These are great, but at its core these are covered bicycle parking, you chain your bike inside the shelter. The shelter themselves are not locked, at least the ones I have come across and you generally share them with your surrounding neighbors as a communal bike storage.
These are perfect for residential and mixed use areas surrounded by low-rise to mid-rise developments, and help keep a bicycle dry, out of the elements, and organized. Especially in areas where larger city covered structures might not be as practical.
For example, something like this is very common infront a business/commercial building. These provide the same functionality with protection from the elements, organization, and a place to lock your bicycle to. These can also work infront of shopping centers or grocery stores.
Now indoor bicycle parking in a city center, take a look at this place in Amsterdam. I was blown away seeing this in person when I had a chance to visit.
Video to see this place in more detail.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqwasBTzZS8
Also worth showing these bike lockers. They are more secure in that each locker stores one average sized bicycle. These take up a little more place but do provide the extra security and have been used in a bunch of places around my area.
We have these exact same style of sheds but locked. Spots are rented out by the gemeente and everyone in the shed has a key.
Waitlist is usually on the order of years, unfortunately.
Also worth showing these bike lockers. They are more secure in that each locker stores one average sized bicycle. These take up a little more place but do provide the extra security and have been used in a bunch of places around my area.
Cool, homeless shelters!
tight! one question though- why does it cost $50,000 to build a bike locker? guarantee someone with a welder could easily build 5 of them at that price and make a healthy profit.
They have to be government approved and that eats up 30k per locker. Then it’s a government job, that makes it 3 times as expensive
Yeah.
Assuming each site serves on average 100 bikes a day (which seems like a high estimate?) and that more budget would be needed for yearly maintenance costs… that’s on the order of $1 for parking one’s bike in a locker, each time.
Seems like a lot? Unless the parking sites are huge for $50k, and the per-bike cost goes down.
Once you get past design, procurement rules, insurance, permitting, collaborating with all impacted parties, avoiding buried utilities, easements, paying project management fees, any environmental concerns, municipal capital work like that quickly becomes more expensive than you buying a shed from a hardware store and drilling some concrete anchors.
i’ll have to ask my bike if it cares how nice its house is. its kind of prissy but i still dont think it needs the $50,000 dollar box to go to sleep in.
That’s why most cities use the common 2 high open racks. They are more exposed to the elements but are more efficient (2 high), standardized and thus cheaper
US does love to go a different way always
Metal is expensive, but also they’ll be subject to considerable criticism from the opposing parties. The design needs to be solid, which means it adds cost. It needs to be pretty, it needs to last forever, and withstand significant abuse. So they’ll contract it out and that adds cost. And you couldn’t possibly reuse a design, oh. My. God. /s
The actual manufacturing I’m not sure about, but I assume the city won’t be interested in 50 contracts, so it’ll be a big shop with overhead, sales people, and steak dinners.
Government procurement is hard, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes stupid.
getting permits to place them is probably pretty expensive.
Some of it, I would hope, is also earmarked for future maintenance.
Paying 4 city workers to watch the 1 guy qualified to put the concrete anchors in. The other 4 are the driver, navigator, pylon guy, and hinge greaser.
Getting permits…. From a city office…. Which the mayor is a part of……
I dunno, I just have a feeling he could do something about that too.
in some places sidewalks are part of the buildings they border. dunno how ny does it but that has stopped a lot of projects.
Ownership of a private lot in NYC comes with a legal requirement to keep the public sidewalk in front of it clean and clear, but the city has complete say over any sidewalk fixture installations.
You want something that is esthetically pleasant too, so you need to pay some designers/architects to chip in. Need security and resistance to the weather. All of that add up.
There’s this phenomenon called bike-shedding, about how because building a bike shedding looks simple, everyone thinks they know how to do it and feel that they to give feedback about it and the bike shedding is never built because of that.
Bike-shedding has a different meaning.
I didn’t said that op was bike-shedding, I was just commenting on the term
Maybe these bike lockers are the final and most tangential piece of buildout for the new world trade center (2013).
Doubt it’s that expensive. A locker can be made for like $500. But then you’re thinking of sheds with a simple lock. If you want something actually safe, you’d need a bike garage, and those can go up to like $4k a piece., or $5k if we’re counting cargo bikes.
To install them, you need labour as well. Assuming a $40/hr wage (could arguably be higher, depending on source), and a team of 8 people doing this for 8 hours a day, that’s $2,560 a day for labour in total. Two isolate the area, keep the area clean, two drill holes in pavement and breaks up stuff so the boxes can get in there, two transport the materials, and two assemble.
So, assuming 4 boxes a day of $5,000 each, so it’s now about $22,560 in total per day (wages included). Let’s assume $22,500 here per day. 500 lockers divided by 4 (amount installed per day) then yields 125 days (4 months, 3 days) to install all of them. Thus, that’s $2,812,500 in total.
