When it comes to the effectiveness of bike lanes and bike parking racks, all you need to do is visit Portland, Ore. They have their chain securely on the sprocket.
Take these stats from the Portland Bureau of Transportation for example:
- 7.2% of workers in Portland, commute by bicycle. The national average is an abysmal half of one percent. (In some European cities, such as Copenhagen, that number is 50%).
- 17,000 people bike to work instead of DRIVING THEIR CARS.
- 350 miles of bikeways are available for cyclists,
- Bicycling magazine named Portland as the No. 1 bicycle friendly city in the nation for several years. (Although in 2016, the magazine named Chicago as the top city, followed by San Francisco and then Portland. Seattle was fourth and New York City fifth. Other cities are catching on).
- The League of American Bicyclists gave Portland a "platinum" award as a bicycle friendly community.
- There are 2.7 miles of bike lanes and paths per square mile
- There are 27 "bicycle boxes" at intersections so cars are better able to see cyclists turning right
- On Sunday, "Parkway" events attract 24,000 people on average
- Every year, the city hosts a celebration of bicycles called PedalPalooza.
Incredible numbers, right?
The city is bike-oriented to its core.
If you want to encourage more people to commute by bike, you obviously need to build bike lanes and make it safer for them to do so.
But there's more.
You also need to provide convenient and safe places for them to park their bikes. Thousands of bicycles require an enormous number of bicycle parking racks.
Couple locking their bikes to bike parking racks in Portland
So to accommodate this demand, in Portland if a business contacts the city, it will generally install a bike parking rack in front of their business for them. For free.
Talk about encouraging bicycling.
"As long as there's room on the sidewalk, we can place it," said Sarah Figliozzi, Program Specialist with the City of Portland's Bureau of Transportation.
Sarah acknowledged that it's important to provide plenty of bicycle parking racks if you want to entice people to ride their bikes instead of driving their cars.
But it's not always easy for a business to install a bike rack.
"Installing a bike rack can be a big challenge," she said. "It's completely beyond the day to day activities of what they are doing," she noted.
Sarah said they get about four requests a month for bike racks. They grant most requests, as long as there is adequate space in front of the business for pedestrians to walk. They don't install commercial bike racks on private property.
It is estimated there are 6,500 publicly-installed bike racks in the city. That's like creating parking garages without the need for all that concrete, steel and precious real estate.
The city also creates a large number of bike parking corrals. What they do is basically take a car parking spot and add a number of bike racks. That's a great way to help more residents visit locations that may be crowded or where parking is difficult to find. There are reportedly 134 bike corrals throughout the city.
Some of their corrals can handle as many as 36 bikes. That's certainly a much smaller footprint than parking for three dozen cars, pickup trucks and vans.
Bike parking is also a magnet for customers.
Sarah points out the most popular businesses for bike parking are "coffee, yoga and alcohol."
"That's our trifecta," she said.
Sure, there is a cost to the city. But certainly providing free bike racks is a small investment compared to the astronomical and time-consuming costs to build highways, subways or parking garages in a large metro area.
"If a city can allocate the dollars, it's a great service," she said.
As you can see, other cities are finally waking up to the benefits of bicycling. Some mayors, such as Chicago's Rahm Emmanuel and New York City's Bill de Blasio, has publicly pledged they are going to make bike infrastructure a priority.
Experts say Portland's bike infrastructure is valued at $60 million. Seems like a big investment. It's not for a city the size of Portland.
Because $60 million is about how much it costs to build just one mile of an urban freeway. In addition to the health benefits, that should be enough of a reason for city officials and politicians to make their cities more bicycle friendly.
It pays to bike. And provide free bike parking racks. Just pedal around Portland to see how it's done.