Saturday, March 21, 2009

On Street Bike Parking in Downtown Fort Collins: The Back Story



The story that follows, from the Coloradoan, announces 5 brand new on-street bike parking racks in Old Town Fort Collins sponsored by New Belgium Brewing. This brief note brings you a few photos and a little bit of the back story of how these racks came to be. (Maybe our Bike Coordinator, Dave Kemp, will follow up with some further commentary). About 2 years ago the folks at Matter Bookstore and the Bean Cycle asked for an on-street bike corral to accommodate all the bikes in front of the Bean (bottom photo above). One business on the street objected to the loss of one automobile parking spot.

So Dave Kemp went to work and came up with five spots around Old Town for racks like the one shown in the first photo - a net gain of something like 100 parking spots since each rack holds twenty or so bikes! Nice work, Dave!

Now all we need is that on-street rack in front of the Bean Cycle!

3 comments:

Doug said...

Excerpts from a discussion between DK, Rick and I on 3/23/09.

The 5 new bike racks installed last week are a pilot on City of Fort Collins streets. Once results are gathered from this pilot there are plans to expand it to other locations like College Ave, but these locations have some stricter guidelines since College is a state highway and managed by CDOT.

BHA Design Inc. said...

Local Fort Collins Companies M&R Fabricators and BHA Design Inc. won the commission to design, build and install the new bike racks in Old Town Fort Collins. To read more about the project and the bike rack design itself please visit our blog for the new Fort Collins bike racks - here. We'd love to hear your thoughts about the new bike racks!

Anonymous said...

I've had two business owners or interested parties complain to me recently that when they approached the City bike coordinator for help in procuring bike racks for their businesses they were told they'd have to do it themselves. One of these properties was the historic City Water Works on North Overland Trail. It's owned by the City!