Not everyone who rides a bike can lift it over their heads
Bikes are evolving and our bike parking standards have to evolve as well.
I visited two new Toronto office buildings recently, and I was very pleased to see that both had bike storage, showers and lockers at ground level, with dedicated entrances to the exterior. However, I was surprised to see in one of the buildings that almost all of the parking spaces were vertical.
Vertical bike racks are allowed in the City of Toronto regulations, and shouldn’t be. Nobody likes them. As a British Columbia guide to bicycle parking facilities notes, they get poor or zero usage. The front wheel racks don’t get used much either but I still see them in Toronto.
There are lots of people (including me) who would have trouble lifting a 30 pound road bike and putting it on a rack like this. E-bikes are impossible.
And as Monte Paulsen of Vancouver noted in a discussion I had two years ago on Treehugger, the world has changed. There has been explosion in sales of e-bikes, cargo bikes, and e-cargo bikes. In the garage shown at top, there two hoops on the ground where one could lock without lifting and one electric outlet on the wall.
The city shouldn’t allow vertical bike racks; as the BC guide noted, nobody wants to use them. I and many others can’t.
The other office building I visited had a much better bike room filled mostly with double-height stacking units. Nobody really wants to use these either; they are not wonderful if you are trying to lift a 60 pound e-bike, but it’s doable.
The building is brand new and mostly empty, but the few people who cycle to work her are making their preferences clear: they all went for the “Sheffield” style hoops that were probably meant for cargo bikes. You can easily get two locks on your bike and the very solid pipe.
According to the wonderful Dublin Cycling Campaign infrastructure guide, everybody loves the Sheffield stand. It’s “easy to use and no lifting required. Supports the bicycle well and provides opportunities to lock back and front wheels as well as the frame.” It was invented in the UK town of Sheffield, which evidently had a surplus of gas piping. The design was suggested by local cyclists, and it started a revolution in bike stand designs, replacing those that only had single points for locking.
The office building with the stacking units had sort-of-Sheffield hoops outside the building, where I parked, and you can see how well they work; I have a U-lock on the head tube and a folding plate lock on the down tube, both fast and easy to use. But I can see why they do not have these inside.
I suspect most real estate developers would choke on the Dublin guide’s recommended layout with a meter between hoops; this is a lot of real estate.
That’s why in the Netherlands you see a lot of stacking bike racks. But nobody wants to use the upper racks if they can help it, which is why the bottom is full and the top empty. They also had no accommodation for e-bikes; the garage was designed before the e-bike revolution really got started. (More on this gorgeous garage here).
In Munich residential projects, there were separate parking areas for e-bikes and cargo bikes. I suspect this is the future of bike parking; human-powered bikes have been pretty much the same for a hundred years, but we are having a Cambrian explosion in e-bikes of varying sizes and shapes. They often don’t easily lock to any kind of stand; here in Munich, the bikes are locked to a chain that is running across the floor. It didn’t look particularly secure to me, but was apparently the best they could do.
Sometimes I wonder what they are thinking in Toronto, did anyone who designs these things ever ride a bike? U-locks are almost universal now, but you can’t use one on this design that is still popping up. The city also has 17,500 iconic bike rings, but really, nothing beats a Sheffield stand. Just ask Boing Boing.
It would be wonderful if someone in this city thought about the design of our bike infrastructure, about where they put it, about how not everyone can lift their bike onto a wall, or on to a mountain of snow in the winter. About how more and more people are biking, and more of those bikes are e-bikes that often cost as much as used cars. About how one of the main reasons people don’t bike or stop biking is theft.
You often hear that “Toronto isn’t Amsterdam” but as planner Brent Toderian is wont to say, “Amsterdam wasn’t always Amsterdam. It chose to become Amsterdam, and transformed itself into Amsterdam.”
Everyone is having great fun dunking on this guy, an auto parts executive, for complaining about bike lanes being built on what was previously an 8-lane car sewer. He also doesn’t mention that in the last two elections, candidates specifically ran on anti-bike lane platforms and lost miserably. Toronto has been doing great things lately in building connected bike lanes; coming home from one of the office buildings yesterday, I was amazed by the new Wellington Street bike lanes. I was able to ride all the way from downtown Toronto to my home and was on a mostly protected bike route for all but two blocks, a stretch of sharrows on Strachan Avenue.
I have often said that we need three things for the true bike and e-bike revolution: good affordable e-bikes, safe places to ride, and secure places to park, as they have in Amsterdam. We are getting the safe places to ride; Who knows, if we had that Amsterdam kind of parking infrastructure we might find that there are 7,000 cyclists to fill it.
The Sheffield/staple/inverted-U design is great, but I think you undersell the Toronto ring and post. Having just one point of contact with the ground instead of two, they're cheaper to install and require less concrete for the footings (and therefore less upfront carbon), while maintaining two points of contact to lock to. I think they're a lovely, clever little design.
I'm gonna grip on to that last paragraph, and especially the notion of "safe places to ride", as I think there's a really interesting debat needed to be had, which hasn't materialized; a few notes on it below, trying to keep it organized. And just as a frame of reference, as I think experience in biking is very important in these debates, I grew up in DK biked since I was a kid. Live ½ year in Amsterdam (2007). about 5-6years in Copenhagen, and just left NYC after 10 years there, arrived in Taipei and excited to get my bike out of the container. Commuting primarily on bike in all places.
I think it would be interesting to have a wider conversation about what constitutes safe biking infrastructure. A lot of biking infrastructure is somewhat just a scaled down version of auto-infrastructure, a separate lane, the lights are the same just a little smaller, Stop signs are even worse as cops think you can only stop by putting your foot on the ground (no one is expecting a driver to put their foot out the door to prove they've stopped, and all this even though bikes functions in a very different way; our visibility, agility, speeds, are all different from that of sitting behind a motor with a speeder.
It appears that to most safe bike infrastructure means divided infrastructure, this is at least what is being constructed a lot. But is it more a of a mixture, which also includes adding bike awareness to all driver license tests, to educate the driving public on awareness of bikes. In NYC the bike lane is in many cases a dangerous place to be, as pedestrians are not used to this, and so will pop into without looking, delivery people roll their carts there, all mayor drains are located here, which are dimensioned for cars and trucks not thin bike wheels, and so often times the safest place would be in the street with the cars, especially if you can bike around the speeding limit, and if you take up space for yourself, the drivers of NYC are much more aware of "incoming" objects, as they are used to people jaywalking and people jumping lanes, so if you make yourself visible and know, they'll be annoyed with you, but drivers are annoyed with everything, but they will give you space. I also understand that it is not for everyone to bike like this, my point is, that safe biking I think need to include much more than "Copenhagen-style bikepaths" separating people; some separation is likely needed, but it's also education in awareness of each other. For me it was a lot easier and better to bike in New York City than it was in Copenhagen.
Furthermore, as you're mentioning e-bikes; do we at this moment also need to consider if there needs to be additional specific e-bike infrastructure an/or training needed to get on one? During my 10 years in NYC I witness the rise of the e-bike, and especially the city-e-bike, which in many cases is quite dangerous, as the people using them often have little experience with biking, and suddenly move a speeds (20mph) they are not fully in control over, to the danger of other bikers and pedestrians.
As for bike parking, I'm all for more and maybe not on the curb where drivers are still prone to hitting parked bikes, or pedestrians knocking them over. Do consider how to make e-bike parking better, also from a fire hazard point of view where there's some safety against overheating batteries. Add that, but don't remove all of our hanging and up top bike storage (in the last photo from Amsterdam, there's quite a few bikes parked up top)—it's one of the few privileges of having a light weight 100% human powered bike still.