops or a neighbor’s yard filled with pet ducks.
Okay. Who cares about where the bike racks are? Where are the pet ducks?
Free bike parking at the 2010 Arts, Beats and Eats in Royal Oak
“Parking policy exerts great influence on mode choice and urban design.”
U.S. Parking Policies: An Overview of Management Strategies, Institute for Transportation and Development Policy.
“The widespread practice of employer-subsidized parking is a significant but often overlooked determinant of mode choice for the journey to work.”
Employer-subsidized Parking and Work-trip Mode Choice, Pickrell, D. H. and Shoup, D. C.
Mode choice — whether someone choices to drive solo, carpool, take transit, bike, or walk is often determined by cost to park ones car.
Recently. this was proven very vividly in the city of Royal Oak.
With the Arts, Beats, and Eats festival moving to Royal Oak, the city looked to recover some city costs by charging for all parking around the event. The $15 parking price was high enough to prompt locals to keep their cars in their driveways and walk or bike.
And fortunately the event organizers partnered with KLM bike shops to offer free valet bike parking. There were two parking lots and both were quite full as the photo shows. In addition, bikes were parked all around the event perimeter.
Clearly, vehicle parking policy is a major determining factor in whether people drive, bike, or walk to downtown. If you provide below market pricing (including free) vehicle parking, don’t expect a lot of people to doing anything but drive solo downtown – especially downtown workers.
Recently the city of Royal Oak announced increasing the downtown parking fees a small amount – not to $15. This should help encourage biking and walking downtown, as well as ride sharing.
And according to “parking guru” Shoup, parking rates should be raised until there is a 15% parking vacancy rate. This reduces traffic levels by helping motorists find parking more quickly and it will likely encourage other modes of travel.
The key, however, is to re-invest those parking fees into the downtown.
There are no excuses to not ride your bike to a Detroit festival this weekend.
From the Wheelhouse Detroit web site:
This weekend, we will happily park your bike for no charge at the Detroit International Jazz Festival. Bike parking is at the intersection of Woodward & Larned, smack dab in the middle of the festivities, which stretch from Hart Plaza to Campus Martius.
Festival hours are 4 to 11 p.m. on Friday; noon to 11:30 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday; and noon to 7:30 P.M. on Monday. See you there!
KLM Bikes is providing free bike at two locations for the Art, Beats, and Eats event in Royal Oak. This is the easiest and cheapest way to get to the festival. The spots are available on a first-come, first-served basis. It looked like many people were taking advantage of this service.
The locations are:
The Hamtramck Festival is this weekend as well. Though it doesn’t seem to have valet bike parking, it does have urban camping. How cool is that?
Tom Page from Detroit Synergy passed long this interesting news item:
The Detroit Institute of Arts/Detroit Film Theatre has implemented free valet parking for bicycles on Fridays. The bike racks, with a museum staffer present, are located in front of the courtyard on the John R. side.
[And that explains why we saw a tandem ride up to the DFT last night!]
Get free news updates (RSS)