But we’ll also need permits. The build plan needs to be assessed for transparency, environment, construction drawings, and the impact for the neighbourhood. It’s complicated, but let’s say $500 per balcony-like area (a balcony being about as big as one of those 3-bike boxes). So that’s $250,000 in total for the permits.
We then end up with a total cost of 3,062,500, or let’s call it 3,100,000. Because building often has additional hidden costs and maintenance, I’m assuming 1/3 extra, so it’s even better when it turns out to cost less. Then we end up with about $4,000,000, or $0.45 per NYC inhabitant.
Even if wages were $250/hr, it’d end up costing only $36,000 a day total (labour+construction), and thus totals $4,750,000 (including permit). Hidden costs and maintenance included, that’s $6,175,000 in total, a fraction of the $25,000,000 that is claimed.
This would mean all of the 500 boxes cost less than a dollar for all NYC inhabitants in total!
That while it gives much more freedom in the form of bicycles. There are no additional fuel costs, yearly checkups, and so on, and you get fitter and stronger, thus reducing your healthcare costs. Bikes literally make you richer.
alternate pitch: shipping containers can cost as little as 2000 including delivery. pay a psychopath with a with a welder ten grand to put some partitions and doors in the thing with scrap metal from the city dump. then spend the remaining 38k on handjobs for the building inspector!
This is excellent /theydidthemath and I appreciate it.
/theydidthemonstermath
Welding isn’t fast, each of those could easily take 40 hours of labor, and that’s on the low side for just an ugly box.
At $100 an hour, that’s 4k alone in just labor.
and 36k in materials?
Design, Engineering, permits, installation, security,painting, maybe monitoring, it all adds up quite quickly. Costs can also cover maintenance and repairs for 5 years, warranty, it’s probably inflated a bit, but it’s not like these could be done properly and nicely for under 10k a piece.
But it’s more likely people are severely underestimating costs, it’s quite easy when your minimum wage is what, $9?
Also, just noticed, but the photo in the article is photoshopped. It’s in the Netherlands lol.
They’re honest about it, crediting the picture to “Tranzito with The Streetsblog Photoshop Desk”.
Odd choice to photoshop Mamdani sitting in front of an example elsewhere instead of just using a picture of a similar installation in another city.
Its kind of funny ngl
No shit
I’m trying to move to the city center of Sao Paulo and finding space to keep our e-bikes safe at night has been the biggest difficulty of the process. The majority of buildings don’t have parking space, that’s great imo, but they also don’t have space for bikes. The elevators are miniscule and the bikes can’t enter. And private parking buildings cost a fortune. Something like that with a reasonable price (or free with time restrictions even better) would be great
As a Dutch person, my recommendation:
get a folding bike. They’re pretty cheap and useful primarily for biking a few km.
Alternatively, get an omafiets, make it look rusty and shoddy. Nobody wants to steal a bike that doesn’t look valuable. You can also twist how it steers, takes training to bike on it, but thieves will always fall.
bike parking spaces in buildings are an open-buffet for bike thieves :/
My friend locked his bike inside of apartment provided locked bike storage and they always had problems with people breaking in, cutting locks and stealing stuff.
Being able to chain them and a security camera is good enough for me. A broken chain and video evidence is enough to claim the insurance in it.
Get folding bikes.
We used to had folding bikes before, but my wife hate them because she always get her hands dirty while folding/unfolding and ruining her clothes. That’s on the table, but is going to need to be a magnificent apartment with the best view ever and under our budget to convince her.
As the owner of a pair of (very) cheap (very) old Dahons, I understand what you mean.
I feel like the design details matter a lot and – though I hate to say it – it could be actually worth getting a Brompton, despite how overpriced they seem.
I’ve always wanted to just park an enclosed trailer on the street to use as a bike garage. I know the Dutch solution to bike storage is to just have a crappy enough bike that no one wants to steal it, and you dont care about leaving it in the elements, but I want nice bikes, lol.
If I can park a car on the same spot indefinitely, why can’t I do a trailer full of bikes?
Those bike lockers address theft, but not protection from the elements. They want it to be translucent for safety, but you could do that with plexiglass.
This!
I always found it very unfair that owning a car just gives people the privilege to just take up public space where the car stands 95% of the time doing nothing.
This is the strategy I would use, pay local bicycle stores to refurbish used bicycles that are fine but not worth much and crash the very bottom of the bicycle market out.
Don’t destroy the “nice bicycle” market just make sure the very bottom of the market is saturated.
Then bicycle theft for commuter/beater bicycles becomes stupid in most cases and local bicycle shops get work too.
Cool. Safe bike lanes are a higher priority for me but I’m not mad about this.
By the time all these NYC mayors are done there’s not going to be any room for pedestrians on the streets
It’s going to blow your mind when you realize city streets used to be fully pedestrianised before the car took that away from pedestrians.
Things like “sidewalks” were not a thing before the auto-industry. The street was the walkway. The public was essentially brainwashed on a massive scale with propaganda to not “jaywalk”, and to always use sides of the street, or what become know as the “sidewalk”.
But like, I like have car!?
