Metered Bike Parking!

Posted on May 3, 2007
Filed Under Ideas |

pay to park your bike I was riding my bike around a couple of days ago, thinking how awesome it is that I don’t have to be driving my car. Then I got the idea for metered bike parking. Bicyclists pay to park their bikes much like people pay to park their cars. To implement this idea, a lot of work would have to go into it. I was thinking it would be too difficult to ticket bikes as they are unlicensed and it would be tough to enforce, I guess you could give people tickets in person.
With the rise in the price of gas, large cities are probably losing hundreds of dollars each day as people leave their cars at home. More and more people seem to be biking and using mass transit and there must be some way to cash in on this “green trend”. Portland just raised the prices for public transportation yet they have not yet figured out how to cash in on pedestrians and bicyclists.

Perhaps we should also start thinking about pedestrian tolls for easy “short cuts” throughout the city.

My plan was basically to remove any lockable item from a certain area of where you would like to charge for bike parking. For things like signs we could put “No Bike Parking” stickers on them. We could also encase narrow poles with large concrete blocks, making it difficult to lock anything to. Perhaps you could make nice flower pots out of these blocks so any poled sign would have some flowers around them.
So when you limit the number of places to lock bikes to, more people will use the pay to park structures that would be placed in the pay to lock your bike up area. These structures would allow access to the locking pole only after you pay. If you happen to run out of time, they would simply unlock your bike or your bike would be impounded and sold at auction. Simple and easy.

Comments

2 Responses to “Metered Bike Parking!”

Name (required) on May 3rd, 2007 1:03 pm

It won’t work.

People will just lock their bikes to each other.

Now… if you provided something of value which was worth paying for, such as a bike locker program (much like your BiG BLock), where you get some more security and weather protection (and can recoup your investment by renting the space when empty to the homeless), it might earn a little something.

Anyway, the fee ought to be about one-tenth of the fee to park a car based on space considerations. And considering bicycle riding has a lot of benefits for cities compared to motoring, I’d encourage it rather than discourage it.

But I live in a city with inadequate parking given the number of motorists.
I’m biased.
Lots of cities have Bike Locker programs and I’d be quite surprised if this hasn’t been discussed in Portland already.

Keep on developing the ideas! Home runs are imminent.
Saites on May 3rd, 2007 11:40 pm

Another option would have it lock the bike in right away, but not unlock until payment is received.