More bike parking, please

Check it out! Six shiny new bike racks!

Late last week I went to pick up my son at afterschool with some trepidation. The 5pm pickup is the most crowded at the bike racks, and this is often a nightmare. However thanks to the much-appreciated efforts of one of the afterschool staffers, we now have a passcode to enter a secured courtyard at the side of the building with its own bike rack. I have been parking there most days, even though it means a lot of extra walking around the building.

I was shocked when I rode up and saw a bona fide miracle: an empty bike rack in front of the building. I sped up before someone else could get there first. Then I looked again: there were five empty bike racks! They hadn’t been there when I walked by earlier in the day. And they were not placed against the bollards—bikes could be parked on both sides! Our son’s afterschool program had installed six new bike racks as promised. (And despite the fact that they’d been in place for only hours, they were already filling up—one family had gotten there before me and parked at the sixth rack already.)

Last year I successfully advocated to have a new bike rack installed at my office, which filled up immediately on installation. And now this year the internet has scored some outstanding cargo-bike friendly racks at our son’s afterschool program. They were filling up by the time I came back outside with my son. If you build them, they will come.