bicycle parking in new york city

until now, parking a bicycle in new york city has been pretty easy. parking meters littered the streets, providing plenty of opportunities for easy parking. this is now changing. new york has followed european trends and is now replacing individual parking meters with a single parking station for each block. this represents a loss of thousands of places to park our bikes.

technically, attaching a bicycling to any municipal furniture is illegal, but parking meters have been generally accepted as acceptable for this important function, as the number of bicycles needing places to park dwarfs the number of legal places to do that.

the avenues have the vast majority of metered parking spaces. one side of a single avenue block has room for 9 cars and meters. this means that for an entire block - east and west sides of the street, there are 18 meters available that can fit 2 bicycles each. there are also at least 4 street signs, indicating parking regulations for that block - one on each corner. this brings the total to 44 parking spaces per block. this isn't counting street lamps, which will only allow chain locks that can fit around them as most bicyclists use u-locks for their bikes as chains are awkward and cumbersome to carry.

this could mean the removal of over 75% of available bike parking. after doing a very unscientific bit of research and math¹, it would appear that for manhattan, if all parking meters were to be removed on the avenues from 14th street to 125 street², we'd see a reduction of somewhere around 40,000³ parking spaces for bikes.

imagine the fallout if new york decided to shed 75% of parking spaces for automobiles. this simply isn't possible, even in a city where less than half the people drive. even still - in a borough where less than 10% do.

now, we have no other option than to attach our bikes to light-posts and street signs, which more often than not, are already occupied by cannibalized bicycles.

this wouldn't be a problem if the city had a plan in place to ensure that every street had available legal bicycle parking, as it does for cars, but this is certainly not the case. in order for a bike rack to be installed, a business owner must contact the city and ask them to install one. the city doesn't require business owners to call the city and ask for parking spaces to be installed in front of their businesses.

while i find the reduction of street obstacles aesthetically pleasing and clean, on a preactical level, this is really fucked. on the way to work, up park avenue the other day i saw several blocks without even a single bike rack and bicycles fallen to the ground, waiting to be run over by the next delivery truck or escalade.

taxation without representation.

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1. i took a single block - 1st avenue between 13th and 14th street, which has no bus stop or yellow/red zones and used this as my base.

2. assuming that each of these blocks have the full 18 spaces available, which i know isn't true, but since i don't have days/weeks/months to count every parking space, i am estimating.

3. 12 avenues and 111 blocks equals 1332 blocks. subtracting central park's missing 153 blocks means a rough total of 1219 blocks. both sides of the street of these blocks equals 2438 whole blocks. 2438 times the 18 parking meters renders the total - 43,338. i've removed the 3,338 as a possible way to make up for lack of bus stop and red/yellow zone data in my calculations.

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